England :: :: University of Virginia Library

Even like a noble tower that stands alone,
Perfect in all its parts, and soaring high
Above the ocean-waves, as on a throne,
And mocking at its wrath with placid eye;
Its halls attir'd with pomp and bravery;
Its courtways throng'd with statues; every wall
Hung round with pictures and rich tracery;
Yea, like a stately mansion, perfect all
That habitation is, which holds the immortal soul.

Again, and when the waves and winds have swept
That temple, and destroy'd the marble floor;
Shatter'd the niches where meek statues slept,
Erased the paintings all so rich before,
Through every room and chamber revell'd o'er,
And stolen each gem and lovely thing away—
Such is the mind when roused by madness' roar,
Its beauteous fabric hath no morning ray:
Its heavenly tenant seems no more than passive clay.

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The mind it is a town and citadel;
The city of the soul; the house, the dome,
Where that which is immortal loves to dwell!
It is a walk where pleasant fancies roam;
Here Reason, Will, Desire have made their home;
Here sits Imagination on her throne;
Here dreams, and ecstacies, and visions come;
Here start enchanted pictures that atone
For half our woes; here sights most radiant wander down!

The mind it is heaven's spark in human dust;
'Tis heavenly fire, in wretched human clay;
'Tis this that makes it soar beyond the crust
That circles it; by this we're borne away
To the empyrian, and our offering lay
On shrines celestial; lustrous, burning bright,
Man cannot quench it, or its wanderings stay;
'Twas fallen Adam's lamp, lost Eden's light,
The glow that shone on chaos and dissolved its night.

It can combine, dissolve, support, divide,
Examine, reason, judge, and analyze;
'Tis stronger than the monarch in his pride,
Yet, like a lamb, at wisdom's feet it lies.
It hath a power to climb the starry skies,
And soar above the rainbow; and, at will,
Discourse the planets; and, with councils wise,
Foretel the eclips'd sun; and, from the hill
Of thought and contemplation, the invisible tell.

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It hath trod down the waves of the huge sea,
And plough'd the tempest, and dissolv'd the storm;
To every shore it wanders bold and free;
Gigantic mountains have beheld its form,
And sunk beneath its feet; its mighty arm
Hath shook vast forests, tamed the lion's might,
And doth the tiger of his fangs disarm;
Caverns of solid rocks have felt its light,
And the wide realms of air have seen it wander bright.

From blocks of stones most lovely shapes have come,
That, o'er the earliest times, their splendour cast;
Rude, barren rocks have rear'd full many a dome,
Temple, and pyramid, and tower, The past,
Though it is cloth'd with beauty, is o'ercast
With hues, like clouds of evening; it hath gone,
And of the pine-tree made a stubborn mast,
And wrung the yellow gold with many a groan;
And swords, and helms, and spears wrench'd from the barren stone.

Into the realms of meditative thought
The sprite hath burst, and rang'd the beams of day;
The little flowers of many a lovely spot
Have own'd it; and the birds regard its sway;
Rocks, trees, and stones their duteous homage pay;
The elemental origins are known;
This wondrous human skeleton doth lay,
Even at its feet, its secret mysteries down,
And every living thing its majesty doth own.

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Its cradles were Greece, Egypt, Babylon,
Assyria, Rome. Men brave, and bold, and high
Philosophers, its swaddling clothes put on,
Gave fitting words, and did direct its eye;
Kings, priests, astronomers did early try
Its sandals, placing on its head a crown.
And last came Newton, to explore its sky:
He subjugated all its worlds, made known
The axis of its wheels, the centre of its throne.

Yea, like the azure breast of heaven, it is
All studded o'er with stars, as with a floor,
For the Great God. Its inner thoughts are bliss,
Or woe, or both. We ope its crystal door;
We gaze, as on a fair or barren shore,
Even as we list. The world is sad and lone,
Ourselves can make it lovely as of yore;
Instead of tear, and sigh, and bitter groan,
Ourselves can give to woe and fear a pleasant tone.

