She comes—the spirit of the dance!
And but for those large, eloquent eyes,
Where passion speaks in every glance,
She ’d seem a wanderer from the skies.
So light that, gazing breathless there,
Lest the celestial dream should go,
You ’d think the music in the air
Waved the fair vision to and fro!
Or that the melody’s...
How, as a spider’s web is spun
With subtle grace and art,
Do thy light footsteps, every one,
Cross and recross my heart!
Now here, now there, and to and fro,
Their winding mazes turn;
Thy fairy feet so lightly go
They seem the earth to spurn.
Yet every step leaves there behind
A something, in thy dance,
That serves...
Thou dancer of two thousand years,
Thou dancer of to-day,
What silent music fills thine ears,
What Bacchic lay,
That thou shouldst dance the centuries
Down their forgotten way?
What mystic strain of pagan mirth
Has charmed eternally
Those lithe, strong limbs, that spurn the earth?
What melody,
Unheard...
And now behold your tender nurse, the air,
And common neighbor that aye runs around,
How many pictures and impressions fair
Within her empty regions are there found,
Which to your senses dancing do propound!
For what are breath, speech, echoes, music, winds,
But dancings of the air in sundry kinds?
For when you breathe, the air in...
