The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [9]
With madness, and unwonted reverie:
In Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf
And blossom of the fairy plant, in grief
Disconsolate linger—grief that hangs her head,
Repenting follies that full long have fled,
Heaving her white breast to the balmy air,
Like guilty beauty, chasten'd, and more fair:
Nyctanthes too, as sacred as the light
She fears to perfume, perfuming the night:
**And Clytia pondering between many a sun,
While pettish tears adown her petals run:
***And that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth—
And died, ere scarce exalted into birth,
Bursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing
Its way to Heaven, from garden of a king:
* This flower is much noticed by Lewenhoeck and Tournefort.
The bee, feeding upon its blossom, becomes intoxicated.
** Clytia—The Chrysanthemum Peruvianum, or, to employ a
better-known term, the turnsol—which continually turns
towards the sun, covers itself, like Peru, the country from
which it comes, with dewy clouds which cool and refresh its
flowers during the most violent heat of the day.—B. de St.
Pierre.
*** There is cultivated in the king's garden at Paris, a
species of serpentine aloes without prickles, whose large
and beautiful flower exhales a strong odour of the vanilla,
during the time of its expansion, which is very short. It
does not blow till towards the month of July—you then
perceive it gradually open its petals—expand them—fade
and die.—St. Pierre.
*And Valisnerian lotus thither flown
From struggling with the waters of the Rhone:
**And thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante!
Isola d'oro!—Fior di Levante!
***And the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever
With Indian Cupid down the holy river—
Fair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given
****To bear the Goddess' song, in odors, up to Heaven:
"Spirit! that dwellest where,
In the deep sky,
The terrible and fair,
In beauty vie!
Beyond the line of blue—
The boundary of the star
Which turneth at the view
Of thy barrier and thy bar—
Of the barrier overgone
By the comets who were cast
From their pride, and from their throne
To be drudges till the last—
To be carriers of fire
(The red fire of their heart)
With speed that may not tire
And with pain that shall not part—
* There is found, in the Rhone, a beautiful lily of the
Valisnerian kind. Its stem will stretch to the length of
three or four feet—thus preserving its head above water
in the swellings of the river.
** The Hyacinth.
*** It is a fiction of the Indians, that Cupid was first
seen floating in one of these down the river Ganges—and
that he still loves the cradle of his childhood.
**** And golden vials full of odors which are the prayers of the saints.
—Rev. St. John.
Who livest—that we know—
In Eternity—we feel—
But the shadow of whose brow
What spirit shall reveal?
Tho' the beings whom thy Nesace,
Thy messenger hath known
Have dream'd for thy Infinity
*A model of their own—
Thy will is done, Oh, God!
The star hath ridden high
Thro' many a tempest, but she rode
Beneath thy burning eye;
And here, in thought, to thee—
In thought that can alone
Ascend thy empire and so be
A partner of thy throne—
* The Humanitarians held that God was to be understood as
having a really human form.—Vide Clarke's Sermons, vol.
1, page 26, fol. edit.
The drift of Milton's argument, leads him to employ language
which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their
doctrine; but it will be seen immediately, that he guards
himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most
ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.—Dr.
Sumner's Notes on Milton's Christian Doctrine.
This opinion, in spite of many testimonies to the contrary,
could never have been very general. Andeus, a Syrian of
Mesopotamia, was condemned for the opinion, as heretical. He
lived in the beginning of the fourth century. His disciples
were called Anthropmorphites.—Vide Du Pin.
Among Milton's poems are these lines:—
Dicite sacrorum præsides nemorum Deæ, &c.
Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine
Natura