Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine, Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast; Custards for supper, and an endless host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such lady-like luxuries,-
Feasting on which we will philosophise.
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood, To thaw the six weeks winter in our blood.
And then we'll talk ;-what shall we talk about? Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout Of thought-entangled descant; ~as to nerves With cones and parallelograms and curves, I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare To bother me,-when you are with me there. And they shall never more sip laudanum From Helicon or Himeros;*-we'll come And in despite of *** and of the devil, Will make our friendly philosophic revel Outlast the leafless time;-till buds and flowers Warn the obscure inevitable hours
Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew :
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.'
'Iegos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some
slight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love.
SWIFT as a spirit hastening to his task Of glory and of good, the sun sprang forth Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened EarthThe smokeless altars of the mountain snows Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth
Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,
To which the birds tempered their matin lay. All flowers in field or forest which unclose
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day, Swinging their censers in the element, With orient incense lit by the new ray
Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air; And, in succession due, did continent,
Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear The form and character of mortal mould, Rise as the sun their father rose, to bear
Their portion of the toil, which he of old Took as his own and then imposed on them: But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold
Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem The cone of night, now they were laid asleep Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem
Which an old chesnut flung athwart the steep Of a green Apennine: before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the deep
Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head, When a strange trance over my fancy grew Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread
Was so transparent, that the scene came through As clear as when a veil of light is drawn O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew
That I had felt the freshness of that dawn, Bathed in the same cold dew my brow and hair, And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn
Under the self-same bough, and heard as there The birds, the fountains, and the ocean hold Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air, And then a vision on my brain was rolled.
As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay, This was the tenour of my waking dream:- Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurring to and fro,
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know Whither he went, or whence he came, or why He made one of the multitude, and so
Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky One of the million leaves of summer's bier ; Old age and youth, manhood and infancy
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear, Some flying from the thing they feared, and some Seeking the object of another's fear;
And others as with steps towards the tomb, Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath, And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked and called it death; And some fied from it as it were a ghost, Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath:
But more with motions, which each other crost, Pursued or spurned the shadows the clouds threw, Or birds within the noon-day ether lost,
Upon that path where flowers never grew, And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst, Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew
Out of their mossy cells for ever burst; Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told Of grassy paths and wood, lawn-interspersed,
With over-arching elms and caverns cold,
And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they Pursued their serious folly as of old.
And as I gazed, methought that in the way The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June When the south wind shakes the extinguished day,
And a cold glare, intenser than the noon,
But icy cold, obscured with [blinding] light
The sun, as he the stars.
When on the sunlit limits of the night Her white shell trembles amid crimson air, And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might,
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim frown Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair,-
So came a chariot on the silent storm Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape So sate within, as one whom years deform,
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape, Crouching within the shadow of a tomb, And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape
Was bent, a dun and faint etherial gloom Tempering the light upon the chariot beam; A Janus-visaged shadow did assume
The guidance of that wonder-winged team; The shapes which drew it in thick lightnings Were lost:-I heard alone on the air's soft stream
The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that charioteer
Had their eyes banded; little profit brings
« 上一頁繼續 » |