And happiness too swiftly flies,
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more: where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

ELEGIAC STANZAS,

SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF PEEL CASTLE, IN A STORM, PAINTED BY SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT.

William Wordsworth.

I WAS thy neighbor once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:

I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!

So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene'er I looked, thy image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! It seemed no sleep,
No mood which season takes away or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

Ah! THEN, if mine had been the painter's hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,

Such Picture would I at that time have made: And seen the soul of truth in every part,

A stedfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been, - 'tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:

A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanized my Soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold

A smiling sea, and be what I have been :

The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old;

This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,

If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,

This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O'tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well,
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labors in the deadly swell,

This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armor of old time,

The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,

Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! 'Such happiness, wherever it be known,

Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

THE GRASSHOPPER.

TO MY NOBLE FRIEND, MR. CHARLES COTTON.

Richard Lovelace.

O THOU, that swing'st upon the waving ear
Of some well-filled oaten beard,

Drunk every night with a delicious tear

Dropt thee from heaven, where now thou art reared.

The joys of earth and air are thine entire,

That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;

And when thy poppy works thou dost retire
To thy carved acorn-bed to lie,

Up with the day, the Sun thou welcom'st then,
Sport'st in the gilt plaits of his beams,
And all these merry days mak'st merry men,
Thyself, and melancholy streams.

But ah! the sickle! golden ears are cropt;
Ceres and Bacchus bid good-night;

Sharp frosty fingers all your flowers have topt,

And what scythes spared, winds shave off quite.

Poor verdant fool! and now green ice, thy joys
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
Bid us lay in 'gainst winter rain, and poise
Their floods with an o'erflowing glass.

Thou best of men and friends, we will create
A genuine summer in each other's breast;
And spite of this cold time and frozen fate,
Thaw us a warm seat to our rest.

Our sacred hearths shall burn eternally
As vestal flames; the North-wind, he

Shall strike his frost-stretched wings, dissolve, and fly
This Etna in epitome.

Dropping December shall come weeping in,

Bewail th' usurping of his reign;

But when in showers of old Greek1 we begin,
Shall cry, he hath his crown again!

Night as clear Hesper shall our tapers whip
From the light casements where we play,
And the dark hag from her black mantle strip,
And stick there everlasting day.

1 Greek wine.

Thus richer than untempted kings are we,
That asking nothing, nothing need;

Though lord of all what seas embrace, yet he
That wants himself is poor indeed.

SONNET.

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

John Keats.

MUCH have I travell'd 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-brow'd 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 star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.