XVII.

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.

XVIII.

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.

XIX.

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
Those.. ere the death-mist went abroad.
And each one, with peculiar talk and play,
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.

XX.

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 danceUntil they vanished at the first moon-glance.

XXI.

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.

XXII.

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.

XXIII.

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.

XXIV.

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.

XXV.

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.

XXVI.

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

XXVII.

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,

XXVIII.

The thought of his own kind who made the soul

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

Naples, December 1818.

Fune 1819.

VI.

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
Of the sweet flowers and sunny grass,
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion

VII.

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.

II.

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.

III.

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.

IV.

And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those 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 had cleft,

And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

V.

'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.

VIII.

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