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Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,

Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, 30 When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,

Like an inspired and desperate alchemist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange
tears

35 Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmèd night To render up thy charge: and, though ne'er yet

Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, 40 And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,

Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome

Of some mysterious and deserted fane, 45 I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain

50

May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

Of night and day, and the deep heart of

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The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,

65 And Silence, too enamored of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

And the green earth, lost in his heart its claims

To love and wonder; he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home,

Until the doves and squirrels would par

take

From his innocuous hand his bloodless
food,

Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks,
And the wild antelope, that starts when-

e'er

The dry leaf rustles in the brake,2 suspend

By solemn vision, and bright silver 105 Her timid steps to gaze upon a form

dream,

His infancy was nurtured. Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and am-
bient air,

70 Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt
75 And knew. When early youth had passed,
he left

His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered
lands.

Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness
Has lured his fearless steps; and he
has bought

80 With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage

men,

His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps

110

115

More graceful than her own.

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He like her shadow has pursued, where 'er 120 Hang their mute thoughts on the mute The red volcano overcanopies

Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice
85 With burning smoke, or where bitumen
lakes

On black bare pointed islets ever beat
With sluggish surge, or where the secret

caves

Rugged and dark, winding among the springs

Of fire and poison, inaccessible

90 To avarice or pride, their starry domes Of diamond and of gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls,

1 The cypress is an emblem of mourning; it is a common tree in graveyards.

walls around,

He lingered, poring on memorials
Of the world's youth; through the long
burning day

Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor,
when the moon

Filled the mysterious halls with floating
shades

125 Suspended he that task, but ever gazed
1 crowded; thronged
2 thicket

3 Supernatural beings of Greek mythology con-
ceived as holding a position between gods and

men.

4 Mythological figures arranged in the fashion of the zodiac, on the walls, columns, etc., of the temple of Denderah, a city in Upper Egypt.

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Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed 235 Through tangled swamps and deep pre

his sleep,

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Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, forever 245 lost,

210 In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death

Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,

O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rain- 250
bow clouds

And pendent mountains seen in the calm
lake

215 Lead only to a black and watery depth,
While death's blue vault, with loathliest
vapors hung,

Where every shade which the foul grave 255
exhales

Hides its dead eye from the detested day,
Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful
realms?

220 This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his

heart;

cipitous dells,

Startling with careless step the moonlight

snake,

He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight,

Shedding the mockery of its vital hues Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs

Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust,' wildly he wandered on,

Day after day a weary waste of hours,
Bearing within his life the brooding care
That ever fed on its decaying flame.
And now his limbs were lean; his scat-
tered hair,

Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within its withered
skin;

Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone,

As in a furnace burning secretly,
From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,
Who ministered with human charity
His human wants, beheld with wondering

awe

Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer, Encountering on some dizzy precipice That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of Wind

The insatiate hope which it awakened, 260 With lightning eyes, and eager breath,

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