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Yet, if we could scorn

Hate and pride and fear,

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then as I am listening now.

I weep

AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF JOHN KEATS.

I.

for Adonais-he is dead.

Oh, weep for Adonais, though our tears

Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head;
And thou, sad hour, selected from all years

To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow! Say, "With me Died Adonais! Till the Future dares

Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity."

IV.

Most musical of mourners, weep again!
Lament anew, Urania! He died,

Who was the sire of an immortal strain,

Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride, The priest, the slave, and the liberticide, Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite Of lust and blood; he went unterrified

Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite

Yet reigns o'er earth, the third among the sons of light.

VI.

But now thy youngest, dearest one, has perished-
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,
And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew;
Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,
The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew,
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste;
The broken lilv lies-the storm is overpast.

XXXIX.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep-
He hath awakened from the dream of life-
'Tis we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

XLII.

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

XLIII.

He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely; he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull, dense world, compelling there

All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear,
And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

XLV.

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton

Rose pale-his solemn agony had not

Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,
Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved;
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.

XLVI.

And many more, whose names on earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die

So long as fire outlives the parent spark,

Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.

"Thou art become as one of us," they cry; "It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty,

Silent alone amid an Heaven of Song:

Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!”

LV.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given :
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

-Adonais.

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