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Afar from its proud natural towers

Of rock and forest, on the hills—

The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers

And shouting with a thousand rills.

I spoke to her of power and pride,

But mystically—in such guise

That she might deem it nought beside

The moment’s converse; in her eyes

I read, perhaps too carelessly,

A mingled feeling with my own—

The flush on her bright cheek, to me

Seem’d to become a queenly throne

Too well that I should let it be

Light in the wilderness alone.

I wrapp’d myself in grandeur then

And donn’d a visionary crown—

Yet it was not that Fantasy

Had thrown her mantle over me—

But that, among the rabble—men.

Lion ambition is chain’d down—

And crouches to a keeper’s hand—

Not so in deserts where the grand—

The wild—the terrible conspire

With their own breath to fan his fire.

Look ‘round thee now on Samarcand!—

Is she not queen of Earth? her pride

Above all cities? in her hand

Their destinies? in all beside

Of glory which the world hath known

Stands she not nobly and alone?

Falling—her veriest stepping-stone

Shall form the pedestal of a throne—

And who her sovereign? Timour—he

Whom the astonished people saw

Striding o’er empires haughtily

A diadem’d outlaw!

0, human love! thou spirit given,

On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!

Which fall‘st into the soul like rain

Upon the Siroc-wither’d plain,

And, failing in thy power to bless,

But leav’st the heart a wilderness!

Idea! which bindest life around

With music of so strange a sound

And beauty of so wild a birth—

Farewell ! for I have won the Earth.

When Hope, the eagle that tower‘d, could see

No cliff beyond him in the sky,

His pinions were bent droopingly—

And homeward turn’d his soften’d eye.

’Twas sunset: when the sun will part

There comes a sullenness of heart

To him who still would look upon

The glory of the summer sun.

That soul will hate the ev’ning mist

So often lovely, and will list

To the sound of the coming darkness (known

To those whose spirits harken) as one

Who, in a dream of night, would fly

But cannot from a danger nigh.

What tho’ the moon—the white moon—

Shed all the splendor of her noon,

Her smile is chilly—and her beam,

In that time of dreariness, will seem

(So like you gather in your breath)

A portrait taken after death.

And boyhood is a summer sun

Whose waning is the dreariest one.

For all we live to know is known,

And all we seek to keep hath flown.

Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall

With the noon-day beauty—which is all.

I reach’d my home—my home no more—

For all had flown who made it so.

I pass’d from out its mossy door,

And, tho’ my tread was soft and low,

A voice came from the threshold stone

Of one whom I had earlier known—

0, I defy thee, Hell, to show

On beds of fire that burn below,

An humbler heart—a deeper wo.

Father, I firmly do believe—

I know—for Death who comes for me

From regions of the blest afar,

Where there is nothing to deceive,

Hath left his iron gate ajar,

And rays of truth you cannot see

Are flashing thro’ Eternity—

I do believe that Eblis hath

A snare in every human path—

Else how, when in the holy grove

I wandered of the idol, Love,

Who daily scents his snowy wings

With incense of burnt offerings

From the most unpolluted things,

Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven

Above with trellis’d rays from Heaven

No mote may shun—no tiniest fly—

The light’ning of his eagle eye—

How was it that Ambition crept,

Unseen, amid the revels there,

Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt

In the tangles of Love’s very hair?

Song

I saw thee on thy bridal day—

When a burning blush came o’ thee,

Though happiness around thee lay,

The world all love before thee:

And in thine eye a kindling light

(Whatever it might be)

Was all on Earth my aching sight

Of Loveliness could see.

That blush, perhaps, was maiden shame—

As such it well may pass—

Though its glow hath raised a fiercer flame

In the breast of him, alas!

Who saw thee on that bridal day,

When that