A dark unfathomed tide Of interminable pride, A mystery, and a dream, Should my early life seem; I say that dream was fraught With a wild and waking thought Of beings that have been,...
When from your gems of thought I turn To those pure orbs, your heart to learn, I scarce know which to prize most high, The bright i-dea, or the bright dear-eye.
I. In the greenest of our valleys, By good angels tenanted, Once fair and stately palace, Radiant palace, reared its head. In the monarch Thought's dominion, It stood there!...
In youth I have known one with whom the Earth In secret communing held, as he with it, In daylight, and in beauty, from his birth: Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit...
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell "Whose heart-strings are a lute"; None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell), Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell...
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest....
Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore.
I heed not that my earthly lot Hath'little of Earth in it, That years of love have been forgot In the hatred of a minute: I mourn not that the desolate Are happier, sweet, than I,...
Not long ago, the writer of these lines, In the mad pride of intellectuality, Maintained "the power of words", denied that ever A thought arose within the human brain...
Beneath the vine-clad eaves, Whose shadows fall before Thy lowly cottage door, Under the lilac's tremulous leaves, Within thy snowy clasped hand The purple flowers it bore....
Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine, A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine. ...