LITMIR.BIZ

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      And by another, in deep dell below,

      See, through the trees, a little river go

      All in its mid-day gold and glimmering.

      Honey from out the gnarled hive I’ll bring,

      And apples, wan with sweetness, gather thee,–

      Cresses that grow where no man may them see,

      And sorrel untorn by the dew-claw’d stag:

      Pipes will I fashion of the syrinx flag, That thou mayst always know whither I roam,

      When it shall please thee in our quiet home

      To listen and think of love. Still let me speak;

      Still let me dive into the joy I seek,–

      For yet the past doth prison me. The rill,

      Thou haply mayst delight in, will I fill

      With fairy fishes from the mountain tarn,

      And thou shall feed them from the squirrel’s barn.

      Its bottom will I strew with amber shells,

      And pebbles blue from deep enchanted wells. Its sides I’ll plant with dew-sweet eglantine,

      And honeysuckles full of clear bee-wine.

      I will entice this crystal rill to trace

      Love’s silver name upon the meadow’s face.

      I’ll kneel to Vesta, for a flame of fire;

      And to god Phœbus, for a golden lyre;

      To Empress Dian, for a hunting spear;

      To Vesper, for a taper silver-clear,

      That I may see thy beauty through the night;

      To Flora, and a nightingale shall light Tame on thy finger; to the River-gods,

      And they shall bring thee taper fishing-rods

      Of gold, and lines of Naiads’ long bright tress.

      Heaven shield thee for thine utter loveliness!

      Thy mossy footstool shall the altar be

      ‘Fore which I’ll bend, bending, dear love, to thee:

      Those lips shall be my Delphos, and shall speak

      Laws to my footsteps, colour to my cheek,

      Trembling or stedfastness to this same voice,

      And of three sweetest pleasurings the choice: And that affectionate light, those diamond things,

      Those eyes, those passions, those supreme pearl springs,

      Shall be my grief, or twinkle me to pleasure.

      Say, is not bliss within our perfect seisure?

      O that I could not doubt?”

      The mountaineer

      Thus strove by fancies vain and crude to clear

      His briar’d path to some tranquillity.

      It gave bright gladness to his lady’s eye,

      And yet the tears she wept were tears of sorrow; Answering thus, just as the golden morrow

      Beam’d upward from the vallies of the east:

      “O that the flutter of this heart had ceas’d,

      Or the sweet name of love had pass’d away.

      Young feathor’d tyrant! by a swift decay

      Wilt thou devote this body to the earth:

      And I do think that at my very birth

      I lisp’d thy blooming titles inwardly;

      For at the first, first dawn and thought of thee,

      With uplift hands I blest the stars of heaven. Art thou not cruel? Ever have I striven

      To think thee kind, but ah, it will not do!

      When yet a child, I heard that kisses drew

      Favour from thee, and so I gave and gave

      To the void air, bidding them find out love:

      But when I came to feel how far above

      All fancy, pride, and fickle maidenhood,

      All earthly pleasure, all imagin’d good,

      Was the warm tremble of a devout kiss,–

      Even then, that moment, at the thought of this, Fainting I fell into a bed of flowers,

      And languish’d there three days. Ye milder powers,

      Am I not cruelly wrong’d? Believe, believe

      Me, dear Endymion, were I to weave

      With my own fancies garlands of sweet life,

      Thou shouldst be one of all. Ah, bitter strife!

      I may not be thy love: I am forbidden–

      Indeed I am–thwarted, affrighted, chidden,

      By things I trembled at, and gorgon wrath.

      Twice hast thou ask’d whither I went: henceforth Ask me no more! I may not utter it,

      Nor may I be thy love. We might commit

      Ourselves at once to vengeance; we might die;

      We might embrace and die: voluptuous thought!

      Enlarge not to my hunger, or I’m caught

      In trammels of perverse deliciousness.

      No, no, that shall not be: thee will I bless,

      And bid a long adieu.”

      The Carian

      No word return’d: both lovelorn, silent, wan, Into the vallies green together went.

      Far wandering, they were perforce content

      To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;

      Nor at each other gaz’d, but heavily

      Por’d on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.

      Endymion! unhappy! it nigh grieves

      Me to behold thee thus in last extreme:

      Ensky’d ere this, but truly that I deem

      Truth the best music in a first-born song.

      Thy lute-voic’d brother will I sing ere long, And thou shall aid–hast thou not aided me?

      Yes, moonlight Emperor! felicity

      Has been thy meed for many thousand years;

      Yet often have I, on the brink of tears,

      Mourn’d as if yet thou wert a forester;–

      Forgetting the old tale.

      He did not stir

      His eyes from the dead leaves, or one small pulse

      Of joy he might have felt. The spirit culls

      Unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays Through the old garden-ground of boyish days.

      A little onward ran the very stream

      By which he took his first soft poppy dream;

      And on the very bark ‘gainst which he leant

      A crescent he had carv’d, and round it spent

      His skill in little stars. The teeming tree

      Had swollen and green’d the pious charactery,

      But not ta’en out. Why, there was not a slope

      Up which he had not fear’d the antelope;

      And not a tree, beneath whose rooty shade He had not with his tamed leopards play’d;

      Nor could an arrow light, or javelin,

      Fly in the air where his had never been–

      And yet he knew it not.

      O treachery!

      Why

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