Of thought-entangled descant; as to nerves-
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
To bother me,-when you are with me there.
And they shall never more sip laudanum
From Helicon or Himeros ; *-—well, come,
And in spite of * * * and of the devil,
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel
Outlast the leafless time;-till buds and flowers
Warn the obscure inevitable hours

Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew :-
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

TO MARY,

ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM UPON

THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST.

I.

How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten,

(For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review; That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true!

**Iuɛpos, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some slight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love

What, though no mice are caught by a young

kitten,

May it not leap and play as grown cats do, Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme.

II.

What hand would crush the silken-winged fly,
The youngest of inconstant April's minions,
Because it cannot climb the purest sky,

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's
dominions?

Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die,

When day shall hide within her twilight

pinions

The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.

III.

To thy fair feet a winged Vision came,

Whose date should have been longer than a

day,

And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift sun went his

way

And that is dead.-O, let me not believe

That any thing of mine is fit to live!

IV.

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years
Considering and retouching Peter Bell;
Watering his laurels with the killing tears

`Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres

Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.

V.

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches
Peter,

Though he took nineteen years, and she three days

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre

She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress

Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness."

VI.

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow

Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at ;

In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello,

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate

Can shrive you of that sin,—if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.

END OF VOL. III.