MY DEAR REYNOLDS: You will remember "Lycus." It was written in the pleasant spring-time of our friendship, and I am glad to maintain that association, by connecting your name with the poem. It will gratify me to find that you regard it with the old partiality for the writings of each other which prevailed in those days. For my own sake, I must regret that your pen goes now into far other records than those which used to delight me.
Your true friend and brother,
FROM AN UNROLLED MANUSCRIPT OF APOLLONIUS CURIUS.
Lycus, detained by Circe in her magical dominion, is beloved by a Water Nymph, who, desiring to render him immortal, has recourse to the Sorceress. Circe gives her an incantation to pronounce, which should turn Lycus into a horse; but the horrible effect of the charm causing her to break off in the midst, he becomes a Centaur.
WHO hath ever been lured and bound by a spell
To wander, foredoomed, in that circle of hell
Where Witchery works with her will like a god,
Works more than the wonders of time at a nod,-
At a word, at a touch,- at a flash of the eye;
But each form is a cheat, and each sound is a lie,
Things born of a wish to endure for a thought,
Or last for long ages to vanish to naught,
Or put on new semblance? O Jove, I had given
The throne of a kingdom to know if that heaven
And the earth and its streams were of Circe, or whether
They kept the world's birth-day and brightened together!
For I loved them in terror, and constantly dreaded
That the earth where I trod, and the cave where I bedded,
The face I might dote on, should live out the lease
Of the charm that created, and suddenly cease:
And I gave me to slumber, as if from one dream
To another each horrid and drank of the stream
Like a first taste of blood, lest as water I quaffed
Swift poison, and never should breathe from the draught,-
Such drink as her own monarch-husband drained up
When he pledged her, and Fate closed his eyes in the cup.
And I plucked of the fruit with held breath, and a fear
That the branch would start back and scream out in my ear;
For once, at my suppering, I plucked in the dusk
An apple, juice-gushing and fragrant of musk;
But by daylight my fingers were crimsoned with gore,
And the half-eaten fragment was flesh at the core;
And once
-only once - for the love of its blush,
I broke a bloom-bough, but there came such a gush
On my hand, that it fainted away in weak fright,
While the leaf-hidden woodpecker shrieked at the sight;
And, O! such an agony thrilled in that note,
That my soul, startling up, beat its wings in my throat,
As it longed to be free of a body whose hand
Was doomed to work torments a Fury had planned!
There I stood without stir, yet how willing to flee,
As if rooted and horror-turned into a tree,—
O! for innocent death, and, to suddenly win it,
I drank of the stream, but no poison was in it;
I plunged in its waters, but ere I could sink
Some invisible fate pulled me back to the brink;
I sprang from the rock, from its pinnacle height,
But fell on the grass with a grasshopper's flight;
I ran at my fears they were fears and no more,
For the bear would not mangle my limbs, nor the boar,
But moaned, all their brutalized flesh could not smother
The horrible truth,— we were kin to each other!
They were mournfully gentle, and grouped for relief, All foes in their skin, but all friends in their grief:
The leopard was there,-baby-mild in its feature;
And the tiger, black-barred, with the gaze of a creature
That knew gentle pity; the bristle-backed boar,
His innocent tusks stained with mulberry gore;
And the laughing hyena - but laughing no more;
And the snake, not with magical orbs to devise
Strange death, but with woman's attraction of eyes;
The tall ugly ape, that still bore a dim shine
Through his hairy eclipse of a manhood divine;
And the elephant stately, with more than its reason,
How thoughtful in sadness! but this is no season
To reckon them up, from the lag-bellied toad
To the mammoth, whose sobs shook his ponderous load.
There were woes of all shapes, wretched forms, when I came
That hung down their heads with a human-like shame;
The elephant hid in the boughs, and the bear
Shed over his eyes the dark veil of his hair;
And the womanly soul, turning sick with disgust,
Tried to vomit herself from her serpentine crust;
While all groaned their groans into one at their lot,
As I brought them the image of what they were not.
Then rose a wild sound of the human voice choking
Through vile brutal organs-low tremulous croaking;
Cries swallowed abruptly — deep animal tones
Attuned to strange passion, and full-uttered groans;
All shuddering weaker, till hushed in a pause
Of tongues in mute motion and wide-yawning jaws;
And I guessed that those horrors were meant to tell o'er
The tale of their woes, but the silence told more
That writhed on their tongues; and I knelt on the sod,
And prayed with my voice to the cloud-stirring God,
For the sad congregation of supplicants there,
That upturned to his heaven brute faces of prayer;
And I ceased, and they uttered a moaning so deep,
That I wept for my heart-ease, but they could not weep
And gazed with red eyeballs, all wistfully dry,
At the comfort of tears in a stag's human eye.
Then I motioned them round, and, to soothe their distress,
I caressed, and they bent them to meet my caress,
Their necks to my arm, and their heads to my palm,
And with poor grateful eyes suffered meekly and calm
Those tokens of kindness, withheld by hard fate
From returns that might chill the warm pity to hate;
So they passively bowed-save the serpent, that leapt
To my breast like a sister, and pressingly crept
In embrace of my neck, and with close kisses blistered
My lips in rash love, then drew backward, and glistered
Her eyes in my face, and, loud hissing affright,
Dropt down, and swift started away from my sight!
This sorrow was theirs, but thrice wretched my lot,
Turned brute in my soul, though my body was not
When I fled from the sorrow of womanly faces,
That shrouded their woe in the shade of lone places,
And dashed off bright tears till their fingers were wet,
And then wiped their lids with long tresses of jet :
But I fled though they stretched out their hands, all
With hair, and blood-stained of the breasts they had man
Though they called and perchance but to ask had I seen
Their loves, or to tell the vile wrongs that had been :
But I stayed not to hear, lest the story should hold
Some hell-form of words, some enchantment, once told,
Might translate me in flesh to a brute; and I dreaded
To gaze on their charms, lest my faith should be wedded
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