XXII.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore,
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

XXIII.

For Winter came: the wind was his whip;
One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles.

XXIV.

His breath was a chain which without a sound
The earth and the air and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.

XXV.

Then the weeds, which were forms of living death,

Fled from the frost to the earth beneath :

Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost.

XXVI.

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air,
And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

XXVII.

First there came down a thawing rain,

And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;

Then there steamed up a freezing dew

Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

XXVIII.

And a northern Whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, Shook the boughs, thus laden and heavy and stiff,

And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

XXIX.

When Winter had gone, and Spring came back,

The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck ;

But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION.

1.

WHETHER the Sensitive Plant, or that Which within its boughs like a spirit sat Ere its outward form had known decay, Now felt this change, I cannot say.

II.

Whether that Lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love as stars do light,
Found sadness where it left delight,

III.

I dare not guess. But, in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

IV.

It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

V.

That garden sweet, that Lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away :

'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

VI.

For love, and beauty, and delight,

There is no death nor change; their might Exceeds our organs, which endure

No light, being themselves obscure.

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 must 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, Saint Dominic,
To convince atheist, Turk, or heretic;

Or those in philanthropic council met
Who thought to pay some interest for the debt
They owed to Jesus Christ for their salvation
By giving a faint foretaste of damnation
To Shakespeare, 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 fishers found under the utmost crag

Of Cornwall, and the storm-encompassed isles
Where to the sky the rude sea rarely 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 forms 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:

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and groovèd blocks,
The elements of what will stand the shocks

Of wave and wind and time.-Upon the table
More knacks and quips there be than I am able
To catalogize in this verse of mine.-

A pretty bowl of wood-not full of wine,

But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink
When at their subterranean toil they swink,
Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who
Reply to them in lava,-cry "halloo ! "-

And call out to the cities o'er their head.

Roofs, towers, and shrines, the dying and the dead,
Crash through the chinks of earth: and then all quaff
Another rouse, and hold their sides and laugh.
This quicksilver no gnome has drunk: within
The walnut bowl it lies, veinèd and thin,

In colour like the wake of light that stains

The Tuscan deep when from the moist moon rains
The inmost shower of its white fire-the breeze

Is still-blue heaven smiles over the pale seas.

And in this bowl of quicksilver-for I
Yield to the impulse of an infancy
Outlasting manhood--I have made to float
A rude idealism of a paper boat.

A hollow screw with cogs : Henry will know