OXV.

TO AILSA ROCK.

HEARKEN, thou craggy ocean pyramid !

Give answer from thy voice, the sea-fowl's screams! When were thy shoulders mantled in huge streams! When, from the sun, was thy broad forehead hid ? How long is't since the mighty power bid

Thee heave to airy sleep from fathom dreams?
Sleep in the lap of thunder or sun-beams,
Or when grey clouds are thy cold cover-lid?
Thou answer'st not, for thou art dead asleep!
Thy life is but two dead eternities—

The last in air, the former in the deep;

First with the whales, last with the eagle-skiesDrown'd wast thou till an earthquake made thee steep, Another cannot wake thy giant size.

CXVI.

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-conceived 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 rule Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main, A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

CXVII.

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.

CXVIII.

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.

CXIX.

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.