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Unmoved by fearful accidents,
All hardships stoutly spurning,
I laughed to scorn the elements —
And chiefly those of Learning.

Such things have vanished like a dream; The mongrel mob grows prouder; And every thing is done by steam,

And men are killed by powder:

I feel, alas! my fame decay;
I give unheeded orders,
And rot in paltry state away,
With Sheriffs and Recorders.

IX.

My First's an airy thing,
Joying in its flowers,
Evermore wandering
In Fancy's bowers;
Living on beauteous smiles
From eyes that glisten,
And telling of Love's wiles
To ears that listen.

But if, in its first flush
Of warm emotion,

My Second come to crush

Its young devotion,
Oh! then it wastes away,

Weeping and waking,
And, on some sunny day,
Is blest in breaking.

X.

On the casement frame the wind beat high,
Never a star was in the sky;

All Kenneth Hold was wrapt in gloom,

And Sir Everard slept in the Haunted Room.

I sat and sang beside his bed;

Never a single word I said,

Yet did I scare his slumber;

And a fitful light in his eye-ball glisten'd,
And his cheek grew pale as he lay and listen'd,
For he thought, or he dream'd, that fiends and fays
Were reckoning o'er his fleeting days,

And telling out their number.

Was it my Second's ceaseless tone?

On my

Second's hand he laid his own: The hand that trembled in his grasp, Was crush'd by his convulsive clasp.

Sir Everard did not fear my First;

He had seen it in shapes that men deem worst
In many a field and flood;

Yet, in the darkness of that dread,

His tongue was parch'd, and his reason fled;
And he watch'd as the lamp burned low and dim,
To see some Phantom, gaunt and grim

Come, dabbled o'er with blood.

Si. Everard kneel'd, and strove to pray,
He pray'd for light, and he prayed for day,
Till terror check'd his prayer;

And ever I mutter'd clear and well
"Click, click," like a tolling bell,
Till, bound by Fancy's magic spell,
Sir Everard fainted there.

And oft, from that remembered night,
Around the taper's flickering light
The wrinkled beldames told,

Sir Everard had knowledge won
Of many a murder darkly done,

Of fearful sights and fearful sounds,

And Ghosts that walk their midnight rounds In the Tower of Kenneth Hold!

(1822.)

XI.

THE canvas rattled on the mast,

As rose the swelling sail;

And gallantly the vessel passed
Before the cheering gale;

And on my First Sir Florice stood,
As the far shore faded now,

And looked upon the lengthening flood

With a pale and pensive brow:
"When I shall bear thy silken glove
Where the proudest Moslem flee,

My lady love, my lady love,
Oh, waste one thought on me!"

Sir Florice lay in a dungeon cell,
With none to soothe or save;
And high above his chamber fell
The echo of the wave;

But still he struck my Second there,

And bade its tones renew

Those hours when every hue was fair, And every hope was true:

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