University of Virginia Library

SONNETS.

DAYBREAK.

What was thy dream, sweet Morning? for, behold,
Thine eyes are heavy with the balm of night,
And, as reluctant lilies to the light,
The languid lids of lethargy unfold.
Was it the tale of Yesterday retold—
An echo wakened from the western height,
Where the warm glow of sunset dalliance bright
Grew, with the pulse of waning passion, cold?
Or was it some heraldic vision grand
Of legends that forgotten ages keep
In twilight, where the sundering shoals of day
Vex the dim sails, unpiloted, of Sleep,
Till, one by one, the freighting fancies gay,
Like bubbles, vanish on the treacherous strand?

FORECAST.

All night a rose, with budding warmth aglow,
Above a sleeper's dreamful visage hung,
Pale with intenser passion than the tongue
Of man is tuned to utter. Breathing low,
The night winds, fledged with odor, to and fro
Went wandering the languid leaves among;
While darkling woke a mocking-bird, and sung
All echoes that the noonday warblers know.
The dream, the song, the odor, each in one
Upbreathing as a starry vapor, spread,
And from the golden minarets of morn,
Far heralding the unawakened sun,
A rapture as of poesy outshed
Upon the spirit of a babe unborn.

TO AN IDOL.

Mute oracle of meek humanity,
Save to its sense of blindness wholly blind,
That drifting wide in misery, to find
Some beacon o'er the night-encumbered sea,
Steered in pathetic ignorance to thee;
What sighs, what tears—of agony confined
Within the sunless prison of the mind,
Walled up of doubt, and locked in mystery,
Couldst thou, if thought were voluble, reveal,
Of panting love, and hopes all winged to rise
But netted of bewilderment, and worn
To thin despair, deep-shuddering to feel
No warmth below, above, no sympathies,
No rest but in oblivion forlorn!

KEDRON.

Where silence broods on ruin, thou alone,
Sweet oracle, in rippling numbers low,
Dost onward through the waste of ages flow,
As an eternal echo. With thy tone
Blent David's holy anthems, and the moan
That shook his heart in exile didst thou know,
What time his tears of tributary woe
Commingled with thy wave. And David's Son
In after years, on Love's vicarious way,
Breathed life above thee, and thy torrent told
Its music to the wide-proclaiming sea:
And still, through all earth's changes manifold,
Where death and silence strive for mastery,
Throbs the prophetic burden of thy lay.

THE DRUID.

Godlike beneath his grave divinities,
The last of all their worshippers, he stood.
The shadows of a vanished multitude
Enwound him, and their voices in the breeze
Made murmur, while the meditative trees
Reared of their strong fraternal branches rude
A temple meet for prayer. What blossoms strewed
The path between Life's morning hours and these?
What lay beyond the darkness? He alone
The sunshine and the shadow and the dew
Had shared alike with leaf, and flower, and stem:
Their life had been his lesson; and from them
A dream of immortality he drew,
As in their fate foreshadowing his own.

THE HERMIT.

High on the hoary mountain-top he dwelt
Alone with God, whose handiwork above
The wonders of the firmament approve
In an eternal silence. There he spelt
The name of the Omnipotent, and knelt
In lowly reverence of adoring love.
Beneath him, all the elements that move
In Nature's prayerful harmonies he felt,
And knew their mystic meaning. Thus the tone
Of lifted billows, and the storm that sways
The forest-seas in chorus, spake alone
Divinity, scarce hidden from his gaze;
And with their mighty voices blent his own
In one majestic utterance of praise.

POE.

Sad spirit, swathed in brief mortality,
Of Fate and fervid fantasies the prey,
Till the remorseless demon of dismay
O'erwhelmed thee—lo! thy doleful destiny
Is chanted in the requiem of the sea
And shadowed in the crumbling ruins gray
That beetle o'er the tarn. Here all the day
The Raven broods on solitude and thee:
Here gloats the moon at midnight, while the Bells
Tremble, but speak not lest thy Ulalume
Should startle from her slumbers, or Lenore
Hearken the love-forbidden tone that tells
The shrouded legend of thine early doom
And blast the bliss of heaven forevermore.

SHELLEY.

Shelley, the ceaseless music of thy soul
Breathes in the Cloud and in the Skylark's song,
That float as an embodied dream along
The dewy lids of morning. In the dole
That haunts the West Wind, in the joyous roll
Of Arethusan fountains, or among
The wastes where Ozymandias the strong
Lies in colossal ruin, thy control
Speaks in the wedded rhyme. Thy spirit gave
A fragrance to all nature, and a tone
To inexpressive silence. Each apart—
Earth, Air, and Ocean—claims thee as its own;
The twain that bred thee, and the panting wave
That clasped thee, like an overflowing heart.

AT KEATS'S GRAVE.

“I feel the flowers growing over me.”
Prophetic thought! Behold, no cypress gloom
Portrays in dim memorial the doom
That quenched the ray of starlike destiny!
E'en death itself deals tenderly with thee:
For here, the livelong year, the violets bloom
And swing their fragrant censers till the tomb
Forgets the legend of mortality.
Nay: while the pilgrim periods of time
Alternate song and holy requiem sing,
As through the circling centuries sublime
They scatter frost, or genial sunshine bring,
With gathered sweets of every varying clime
They weave around thee one perpetual Spring.