ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S 'HOMER.'

M

UCH have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ;
Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne :

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

TO HOMER.

TANDING aloof in giant ignorance,
Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.

So thou wast blind!-but then the veil was rent,

For Jove uncurtained Heaven to let thee live, And Neptune made for thee a spermy tent,

And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive; Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light, And precipices show untrodden green; There is a budding morrow in midnight;

There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel,

To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

M

ON THE ELGIN MARBLES.

Y spirit is too weak; mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an indescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time-with a billowy main

A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

IME'S sea hath been five years at its slow ebb, Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand, Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web And snared by the ungloving of thine hand. And yet I never look on midnight sky

But I behold thine eyes' well memoried light;

I cannot look upon the rose's dye

But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight;

I cannot look on any budding flower,

And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour

Its sweets in the wrong sense :-Thou dost eclipse Every delight with sweet remembering,

And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.

1 A lady whom he saw for some few moments at Vauxhall.

ON A DREAM.

S Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,

So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright,

So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes,
And seeing it asleep, so fled away,

Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,

Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day,
But to that second circle of sad Hell,

Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows,-pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

N