Have strewed a scene, which I should see With double joy wert thou with me!

And peasant girls, with deep blue eyes,
And hands which offer early flowers,
Walk smiling o'er this Paradise.
Above, the frequent feudal towers
Through green leaves lift their walls of gray,
And many a rock which steeply lours,
And noble arch in proud decay,
Look o'er this vale of vintage bowers:
But one thing want these banks of Rhine,
Thy gentle hand to clasp in mine!

I send the lilies given to me;
Though long before thy hand they touch,
I know that they must withered be,
But yet reject them not as such;
For I have cherished them as dear,
Because they yet may meet thine eye,
And guide thy soul to mine even here,
When thou behold'st them drooping nigh,
And know'st them gathered by the Rhine,
And offered from my heart to thine!

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits,

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or
The spirit he loves remains; [stream,
And I all the while bask in heaven's blue
smile,

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead.
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings.

And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,

Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn ;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear, [roof,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee
Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,

Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,

Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone, And the moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,

When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the powers of the air are chained to
my chair,

Is the million-coloured bow:

The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but i cannot die.

For after the rain, when with never a stain The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

1 arise and unbuild it again.

THE WORLD'S WANDERERS.

TELL me, thou star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night

Will thy pinions close now?

Tell me, moon, thou pale and gray Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way, In what depth of night or day

Seekest thou repose now?

Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world's rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?

MONT BLANC. Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni.

THE everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid

waves,

Now dark, now giittering, now reflecting gloom,

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought it tribute brings

Of waters, with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains
lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine

Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful

scene,

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest;-thou dost lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever

came

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear-an old and solemn harmony: Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep

Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep

Which, when the voices of the desert fail.
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's com-
motion
[tame:
A loud, lone sound, no other sound can
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless
motion,

Thou art the part of that unresting sound,
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influenc
ings,

Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wan-
dering wings

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile round it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there-how hideously

Its shapes are heaped around, rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-demon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a

And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains,

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice
Frost and the sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled-dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling

place

Of insects, beasts, and birds becomes its spoil;

Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,

And their place is not known. Below,

Silently there, and heap the snow with

breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret strength of
things
[finite dome

Which governs thought, and to the in-
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars,

and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?

LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS.

'MID the mountains Euganean
I stood listening to the paan
With which the legioned rooks did hail
The sun's uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar
Like grey shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Flecked with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky,
So their plumes of purple grain,
Starred with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes

On the morning's fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail,
And the vapours cloven and gleaming
Follow down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.

Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day's azure eyes
Ocean's nursling, Venice, lies,
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite's destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;

And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,

Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,.

Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.

Sun-girt city, thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.

A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne among the waves,
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate,
With green sea-flowers overgrown,
Like a rock of ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path.

Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aërial gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering.
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they,
Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consumed away.

Earth can spare ye: while, like flowers,

In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming.
Perish! let there only be
Floating o'er thy hearthless sea,
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally,
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;-
That a tempest-cleaving swan
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror: what though yet
Poesy's unfailing river,

Which through Albion winds for ever,
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred poet's grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled?
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay
Aught thine own, -oh, rather say,
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul!
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs;
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power, which he
Imaged 'mid mortality;

As the love from Petrarch's urn
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,

A quenchless lamp, by which the heart
Sees things unearthly; so thou art,
Mighty spirit: so shall be

The city that did refuge thee.

Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light

Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that grey cloud
Many-domed Padua proud
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain

In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow
With the purple vintage strain,
Heaped upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword
Lies unchanged, though many a lord,
Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region's foison,
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction's harvest home:
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge.

*

*

*

*

In thine halls the lamp of learning,
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
It gleams betrayed and to betray:
Once remotest nations came
To adore that sacred flame,
When it lit not many a hearth
On this cold and gloomy earth;
Now new fires from antique light
Spring beneath the wide world's might;
But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by tyranny.

As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of piny dells,
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
By the fire thus lowly born:
The spark beneath his feet is dead,
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear: so thou,
O tyranny, beholdest now

Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest:
Grovel on the earth! ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!

Noon descends around me now:
'Tis the noon of autumn's glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curved horizon's bound
To the point of heaven's profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
And the plains that silent lie