as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful or wise or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

"The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. [But that Power, which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure

its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tenderhearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

Mother of this unfathomable world! Favor my solemn song, for I have loved 19 Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed

In charnels and on coffins, where black death

Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,

Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its

own stillness,

30

Like an inspired and desperate alchemist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears,

Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmèd night

too acred

for

ин

utterance.

The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burden; at the sound he turned,"
And saw by the warm light of their own
life

Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare,

Her dark locks floating in the breath of night,

Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly.

180

His strong heart sunk and sickened with

excess

Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs, and quelled

Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods,

And shook him from his rest, and led him forth

Into the darkness. As an eagle, grasped In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast

Burn with the poison, and precipitates Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,

230

have fled

The hues of heaven that canopied his bower

Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed

his sleep,

flight

Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs

Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, Day after day, a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame.

And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair,

Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand Hung like dead bone within its withered