Yea, of its high-priests Newton's name is first.
Then issue forth, like lamps, a radiant band,
Euclid and Archimedes, names that burst
The gloom of early times. Plato doth stand
With Zeno. Socrates, too, holds command
With Seneca, who both, as martyrs, died
For truth: these o'er the spirit held command,
And made the limits of its range more wide,
And bore it far aloft to soar in constant pride.

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To these, we add the poets; that pure host
Of almost martyrs. Homer rings his shell
From fabulous regions, and the soul is lost
Amid the plumes of war—we cannot swell
His fame; the classic Virgil hath a knell
O'er burning Troy; we list to Horace's name;
The pure and saintly Milton, too, can tell
Of mighty acts; we hear of Shakspeare's fame;
And Byron's lyre is heard amid the mouldering flame.

'Tis we ourselves, like murderers, have come
And call'd up shapes of blood. We, we alone,
Have driven the serpent to his secret home,
And given him fangs; and made the cliffs a throne
For the fierce wolf. The storms have got their tone
From us; we have created hate and war;
'Tis we have stain'd the sun, and dimm'd the moon,
And scatter'd clouds around the morning star:—
When first the world was ours, there was no strife nor jar.

It came, a spirit from elysium,
Cloth'd by God's hands, a thing of saintly light;
Pleasure, and joy, and rapture were its doom:
These have we chang'd to clouds, and storms, and night.
God gave us peace, and love, and rare delight;
Man gave us blood, and wrong, and lies, and hate.
Our primal world was beautiful and bright;
Now fiends and scorpions linger at our gate,
And want, and fear, and pestilence in our pathways wait.

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And madness—madness, of all woes the chief;
The spectral phantom—the strange ghastly form—
The blood-stain'd nightmare—and the midnight thief—
We, we ourselves have conjur'd to deform
Our temple; we gave valour to his arm;
Lust, wrong, intoxication brought him here;
We gave the giant's sinews to the worm,
And call'd the midnight phantasies of fear—
For that which came from God, was stainless, pure, and clear!

What wreck hath madness! Comes a changed hue,
Black and distorted, o'er each living thing!
The hidden workings of the soul are new—
Its gates, and halls, and courts, and chambers ring
With sound of desolation! The winds bring
The shrieks of ghosts; fiends echo in the ear;
And wild and strange unearthly voices sing,
As from the dead, of grief, and woe, and fear,
And the stars seem to mock from out their holy sphere.

Some are there, who, with slow and devious feet,
Seek ancient places, where the lover's vow
Was murmur'd to their shame. She clasps the seat
Where he had sat, whose beauty brought her low—
And she will wreath rare flowers around her brow,
And sing beloved songs, and for her child
Wreath curious garlands, and in language sweet,
Tell of the faithless sire that her beguil'd,
Then sink to lamentations, terrible and wild.

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Another weepeth for the silent dead,
And sorrow bears the sufferer to the ground—
The maiden whom he lov'd, in her death-bed
Lies low—and now the midnight hears the sound
Of his craz'd woes, and echo doth rebound
With mighty grief—He calleth on the sky
To send her back—the moon and starry round
He calleth, and the tempests rolling by,
And execrates the clouds, that like her garments fly.

He seeks her in each old familiar place,
Amid her pleasant walks—he seeks her tomb,
And calls her from the grass, and sees her face
Among the distant moonbeams—'mid the gloom
Of silent night he prowls, and bids her come.
Haggar'd and ghastly like a ghost he kneels,
And fancies he beholds her eyes illume
The darkness-and half fancies that he feels
Her hands in his—and with ecstatic gladness reels.

A mother maddens o'er her infant dead—
She feels his little lips and hands no more,
To cool her burning brow—his lovely head
Is sunk to dust; his pleasant wiles are o'er;
And now her main delight it is to shower
The wild rose o'er his grave, and o'er the stone,
His monument, wreathe garlands, and explore
The waving grass, as if he had not gone—
Then shriek with hideous cries, in solitude alone.

