Works

("Phoebus, n'est-il sur la terre?")

[OPERA OF "ESMERALDA," ACT IV., 1836.]


Phoebus, is there not this side the grave,
Power to save
Those who're loving? Magic balm...

The First Epistle

Awake, my St. John!(1) leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.
Let us (since Life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)...

Essential oils are wrung:
The attar from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws.

The general rose decays;
But this, in lady's drawer,...

The knightly legend of thy shield betrays
The moral of thy life; a forecast wise,
And that large honour that deceit defies,
Inspired thy fathers in the elder days,...

No one was with me there -
Happy I was - alone;
Yet from the sunshine suddenly
A joy was gone.

A bird in an empty house
Sad echoes makes to ring,
Flitting from room to room...

So well I knew your habits and your ways,
That like a picture painted on the skies,
At the sweet closing of the summer days,
You stand before my eyes.

I see you on the old verandah there,...

Though far apart, my darling, side by side
We wander still and our fond yearnings meet,
As when our hearts with highest raptures beat
Before our footsteps trod the paths of pride;...

"It is good-bye," she said; "the world is wide,
There's space for you and me to walk apart.
Though we have walked together side by side,
My thoughts all yours, my resting-place your heart,...

"To point a moral." - JOHNSON.


Fairest Lady and Noble, for once on a time,
Condescend to accept, in the humblest of rhyme,
And a style more of Gay than of Milton,...

In extended observation of the ways and works of man,
From the Four-mile Radius roughly to the Plains of Hindustan:
I have drunk with mixed assemblies, seen the racial ruction rise,...

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach Thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on Thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land...

When the impatient spirit leaves behind
The clogging hours and makes no dear delay
To drop this Nessus-shirt of night and day,
To cast the flesh that bound and could not bind...

I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well hath He spoken: 'Swear not by thy head,
Thou knowest not the hairs,' though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in his own strange book.
...

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

O years! and age! farewell:
Behold I go,
Where I do know
Infinity to dwell.

And these mine eyes shall see
All times, how they
Are lost i' th' sea
Of vast eternity:
...

On this wondrous sea,
Sailing silently,
Ho! pilot, ho!
Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers roar,
Where the storm is o'er?

In the silent west
Many sails at rest,...

How ill doth he deserve a lover's name,
Whose pale weak flame
Cannot retain
His heat, in spite of absence or disdain;
But doth at once, like paper set on fire,
Burn and expire;...

The heart that once was rich with light,
And happy in your grace,
Now lieth cold beneath the scorn
That gathers on your face;
And every joy it knew before,
And every templed dream,...

Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare bony feet?
Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

...

"What traveller soever wander here
In quest of peace and what is best of pleasure,
Let not his hope be overcast and drear
Because I, Death, am here to fix the measure
Of life, even in blameless Arcady....