Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past, Thou wert a spirit, to this nether sphere SONNET. TO A FRIEND WHO ASKED, HOW I FELT WHEN THE CHARLES! my slow heart was only sad, when first And hanging at her bosom (she the while While others wish thee wise and fair, A maid of spotless fame, I'll breathe this more compendious prayerMayst thou deserve thy name! Thy Mother's name, a potent spell, Meek Quietness, without offence; Associates of thy name, sweet Child! So when, her tale of days all flown, Some hoary-headed Friend, perchance, Ev'n thus a lovely rose I view'd In summer-swelling pride; Nor mark'd the bud, that green and rude Peep'd at the Rose's side. It chanced, I pass'd again that way In Autumn's latest hour, And wond'ring saw the self-same spray Rich with the self-same flower. Ah fond deceit! the rude green bud Had bloom'd, where bloom'd its parent stud, ΕΡΙΤΑΡΗ ON AN INFANT. Its balmy lips the Infant blest Relaxing from its Mother's breast, How sweet it heaves the happy sigh Of innocent Satiety! And such my Infant's latest sigh! O tell, rude stone! the passer by, That here the pretty babe doth lie, Death sang to sleep with Lullaby. MELANCHOLY. A FRAGMENT. STRETCH'D on a moulder'd Abbey's broadest wall, The fern was press'd beneath her hair, And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak, That pallid cheek was flush'd: her eager look TELL'S BIRTH-PLACE. IMITATED FROM STOLBERG. MARK this holy chapel well! Here first, an infant to her breast, • Vouchsafe him health, O God, and give God gave him reverence of laws, Yet stirring blood in Freedom's cause- The eye of the Hawk, and the fire therein! To Nature and to Holy writ The straining oar and chamois chase He knew not that his chosen hand, A CHRISTMAS CAROL. THE Shepherds went their hasty way, And now they check'd their eager tread, For to the Babe, that at her bosom clung, They told her how a glorious light, A botanical mistake. The plant which the poet here describes is called the Hart's Tongue. She listen'd to the tale divine, And closer still the Babe she press'd; And while she cried, the Babe is mine! The milk rush'd faster to her breast: Joy rose within her, like a summer's morn; Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born. Thou Mother of the Prince of Peace, Poor, simple, and of low estate! That Strife should vanish, Battle cease, O why should this thy soul elate? Sweet Music's loudest note, the Poet's story, -Did'st thou ne'er love to hear of Fame and Glory? And is not War a youthful King, A stately Hero clad in Mail? Beneath his footsteps laurels spring; Him Earth's majestic monarchs hail Their Friend, their Playmate! and his bold bright eye Compels the maiden's love-confessing sigh. <<< Tell this in some more courtly scene, To maids and youths in robes of state! I am a woman poor and mean, « A murderous fiend, by fiends adored, He kills the Sire and starves the Son; The Husband kills, and from her board Steals all his Widow's toil had won; Plunders God's world of beauty; rends away All safety from the Night, all comfort from the Day. Then wisely is my soul elate, That Strife should vanish, Battle cease: I'm poor and of a low estate, The Mother of the Prince of Peace. Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn: HUMAN LIFE, ON THE DENIAL OF IMMORTALITY. Ir dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Surplus of nature's dread activity, She form'd with restless hands unconsciously! If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state, Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy Hopes, thy Fears, The counter-weights!-Thy Laughter and thy Tears Mean but themselves, each fittest to create, And to repay the other! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good? Why cowl thy face beneath the Mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold! Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun! Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none: Thy being's being is contradiction. But soon did righteous Heaven her guilt pursue! Where'er with wilder'd step she wander'd pale, Still Edmund's image rose to blast her view, Still Edmund's voice accused her in each gale. With keen regret, and conscious guilt's alarms, Go, Traveller! tell the tale with sorrow fraught: KUBLA KHAN; OR, A VISION IN A DREAM. [THE following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall. The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation, or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment be was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter: Then all the charm Is broken-all that phantom-world so fair Poor youth! who scarcely darest lift up thine eyes- And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Σαμερον αδίον ασω: but the to-morrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.-Note to the first Edition, 1816.] IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: But oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted The shadow of the dome of pleasure It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she play'd, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 't would win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, Since in me, round me, every where Eternal Strength and Wisdom are. But yester-night I pray'd aloud And whom I scorn'd, those only strong! So two nights pass'd: the night's dismay The third night, when my own loud scream And having thus by tears subdued Such punishments, I said, were due For aye entempesting anew The unfathomable hell within, The horror of their deeds to view, And whom I love, I love indeed. APPENDIX. THE PAINS OF SLEEP. ERE On my bed my limbs I lay, A sense o'er all my soul imprest APOLOGETIC PREFACE ΤΟ «FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER. (See page 26). Ar the house of a gentleman, who by the principles and corresponding virtues of a sincere Christian consecrates a cultivated genius and the favourable accidents of birth, opulence, and splendid connexions, it was my good fortune to meet, in a dinner-party, with more men of celebrity in science or polite literature, than are commonly found collected round the same table. In the course of conversation, one of the party reminded an illustrious Poet, then present, of some verses which he had recited that morning, and which had appeared in a newspaper under the name of a War-Eclogue, in which Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, were introduced as the speakers. The gentleman so addressed replied, that he was rather surprised that none of us should have noticed or heard of the poem, as it had been, at the time, a good deal talked of in Scotland. It may be easily