JOHN KEATS.

CXVII.

ON THE ELGIN MARBLES.

My spirit is too weak; mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep. And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye. Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an indescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time-with a billowy main, A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

CXVIII.

TO HOMER.

STANDING aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.

So thou wast blind!-but then the veil was rent,
For Jove uncurtained Heaven to let thee live,
And Neptune made for thee a spermy tent,
And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive:

Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green;
There is a budding morrow in mid-night;
There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel,
To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

JOHN KEATS.

CXIX.

THE DAY IS GONE.

THE day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!

Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,

Bright eyes, accomplish'd shape, and lang’rous waist! Faded the flower and all its budded charms,

Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,

Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise,-
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday-or holinight

Of fragrant-curtain'd love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I've read Love's missal through to-day,
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

CXX.

BRIGHT STAR!

BRIGHT STAR! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
Half-passionless, and so swoon on to death.

FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE.

CXXI.

ART thou already weary of the way,

Thou who hast yet but half the way gone o'er?
Get up, and lift thy burthen; lo, before
Thy feet the road goes stretching far away.
If thou already faint who art but come
Through half thy pilgrimage, with fellows gay,

Love, youth, and hope, under the rosy bloom
And temperate airs of early breaking day—

Look yonder, how the heavens stoop and gloom! There cease the trees to shade, the flowers to spring, And the angels leave thee. What wilt thou become Through yon drear stretch of dismal wandering,

Lonely and dark?—I shall take courage, friend,
For comes not every step more near the end?