The Warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the year
On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold...
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From “Mont Blanc”
MONT BLANC yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,... -
I.
i Dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring,
And gentle odors led my steps astray,
Mixt with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kist it and then fled, as thou... -
HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing... -
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,—
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on. -
From “Queen Mab,” I.
HOW wonderful is Death!
Death and his brother Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When, throned on ocean’s wave,
It blushes o’er the world:
Yet both so passing wonderful!Hath then the gloomy Power...
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I Met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,
The hand that... -
From “View from the Euganean Hills”
ALL is bright and clear and still
Round the solitary hill.Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day’s azure eyes,
Ocean’s nursling, Venice, lies,—
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
... -
From “Alastor”; Preface
“Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem, amans amare.”—Confessions of Saint Augustine.EARTH, ocean, air, belovèd brotherhood!
If our great mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,
With...