The chain is loosed, the sails are spread,
The living breath is fresh behind,
As with dews and sunrise fed,

Comes the laughing morning wind ;—
The sails are full, the boat makes head
Against the Serchio's torrent fierce,
Then flags with intermitting course,

And hangs upon the wave, and stems
The tempest of the . . .

Which fervid from its mountain source
Shallow, smooth and strong doth come,—
Swift as fire, tempestuously

It sweeps into the affrighted sea;
In morning's smile its eddies coil,
Its billows sparkle, toss and boil,
Torturing all its quiet light

Into columns fierce and bright.

The Serchio, twisting forth Between the marble barriers which it clove

At Ripafratta, leads through the dead chasm The wave that died the death which lovers love, Living in what it sought; as if this spasm Had not yet past, the toppling mountains cling, But the clear stream in full enthusiasm Pours itself on the plain, then wandering

Down one clear path of effluence crystalline, Sends its superfluous waves, that they may fling At Arno's feet tribute of corn and wine, Then, through the pestilential desarts wild Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine, It rushes to the Ocean.

THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

TO MARY.

RCTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON the AS OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST.)

How my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten

vipers kill, though dead), by some review, you condemn these verses I have written, Suse they tell no story, false or true!

though no mice are caught by a young kitten, Now it not leap and play as grown cats do, claws come? Prithee, for this one time, cut thee with a visionary rhyme.

hand would crush the silken-winged fly,
youngest of inconstant April's minions,
e it cannot climb the purest sky,

re the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions?
ne. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die,

n day shall hide within her twilight pinions, ent eyes, and the eternal smile,

thine, which lent it life awhile.

To thy fair feet a wingèd Vision came,

Whose date should have been longer than a day, And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame,

And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame,

But the shower fell, the swift sun went his wayAnd that is dead.- -O, let me not believe That any thing of mine is fit to live!

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years
Considering and retouching Peter Bell;
Watering his laurels with the killing tears

Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres

Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this

well

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil
The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches Peter,
Though he took nineteen years, and she three
days

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre
She wears; he, proud ás dandy with his stays,
hung upon his wiry limbs a dress

King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness."

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow,
Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate Can shrive you of that sin,—if sin there be In love, when it becomes idolatry.

The Witch of Atlas.

BEFORE these cruel Twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth

The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain
Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

Her mother was one of the Atlantides:

The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden

In the warm shadow of her loveliness ;

He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden The chamber of grey rock in which she lay

She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

'Tis said, she first was changed into a vapour,
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,
Like splendour-wingèd moths about a taper,
Round the red west when the sun dies in it :

And then into a meteor, such as caper

On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit:

Then, into one of those mysterious stars

Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.