Which clanged alone the mountain's marble brow,
Warped into adamantine fretwork, hung
And filled with frozen light the chasm below.

FRAGMENT IV.

Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all
We can desire, O Love! and happy souls,
Ere from thy vine the leaves of autumn fall,

Catch thee, and feed from their o'erflowing bowls
Thousands who thirst for thy ambrosial dew;--
Thou art the radiance which where ocean rolls.

Invests it; and when heavens are blue
Thou fillest them; and when the earth is fair
The shadow of thy moving wings imbue

Its deserts and its mountains, till they wear
Beauty like some bright robe;-thou ever soarest
Among the towers of men, and as soft air

In spring, which moves the unawakened forest,
Clothing with leaves its branches bare and bleak,
Thou floatest among men: and aye implorest

That which from thee they should implore:-the weak
Alone kneel to thee, offering up the hearts

The strong have broken-yet where shall any seek

A garment whom thou clothest not?

LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE.

Leghorn, July 1,

1820.

THE spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silkworm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
So I, a thing whom moralists call worm,
Sit spinning still round this decaying form,
From the fine threads of rare and subtle thought-
No net of words in garish colours wrought
To catch the idle buzzers of the day-

But a soft cell, where when that fades away,
Memory may clothe in wings my living name
And feed it with the asphodels of fame,

Which in those hearts which most remember me
Grow, making love an immortality.

Whoever should behold me now, I wist,
Would think I were a mighty mechanist,
Bent with sublime Archimedean art

To breathe a soul into the iron heart

Of some machine portentous, or strange gin,
Which by the force of figured spells might win

Its way over the sea, and sport therein;

For round the walls are hung dread engines, such
As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to clutch

Ixion or the Titan:-or the quick

Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,

To convince Atheist, Turk, or Heretic;

Or those in philosophic councils met,

Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed

By giving a faint foretaste of damnation

To Shakspeare, Sidney, Spenser and the rest

Who made our land an island of the blest,

When lamp-like Spain, who now relumes her fire

On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire:

With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag,
Which fishes found under the utmost crag

Of Cornwall and the storm-encompassed isles,
Where to the sky the rude sea seldom smiles
Unless in treacherous wrath, as on the morn
When the exulting elements in scorn

Satiated with destroyed destruction, lay
Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,

As panthers sleep:-and other strange and dread
Magical forins the brick floor overspread-
Proteus transformed to metal did not make
More figures, or more strange; nor did he take
Such shapes of unintelligible brass,

Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood,
And forms of unimaginable wood,
To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood: