With lightning and with music: the damp death
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips;

And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath

Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips, It flushed through his pale limbs, and past to its eclipse.

XIII.

And others came... Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;

And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,

And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,

Came in slow pomp;- the moving pomp might

seem

Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.

XIV.

All he had loved, and moulded into thought,
From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought

Her eastern watchtower, and her hair unbound,
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground,
Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day;

Afar the melancholy thunder moaned,

Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay,

And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay.

XV.

Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay,
And will no more reply to winds or fountains,
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray,
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day;

Since she can mimic not his lips, more dear
Than those for whose disdain she pined away

Into a shadow of all sounds: a drear

Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hear.

XVI.

Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down

Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,

Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown

For whom should she have waked the sullen year? To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear

Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both

Thou Adonais: wan they stand and sere

Amid the faint companions of their youth, With dew all turned to tears; odour, to sighing ruth.

XVII.

Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale

Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;

Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain
Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,
As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain

Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast, And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

XVIII.

Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;

The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;

Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier ;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere ;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

XIX.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean

A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst As it has ever done, with change and motion, From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos; in its steam immersed

The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light; All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst; Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight, The beauty and the joy of their renewèd might.

XX.

The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;

Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath ;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath

By sightless lightning?— th' intense atom glows A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.

XXI.

Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
The actors or spectators? Great and mean

Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow.

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,

Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,

Month follow month with

woe, and year wake

year to

sorrow.

XXII.

He will awake no more, oh, never more!

"Wake thou," cried Misery, "childless Mother, rise "Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core, "A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs." And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes,

And all the Echoes whom their sister's song

Had held in holy silence, cried:

"Arise !"

Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung.

XXIII.

She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear
The golden Day, which, on eternal wings,

Even as a ghost abandoning a bier,

Had left the Earth a corpse.

Sorrow and fear

So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania;

So saddened round her like an atmosphere
Of stormy mist; so swept her on her way

Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay.

XXIV.

Out of her secret Paradise she sped,

Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel,