The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed
Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne,
A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls
His brother Death. A rare and regal prey
He hath prepared, prowling around the world;
Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men
Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms,
Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine

The unheeded tribute of a broken heart.

When on the threshold of the green recess

The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death
Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,

Did he resign his high and holy soul

To images of the majestic past,

That paused within his passive being now,

Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe
Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone
Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest,
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink
Of that obscurest chasm;— and thus he lay,
Surrendering to their final impulses

The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear

Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintly smiling :- his last sight
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,
With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills
It rests, and still as the divided frame
Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood,
That ever beat in mystic sympathy

With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:
And when two lessening points of light alone
Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp
Of his faint respiration scarce did stir

The stagnate night:-till the minutest ray

Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.
It paused-it fluttered. But when heaven remained
Utterly black, the murky shades involved

An image, silent, cold, and motionless,

As their own voiceless earth and vacant air.
Even as a vapour fed with golden beams
That ministered on sunlight, ere the west
Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame
No sense, no motion, no divinity-

A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings

The breath of heaven did wander a bright stream Once fed with many-voiced waves -a dream

Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

O, for Medea's wondrous alchemy,

Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam
With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale
From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God,
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice
Which but one living man has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever,
Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible

For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled
Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams, - ah! thou hast fled!

The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,

The child of grace and genius. Heartless things
Are done and said i' the world, and many worms

And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth
From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,

Lifts still its solemn voice :- but thou art fled
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee
Been purest ministers, who are, alas !
Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips
So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes
That image sleep in death, upon that form
Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear]

Be shed - not even in thought. Nor, when those hues
Are gone, and those divinest lineaments,

Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone

In the frail pauses of this simple strain,
Let not high verse, mourning the memory
Of that which is no more, or painting's woe
Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery
Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence,
And all the shews o' the world are frail and vain
To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.
It is a woe too 'deep for tears,' when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;

But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

[TO COLERIDGE.]

ΔΑΚΡΥΕΙ ΔΙΟΙΣΩ ΠΟΤΜΟΝ ΑΠΟΤΜΟΝ.

O! THERE are spirits of the air,
And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair

As star-beams among twilight trees:
Such lovely ministers to meet

Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.

With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

And moonlight seas, that are the voice

Of these inexplicable things

Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice

When they did answer thee; but they
Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.

And thou hast sought in starry eyes

Beams that were never meant for thine,