13300 All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not: What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not; Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower; Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view; Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves. Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine: I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus hymeneal, Or triumphal chaunt, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be; Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. Better than all measures Of delightful sound, That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 13302 ARETHUSA A' RETHUSA arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian mountains: Shepherding her bright fountains. She leapt down the rocks, The earth seemed to love her, And heaven smiled above her, As she lingered towards the deep. Then Alpheus bold, On his glacier cold, With his trident the mountains strook, And opened a chasm In the rocks; -with the spasm All Erymanthus shook. And the black south wind It concealed behind The urns of the silent snow, And earthquake and thunder The bars of the springs below. "Oh, save me! Oh, guide me! For he grasps me now by the hair!" The loud Ocean heard, To its blue depth stirred, And divided at her prayer: And under the water The Earth's white daughter Fled like a sunny beam; Behind her descended Her billows, unblended With the brackish Dorian stream; On the emerald main A dove to its ruin Down the streams of the cloudy wind. Under the bowers Where the Ocean Powers Which amid the streams Weave a network of colored light; Where the shadowy waves And the sword-fish dark, Under the ocean foam, And up through the rifts Of the mountain clifts, They past to their Dorian home. And now from their fountains In Enna's mountains, Down one vale where the morning basks, Like friends once parted Grown single-hearted, They ply their watery tasks. From their cradles steep In the cave of the shelving hill; Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing Speeded by my sweet pipings. The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns, And the Nymphs of the woods and waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the dædal earth, And of heaven,- and the giant wars, And love, and death, and birth, And then I changed my pipings, |