A Fragment.[73]

Could I remount the river of my years To the first fountain of our smiles and tears, I would not trace again the stream of hours Between their outworn banks of withered flowers, But bid it flow as now--until it glides Into the number of the nameless tides.

* * * * *

What is this Death?--a quiet of the heart? The whole of that of which we are a part? For Life is but a vision--what I see Of all which lives alone is Life to me, And being so--the absent are the dead, Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread A dreary shroud around us, and invest With sad remembrancers our hours of rest. The absent are the dead--for they are cold, And ne'er can be what once we did behold; And they are changed, and cheerless,--or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided--equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; It may be both--but one day end it must In the dark union of insensate dust. The under-earth inhabitants--are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever Man has trodden or shall tread? Or do they in their silent cities dwell Each in his incommunicative cell? Or have they their own language? and a sense Of breathless being?--darkened and intense As Midnight in her solitude?--Oh Earth! Where are the past?--and wherefore had they birth? The dead are thy inheritors--and we But bubbles on thy surface; and the key Of thy profundity is in the Grave, The ebon portal of thy peopled cave, Where I would walk in spirit, and behold Our elements resolved to things untold, And fathom hidden wonders, and explore The essence of great bosoms now no more.

* * * * *

Diodati, July, 1816.

[First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ii. 36.]

SONNET TO LAKE LEMAN.

Rousseau--Voltaire--our Gibbon--and De Staël-- Leman! these names are worthy of thy shore, Thy shore of names like these! wert thou no more, Their memory thy remembrance would recall: To them thy banks were lovely as to all, But they have made them lovelier, for the lore Of mighty minds doth hallow in the core Of human hearts the ruin of a wall Where dwelt the wise and wondrous; but by thee How much more, Lake of Beauty! do we feel, In sweetly gliding o'er thy crystal sea, The wild glow of that not ungentle zeal, Which of the Heirs of Immortality Is proud, and makes the breath of Glory real!

Diodati, July, 1816.

[First published, Prisoner of Chillon, etc., 1816.]

STANZAS TO AUGUSTA.[n]

I.

Though the day of my Destiny's over, And the star of my Fate hath declined,[o] Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find; Though thy Soul with my grief was acquainted, It shrunk not to share it with me, And the Love which my Spirit hath painted[p] It never hath found but in Thee.

II.

Then when Nature around me is smiling, The last smile which answers to mine, I do not believe it beguiling,[q] Because it reminds me of thine; And when winds are at war with the ocean, As the breasts I believed in with me,[r] If their billows excite an emotion, It is that they bear me from Thee.

III.

Though the rock of my last Hope is shivered,[s] And its fragments are sunk in the wave, Though I feel that my soul is delivered To Pain--it shall not be its slave. There is many a pang to pursue me: They may crush, but they shall not contemn; They may torture, but shall not subdue me; 'Tis of Thee that I think--not of them.[t]

IV.

Though human, thou didst not deceive me, Though woman, thou didst not forsake, Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me, Though slandered, thou never couldst shake;[u] Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me, Though parted, it was not to fly, Though watchful, 'twas not to defame me, Nor, mute, that the world might belie.[v]

V.

Yet I blame not the World, nor despise it, Nor the war of the many with one; If my Soul was not fitted to prize it, 'Twas folly not sooner to shun: And if dearly that error hath cost me, And more than I once could foresee, I have found that, whatever it lost me,[w] It could not deprive me of Thee.

VI.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,[x] Thus much I at least may recall, It hath taught me that what I most cherished Deserved to be dearest of all: In the Desert a fountain is springing,[y] In the wide waste there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing, Which speaks to my spirit of Thee.

July 24, 1816.

[First published, Prisoner of Chillon, etc., 1816.]