Month after month endured; it was a feast

Whene'er he found those globes of deep-red gold Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear, Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.

14 And in the roofless huts of vast morasses,
Deserted by the fever-stricken serf,

All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses,
And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf,
And where the huge and speckled aloe made,
Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,
15. He housed himself.-There is a point of strand

Near Vado's tower and town; and on one side
The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,
And on the other creeps eternally

Through muddy weeds the shallow sullen sea.
16. Here the earth's breath is pestilence, and few
But things whose nature is at war with life-
Snakes and ill worms-endure its mortal dew.
The trophies of the clime's victorious strife-
White bones, and locks of dun and yellow hair,
And ringed horns which buffaloes did wear-

17. And at the utmost point stood there

The relics of a weed-inwoven cot,

Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer Had lived seven days there: the pursuit was hot When he was cold. The birds that were his grave Fell dead upon their feast in Vado's wave. 18. There must have lived within Marenghi's heart

That fire, more warm and bright than life or hope, (Which to the martyr makes his dungeon.

More joyous than the heaven's majestic cope
To his oppressor), warring with decay,—
Or he could ne'er have lived years, day by day.
19. Nor was his state so lone as you might think.

He had tamed every newt and snake and toad,
And every seagull which sailed down to drink
ere the death-mist went abroad.
And each one, with peculiar talk and play,
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.

Those .

20. And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at night
Came licking with blue tongues his veinèd feet;
And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright,
In many entangled figures quaint and sweet
To some enchanted music they would dance—
Until they vanished at the first moon-glance.
21. He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed
The summer dewdrops in the golden dawn;

And, ere the hoar-frost vanished, he could read

Its pictured footprints, as on spots of lawn
Its delicate brief touch in silence weaves

The likeness of the wood's remembered leaves.
22. And many a fresh Spring-morn would he awaken-
While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron
Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken

Of mountains and blue isles which did environ
With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea,-
And feel

liberty.

23. And in the moonless nights, when the dim ocean Heaved underneath the heaven,

Starting from dreams

Communed with the immeasurable world;
And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated,
Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.
24. His food was the wild fig and strawberry,

The milky pine-nuts which the autumnal blast
Shakes into the tall grass; and such small fry
As from the sea by winter-storms are cast;
And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found
Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.

25. And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made
His solitude less dark. When memory came

(For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),
His spirit basked in its internal flame,—

As, when the black storm hurries round at night,
The fisher basks beside his red firelight.

26. Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and errors,
Like billows unawakened by the wind,

Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors,

Weakness, and doubt, had withered in his mind.
His couch

27. And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet
A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,-
Its pennons streaming on the blasts that fan it,

Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,
Like the dark ghost of the unburied even
Striding across the orange-coloured heaven,—

28. The thought of his own kind who made the soul

Which sped that winged shape through night and day,— The thought of his own country

Naples, December 1818.

557

1919.

1319.

XIII.

YE gentle visitations of calm thought-
Moods like the memories of happier earth!

Which come arrayed in thoughts of little worth,
Like stars in clouds by the weak winds enwrought, -
But that the clouds depart and stars remain,
While they remain, and ye, alas, depart!

June 1819.

XIV.

THE world is dreary,

And I am weary

Of wandering on without thee, Mary;

A joy was erewhile

In thy voice and thy smile,

And 'tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.

XV.

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

THY little footsteps on the sands

Of a remote and lonely shore;

The twinkling of thine infant hands,

Where now the worm will feed no more:

Thy mingled look of love and glee
When we returned to gaze on thee.

XVI.

TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.

(With what truth I may say-
"Roma! Roma! Roma!
Non è piu come era prima!")
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid!
Here its ashes find a tomb;
But beneath this pyramid

Thou art not ;—if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine.
Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,

The love of living leaves and weeds,
Among these tombs and ruins wild ;-

Let me think that, through low seeds
Ct the sweet flowers and sunny grass,
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion

XVII.

ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI,

IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY.

I. IT lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
2. Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone,
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the melodious hues of beauty, thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As . grass out of a watery rock,

Hairs which are vipers; and they curl and flow,
And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions show

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
3. And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into these Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light hath cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

4. 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there—
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.
Florence, 1819.

1820.

1820.

XVIII.

SUCH hope as is the sick despair of good,
Such fear as is the certainty of ill,

Such doubt as is pale Expectation's food,

Turned while she tastes to poison, when the will Is powerless, and the spirit

XIX.

My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.

XX.

A VISION OF THE SEA.

'Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail
Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale.
From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven;
And, when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from heaven,
She sees the black trunks of the waterspouts spin
And bend, as if heaven was ruining in,

Which they seemed to sustain with their terrible mass.
As if ocean had sunk from beneath them, they pass

To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound;
And the waves and the thunders, made silent around,
Leave the wind to its echo. The vessel, now tossed
Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost
In the skirts of the thunder-cloud. Now down the sweep
Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep
It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale

Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the gale,
Dim mirrors of ruin, hang gleaming about;

While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like a rout
Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire-flowing iron,
With splendour and terror the black ship environ;
Or, like sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale fire,
In fountains spout o'er it. In many a spire
The pyramid-billows, with white points of brine,
In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine,
As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea.

The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree
While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast
Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches has passed.
The intense thunder-balls which are raining from heaven
Have shattered its mast, and it stands black and riven.
The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead hulk
On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk,
Like a corpse on the clay which is hungering to fold
Its corruption around it. Meanwhile, from the hold,