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Some for the clinging love of gold, will craze,
And rake their prison pavement, and the clay,
For the incarnate fiend—and madly gaze
Into each crevice, and insanely pray
For gold, gold, gold—and when their heads they lay
In slumber, dream of bags and loads, and see
Huge burthens of the dross, which burthens they
Press to their shrivell'd breasts, and shout for glee,
And raise their bleared eyes—and wake to misery.

Some—the debauched, the profligate, the gay,
Whose life hath been a wild and reckless dream,
A wildering ecstacy and holiday;
When all is o'er, like an exhausted theme,
Their health, their wealth, their station gone, I deem;
Their dear, dear friends, all false—at last, start up
And curse themselves and all. For these did seem
True as the heavens; with them, did drink and sup;
Their food was death, and poison hiss'd within their cup.

The ambitious man, whose far exalted soul
Saw empires at his feet, and wore a crown—
Whose spirit in its phantasies, did roll
O'er seas and continents for high renown.
When the wild dream is o'er, the vision flown,
What's left but madness and a shatter'd brain?
The fabric of his thoughts hath humbled down,
And nought is left of enterprise or gain;
Nought hath he of his all, but agony and pain.

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And some are warriors, and insanely wage
With swords of lath, fierce war, and massacre,
And hew down empires in their frothy rage:
Some, too, are kings and queens, and bind their hair
With straw for gold, and on their foreheads bear
Crowns of the woven reed, and on the stone
Of their cold dungeons, place themselves with ease
And fancy, they possess an empire's throne:
And some do nought but sing, and some do nought but moan.

Some 'mid black fiends and hideous phantoms dwell,
And view grim faces frowning on their sleep:
Some in their dreams, view all the fires of hell,
And hear the blazing whirlwinds o'er them sweep—
Shrieks, laughters, lamentations, groanings, keep
Their souls in constant dread; and staring wild,
With long and matted hair, they war and weep,
Or battle with the fiends that them beguil'd,
Or hide their burning foreheads like a frighted child.

The rustling leaves are phantoms in their eyes,
The moaning winds bring terror to their soul,
Departed spirits throng the starry skies,
And on the tempests horrid nightmares roll,
And Demons from the gulphs of midnight call:
Where sweet content and peace and gladness dwelt
With reason, madness reigns with control
The same who at the shrine of nature knelt,
And worshipp'd all her forms, and saint-like felt.

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Her influences now are wreck'd and lost;
Her wilder'd vision wanders far away,
And like a storm-cloud through the heavens is toss'd;
Enchanted temples greet the evening ray;
Huge shaggy cliffs and caves around him lay;
Tempestuous seas, and monsters raging there,
Surround, and to the bard their homage pay;
And sometimes holy music fills the air,
And beatific sights irradiate his hair.

And sometimes, in his high impassioned dream,
Wing'd messengers will wander up and down,
And give the sun and rainbow for his theme:
Yea, shining spirits, each with golden crown
Array'd, and sitting on an emerald throne,
Each with a radiant sceptre in his hand,
Will call to him, with Heaven's harmonious tone,
And lift his visions to that starry land
Where peace, and love, and justice reign in joint command.

But, what of her, our queen?—She once was fair,
And sat in bowers of beauty, 'mid the ray
Of summer sunbeams, without thought or care;
Princes and youthful kings did homage pay
Before her loveliness, and woke the lay
Of serenading 'neath the midnight moon,
And watch'd beneath her casement, and did pray
That she would smile on them, and grant their boon,
And call'd her lofty names—and sought her late and soon.

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The blessings on her infant cradle laid,
A nation's acclamations now are nought.
What recks it that her royal mother pray'd
For heaven to bless her infancy, and sought
Each holy saint? The brain is over wrought
To madness; there's no music in the tongue;
The soul is out of tune, and judgeth not;
The cup of reason's broke; the mind is wrung
To drops of blood, and agonies that never can be sung.

Her crown is as a bauble in her hand,
A toy for children. With her robes of state
She clothes her maids, and gives them her command:
Lovely in all madness, and elate
In beauty, kings might at her footstool wait;
For, in her open forehead and bright eye
Still seem the lamps of reason at the gate—
But the shrine is shatter'd—on the sky
Lingers the lucid thunder cloud, and storms are nigh.