In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run,

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of heaven,

In the broad day-light

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see,

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not⚫

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour,

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aërial hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves

By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much scent these heavy-wingéd thieves:

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:

Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine;

I have never heard,

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymenæal,

Or triumphal chaunt,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be :

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught:

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever could come near.

Better than all measures

Of delight and sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness

That the brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Underneath day's azure eyes,
Ocean's nursling, Venice, lies,-
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite's destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;

And before that chasm of light,

As within a furnace bright,

Venice.

Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,

Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies:
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.
Sun-girt City! thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen.

From Lines written among the Euganean Hills.

I see the deep's untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown!

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:

I sit upon the sands alone,

The lightning of the noontide ocean

Is flashing round me, and a tone

Arises from its measured motion;

How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

Nor peace within, nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,

And walked with inward glory crowned-
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround-

Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;

To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

From Stanzas written near Naples.

The Cloud.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

The sweet birds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun. . . .

I am the daughter of the earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change but I cannot die,

For after the rain, when, with never a stain

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of air-

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I rise and upbuild it again.

A cenotaph is a tomb erected in honour of one who is buried elsewhere. Here the sky, where the cloud, which

Out of six stanzas.

has passed away with the rain, ought to be buried, is called its cenotaph.

Autumn.

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 death-bed, 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 year,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the night-worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away,

Put on white, black, and grey,

Let your light sisters play

Ye follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong;

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Julian and Maddalo.

Kings are like stars-they rise and set-they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.

Hellas.