Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burnt its wings;

Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings, Young Love should teach Time, in his own gray style,

All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile,

A lovely soul formed to be blest and bless?

A well of sealed and secret happiness,
Whose waters like blithe light and
music are,
Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A
Star
Which moves not in the moving
Heavens, alone?
A smile amid dark frowns? a gentle
tone

Amid rude voices? a beloved light?
A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight?

A Lute which those whom Love has taught to play

Make music on, to soothe the roughest day

And lull fond grief asleep? a buried treasure?

A cradle of young thoughts of wingless pleasure;

A violet-shrouded grave of Woe?-I

measure

Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, Ainid the enchanted mountains, and the

caves

divine sleep, and on the air-like

Of

waves

Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor

Paved her light steps;-on an imagined shore,

Under the gray beak of some promontory

She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,

That I beheld her not. In solitudes Her voice came to me through the whispering woods,

And from the fountains, and the odors deep

Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep

Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there,

Breathed but of her to the enamored air; And from the breezes whether low or

loud,

And from the rain of every passing cloud,

And from the singing of the summer birds,

And from all sounds, all silence. In the words

Of antique verse and high romance,—in form,

Sound, color-in whatever checks that Storm

Which with the shattered present chokes the past;

And in that best philosophy, whose taste Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom

As glorious as a fiery martyrdom ;
Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.-

Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth

I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes

of fire,

And towards the loadstar of my one desire,

I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight Is as a dead leaf's in the owlet light, When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere

A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre,
As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.-
But She, whom prayers or tears then
could not tame,

Passed, like a God throned on a winged
planet,
Whose burning plumes to tenfold swift-
ness fan it,

Into the dreary cone of our life's shade; And as a man with mighty loss dismayed, I would have followed, though the grave between

Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are

unseen:

When a voice said :--“ O Thou of hearts the weakest,

The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest."

Then I" Where?" the world's echo answered "where!" And in that silence, and in my despair, I questioned every tongueless wind that flew

Over my tower of mourning, if it knew Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul; And murmured names and spells which have control

Over the sightless tyrants of our fate; But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate The night which closed on her; nor uncreate