All impulses of soul and sense

Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve :
The music and the doleful tale,
The rich and balmy eve;

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng;
And gentle wishes long subdued,
Subdued and cherished long!

She wept with pity and delight,

She blushed with love and maiden shame;
And, like the murmur of a dream,
I heard her breathe my name.

Her bosom heaved-she stepped aside
As conscious of my look she stepped;
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,
She flew to me and wept.

She half enclosed me with her arms, She pressed me with a meek embrace; And, bending back her head, looked up, And gazed upon my face.

'Twas partly love, and partly fear, And partly 'twas a bashful art, That I might rather feel than see The swelling of her heart.

I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And told her love with virgin pride; And so I won my Genevieve,

My bright and beauteous bride.

HYMN BEFORE SUNRISE IN THE VALE QF
CHAMOUNI.

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star
In his steep course? So long he seems to pause
On thy bald, awful head, O sovran Blanc !
The Arvé and Arveiron at thy base
Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form!
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines
How silently! Around thee and above
Deep is the air, and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,

Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet, beguiling melody,

So sweet we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the mean while, wast blending with my

thought,

Yea, with my life, and life's own secret joy,
Till the dilating soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty vision passing-there,

As in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven!

Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks, and secret ecstasy! Awake,
Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn!

Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale!
Oh, struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,

Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink:
Companion of the morning-star at dawn,
Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald: wake, oh wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth?
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents, fiercely glad!
Who called you forth from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns called you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jaggéd rocks,
Forever shattered, and the same forever?

Who gave you your invulnerable life,

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?

And who commanded (and the silence came),
Here let the billows stiffen and have rest?

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full-moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living
flowers

Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
God! Let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!

Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, you piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost !
Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest!
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
Ye sigus and wonders of the elements!
Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!

Thou too, hoar mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure

serene,

Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast-
Thon too again, stupendous mountain! thou
That, as I raise my head, awhile bowed low
In adoration, upward from thy base

HUMAN LIFE.

ON THE DENIAL OF IMMORTALITY.

If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion not alone declare, But are the whole of being! If the breath

Be life itself, and not its task and tent; If e'en a soul like Milton's can know death; O man! thou vessel, purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! Surplus of Nature's dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase, Retreating slow, with meditative pause,

She formed with restless hands unconsciously! Blank accident! nothing's anomaly!

If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state,

Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud,

To rise before me,-rise, oh ever rise!

Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God!

COMPLAINT.

How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits
Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.

REPROOF.

For shame, dear friend! renounce this canting strain!

What wouldst thou have a good great man obtain ?
Place-titles-salary-a gilded chain-

Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?—
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man?-Three treasures, love, and
light,

And calm thoughts, regular as infant's breath;And three firm friends, more sure than day and night

Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.

The counter-weights!-Thy laughter and thy tears
Mean but themselves, each fittest to create,

And to repay the other! Why rejoices
Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good?
Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood?
Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices,
Image of image, ghost of ghostly elf,

That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold?
Yet what and whence thy gain if thou withhold
These costly shadows of thy shadowy self?
Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek or shun!
Thou hast no reason why; thou canst have none;
Thy being's being is a contradiction.

FANCY IN NUBIBUS; OR, THE POET IN THE CLOUDS.

Oh, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the casily persuaded eyes

Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
Of a friend's fancy; or, with head bent low,
And cheek aslant, see rivers flow of gold
"Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go
From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous

land!

Or, listening to the tide with closed sight,
Be that blind bard who, on the Chian strand,
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE IN EDUCATION. O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule,

And sun thee in the light of happy faces,

Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.
For as old Atlas on his broad neck places
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it,-so
Do these upbear the little world below
Of Education, Patience, Love, and Hope.
Methinks I see them grouped in seemly show,
The straitened arms upraised, the palms aslope,
And robes that, touching as adown they flow
Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow.
O, part them never! If Hope prostrate lie,
Love too will sink and die.
But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive
From her own life that Hope is yet alive;
And, bending o'er with soul-transfusing eyes,
And the soft murmurs of the mother-dove,
Woos back the fleeting spirit and half-supplies ;—
Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave
to Love.

Yet haply there will come a weary day,

When, overtasked at length,

Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. Then, with a statue's smile, a statue's strength, Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loath, And both supporting, does the work of both.

FROM "DEJECTION: AN ODE."

O lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth
Than that inanimate, cold world allowed
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair, luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth;

And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

pure of heart! thon need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be; What, and wherein it doth exist,

This light, this glory, this fair, luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power!

Joy, virtuous lady! joy that ne'er was given Save to the pure, and in their purest hour;

I shall grieve down this blow; of that I'm conscious:

What does not man grieve down? From the highest,

As from the vilest, thing of every day

He learns to wean himself; for the strong hours
Conquer him. Yet I feel what I have lost
In him. The bloom is vanished from my life.
For oh, he stood beside me, like my youth,
Transformed for me the real to a dream,
Clothing the palpable and familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.
Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,
The beautiful is vanished-and returns not.

EPITAPH ON AN INFANT.

Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care,
The opening bud to heaven conveyed,
And bade it blossom there.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

IN SEVEN PARTS.

"Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit, et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quæ loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne meus assuefacta hodiernæ vitæ minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus."-T. BURNET: Archæol. Phil., p. 68.

PART I.

It is an ancient mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three:

"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

"The bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst hear the merry din."

He holds him with his skinny hand: "There was a ship," quoth he. "Hold off! unhand me, gray-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye-
The wedding-guest stood still,
And listens like a three-years' child;
The mariner hath his will.

The wedding-guest sat on a stone,
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed mariner:--

The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop

Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the light-house top.

The sun came up upon the left,

Out of the sea came he,

And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,

Till over the mast at noon

The wedding-guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she;

Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy.

The wedding-guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed mariner :-

And now the storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong;

He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we kenThe ice was all between,

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an albatross :
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The albatross did follow,

And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine: