Love, beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere, Which trembles and burns with the fervour of dread

Around her wild eyes, her bright hand, and her head,

Like a meteor of light o'er the waters. Her child

Is yet smiling and playing and murmuring; so

smiled

The false deep ere the storm.

and brother

Like a sister

The child and the ocean still smile on each other, Whilst

1820.

XXV.

THE WANING MOON.

AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

1820.

XXVI.

DEATH.

I. DEATH is here, and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere;

All around, within, beneath,

Above, is death-and we are death.

2. Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

3. First our pleasures die, and then

Our hopes, and then our fears: and, when
These are dead, the debt is due,

Dust claims dust-and we die too.

4. 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.

1820.

XXVII.

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 grey
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?

1820.

XXVIII.

PROLOGUE TO HELLAS.

HERALD OF ETERNITY.

IT is the day when all the Sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house whose floor

Is chaos and the immovable abyss

Frozen by his steadfast word to hyaline.

The shadow of God, and delegate

Of that before whose breath the universe

Is as a print of dew.

Hierarchs and kings,

Who from your thrones pinnacled on the

past

Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom
Of mortal thought, which, like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the .. of
heaven

Which gave it birth, . . . assemble here
Before your Father's throne. The swift
decree

Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation

Is yet withheld, clothed in which it shall

annul

The fairest of those wandering isles that

gem

The sapphire space of interstellar air,—

That green and azure sphere, that earth enwrapped

Less in the beauty of its tender light

Than in an atmosphere of living spirit

Which interpenetrating all the

it rolls from realm to realm

And age to age, and in its ebb and flow
Impels the generations

To their appointed place,

Whilst the high Arbiter

Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time Sends his decrees veiled in eternal . . . Within the circuit of this pendent orb

There lies an antique region, on which fell The dews of thought, in the world's golden dawn,

Earliest and most benign; and from it sprung Temples and cities and immortal forms,

And harmonies of wisdom and of song,

And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair.

And, when the sun of its dominion failed,
And when the winter of its glory came,
The winds that stripped it bare blew on, and

swept

That dew into the utmost wildernesses

In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, Sons of God, for ye beheld,

Reluctant or consenting or astonished,

The stern decrees go forth which heaped on Greece

Ruin and degradation and despair.

A fourth now waits. Assemble, Sons of God, To speed or to prevent or to suspend