DEATH.

I.

DEATH is here and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,

Our hopes, and then our fears — and when

These are dead, the debt is due,

Dust claims dust

and we die too.

IV.

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish,

Such is our rude mortal lot—

Love itself would, did they not.

AUTUMN.

A DIRGE.

I.

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying.

Come, months, come away,

From November to May,

In your saddest array ;
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

II.

The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away;
Put on white, black, and grey;

Let your light sisters play

Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.

LEGHORN, July 1, 1820

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought —
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day—
But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,
Which in those hearts which must remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist, Would think I were a mighty mechanist, Bent with sublime Archimedean art

To breathe a soul into the iron heart

Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,
Which by the force of figured spells might win
Its way over the sea, and sport therein;

For round the walls are hung dread engines, such

As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch

Ixion or the Titan:

or the quick

Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,
To convince Atheist, Turk or Heretic,
Or those in philanthropic council met,
Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation,
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest
Who made our land an island of the blest,
When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire
On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire :-
With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and
jag,

Which fishers found under the utmost crag
Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn

When the exulting elements in scorn
Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,

As panthers sleep; -and other strange and dread
Magical forms the brick floor overspread —
Proteus transformed to metal did not make

More figures, or more strange; nor did he take

Such shapes of unintelligible brass,
Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood;
And forms of unimaginable wood,

To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood:

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved

blocks,

The elements of what will stand the shocks

Of wave and wind and time. Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able
To catalogize in this verse of mine :-

A pretty bowl of wood - not full of wine,

But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink
When at their subterranean toil they swink,
Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who
Reply to them in lava- cry halloo !

And call out to the cities o'er their head,

Roofs, towers and shrines, the dying and the dead,

Crash through the chinks of earth- and then all quaff
Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh.
This quicksilver no gnome has drunk — within
The walnut bowl it lies, veinèd and thin,

In colour like the wake of light that stains

The Tuscan deep, when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of it's white fire-the breeze
Is still-blue heaven smiles over the pale seas.