For save when shutting reasons up in rhythm, Or Heliconian honey in living words, To make a truth less harsh, I often grew Tired of so much within our little life, Or of so little in our little life Poor little life that toddles half an hour Crown'd with a flower or two, and there an end- Not manlike end myself? our privilege What beast has heart to do it? And what man, Not I; not he, who bears one name with her, When brooking not the Tarquin in her veins, She made her blood in sight of Collatine And all his peers, flushing the guiltless air, Spout from the maiden fountain in her heart. And from it sprang the Commonwealth, which breaks As I am breaking now! "And therefore now Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all, Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart Those blind beginnings that have made me man Through all her cycles into man once more, But till this cosmic order everywhere Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day Cracks all to pieces, and that hour perhaps. Is not so far when momentary man Shall seem no more a something to himself, But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes, My golden work in which I told a truth That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel, And numbs the Fury's ringlet-snake, and plucks The mortal soul from out immortal hell, Shall stand ay, surely: then it fails at last, And perishes as I must; for O Thou, Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity, Yearn'd after by the wisest of the wise, I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not How roughly men may woo thee so they win Thus - thus: the soul flies out and dies in the air." With that he drove the knife into his side: She heard him raging, heard him fall; ran in, Beat breast, tore hair, cried out upon herself As having fail'd in duty to him, shriek'd That she but meant to win him back, fell on him, Clasp'd, kiss'd him, wail'd: he answer'd, " Care not thou What matters? All is over: Fare thee well!" THE GOLDEN SUPPER. [This poem is founded upon a story in Boccaccio. A young lover, Julian, whose cousin and foster-sister, Camilla, has been wedded to his friend and rival, Lionel, endeavors to narrate the story of his own love for her, and the strange sequel of it. He speaks of having been haunted in delirium by visions and the sound of bells, sometimes tolling for a funeral, and at last ringing for a marriage; but he breaks away, overcome, as he approaches the Event, and a witness to it completes the tale.] ** He flies the event: he leaves the event to me: As who should say "continue." Well, he had One golden hour of triumph shall I say? Solace at least before he left his home. Would you had seen him in that hour of his ! He moved thro' all of it majestically. Restrain❜d himself quite to the close but now Whether they were his lady's marriage-bells, Or prophets of them in his fantasy, I never ask'd: but Lionel and the girl Were wedded, and our Julian came again Back to his mother's house among the pines. But there, their gloom, the mountains and the Bay, The whole land weigh'd him down as Ætna does The Giant of Mythology: he would go, Would leave the land forever, and had gone Surely, but for a whisper "Go not yet," Some warning, and divinely as it seem'd And thus he stay'd and would not look at her |