supposed, that my feelings were at this moment not of the most comfortable kind. Of all present, one only knew, or suspected me to be the author: a man who would have established himself in the first rank of England's living Poets, if the Genius of our country had not decreed that he should rather be the first in the first rank of its Philosophers and scientific Benefactors. It appeared the general wish to hear the lines. As my friend chose to remain silent, I chose to follow his example, and Mr ***** recited the Poem. This he could do with the better grace, being known to have ever been not only a firm and active Anti-Jacobin and Anti-Gallican, but likewise a zealous admirer of Mr Pitt, both as a good man and a great Statesman. As a Poet exclusively, he had been amused with the Eclogue; as a Poet, he recited it; and in a spirit, which made it evident, that he would have read and repeated it with the same pleasure, had his own name been attached to the imaginary object or agent. After the recitation, our amiable host observed, that in his opinion Mr ***** had over-rated the merits of the poetry; but had they been tenfold greater, they could not have compensated for that malignity of heart, which could alone have prompted sentiments so atrocious. I perceived that my illustrious friend became greatly distressed on my account; but fortunately I was able to preserve fortitude and presence of mind enough to take up the subject without exciting even a suspicion how nearly and painfully it interested me. What follows, is substantially the same as I then replied, but dilated and in language less colloquial. It was not my intention, I said, to justify the publication, whatever its author's feelings might have been at the time of composing it. That they are calculated to call forth so severe a reprobation from a good man, is not the worst feature of such poems. Their moral deformity is aggravated in proportion to the pleasure which they are capable of affording to vindictive, turbulent, and unprincipled readers. Could it be supposed, though for a moment, that the author seriously wished what he had thus wildly imagined, even the attempt to palliate an inhumanity so monstrous would be an insult to the hearers. But it seemed to me worthy of consideration, whether the mood of mind, and the general state of sensations, in which a Poet produces such vivid and fantastic images, is likely to co-exist, or is even compatible with, that gloomy and deliberate ferocity which a serious wish to realize them would pre-suppose. It had been often observed, and all my experience tended to confirm the observation, that prospects of pain and evil to others, and in general, all deep feelings of revenge, are commonly expressed in a few words, ironically tame, and mild. The mind under so direful and fiend-like an influence seems to take a morbid pleasure in contrasting the intensity of its wishes and feelings, with the slightness or levity of the expressions by which they are hinted; and indeed feelings so intense and solitary, if they were not precluded (as in almost all cases they would be) by a constitutional activity of fancy and association, and by the specific joyousness combined with it, would assuredly themselves preclude such activity. Passion, in its own quality, is the antagonist of action; though in an ordinary and natural degree the former alternates with the latter, and thereby revives and strengthens it. But the more intense and insane the passion is, the fewer and the more fixed are the correspondent forms and notions. A rooted hatred, an inveterate thirst of revenge, is a sort of madness, and still eddies round its favourite objeet, and exercises as it were a perpetual tautology of mind in thoughts and words, which admit of no adequate substitutes. Like a fish in a globe of glass, it moves restlessly round and round the scanty circumference, which it cannot leave without losing its vital element. There is a second character of such imaginary representations as spring from a real and earnest desire of evil to another, which we often see in real life, and might even anticipate from the nature of the mind. The images, I mean, that a vindictive man places before his imagination, will most often be taken from the realities of life: they will be images of pain and suffering which he has himself seen inflicted on other men, and which he can fancy himself as inflicting on the object of his hatred. I will suppose that we had heard at different times two common sailors, each speaking of some one who had wronged or offended him that the first with apparent violence had devoted every part of his adversary's body and soul to all the horrid phantoms and fantastic places that ever Quevedo dreamt of, and this in a rapid flow of those outré and wildly-combined execrations, which too often with our lower classes serve for escape-valves to carry off the excess of their passions, as so much superfluous steam that would endanger the vessel if it were retained. The other, on the contrary, with that sort of calmness of tone which is to the ear what the paleness of anger is to the eye, shall simply say, If I chance to be made boatswain, as I hope I soon shall, and can but once get that fellow under my hand (and I shall be upon the watch for him), I'll tickle his pretty skin! I wont hurt him! oh no! I'll only cut the to the liver! I dare appeal to all present, which of the two they would regard as the least deceptive symptom of deliberate malignity? nay, whether it would surprise them to see the first fellow, an hour or two afterward, cordially shaking hands with the very man, the fractional parts of whose body and soul he had been so charitably disposing of; or even perhaps risking his life for him. What language Shakspeare considered characteristic of malignant disposition, we see in the speech of the good-natured Gratiano, who spoke an infinite deal of nothing more than any man in all Venice;» -Too wild, too rude and bold of voice! the skipping spirit, whose thoughts and words reciprocally ran away with each other; O be thou damn'd, inexorable dog! and the wild fancies that follow, contrasted with Shylock's tranquil « I stand here for law.. Or, to take a case more analogous to the present subject, should we hold it either fair or charitable to believe it to have been Dante's serious wish, that all the persons mentioned by him, (many recently departed, and some even alive at the time), should actually suffer the fantastic and horrible punishments, to which he has sentenced them in his Hell and Purgatory? Or what shall we say of the passages in which Bishop Jeremy Taylor anticipates the state of those who, vicious themselves, |