Still flying from Nature to study her laws,
And dulling delight by exploring its cause,
You forget how superior, for mortals below,
Is the fiction they dream to the truth that they
know.

Oh! who, that has e'er enjoyed rapture complete,
Would ask how we feel it, or why it is sweet;
How rays are confus'd, or how particles fly
Through the medium refin'd of a glance or a sigh;
Is there one, who but once would not rather have
known it,

Than written, with Harvey, whole volumes upon it?

As for you, my sweet-voiced and invisible love, You must surely be one of those spirits, that rove By the bank where, at twilight, the poet reclines, When the star of the west on his solitude shines, And the magical fingers of fancy have hung Every breeze with a sigh, every leaf with a tongue. Oh! hint to him then, 'tis retirement alone Can hallow his harp or ennoble its tone; Like you, with a veil of seclusion between, His song to the world let him utter unseen, And like you, a legitimate child of the spheres, Escape from the eye to enrapture the ears.

Sweet spirit of mystery! how I should love, In the wearisome ways I am fated to rove, To have you thus ever invisibly nigh, Inhaling for ever your song and your sigh! Mid the crowds of the world and the murmurs of care,

I might sometimes converse with my nymph of the air,

And turn with distaste from the clamorous crew, To steal in the pauses one whisper from you.

Nor have any concern with those fanciful forms
That dance upon rainbows and ride upon storms;
That, in short, you're a woman; your lip and
your eye

As mortal as ever drew gods from the sky.
But I will not believe them - no, Science, to you
I have long bid a last and a careless adieu :

known,

The voice of the one upon earth, who has twin'd With her being for ever my heart and my mind, Though lonely and far from the light of her smile, An exile, and weary and hopeless the while, Could you shed for a moment her voice on my ear, I will think, for that moment, that Cara is near;