| |
| SWEET are the pleasures that to verse belong, | |
| And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song; | |
| Nor can remembrance, Mathew! bring to view | |
| A fate more pleasing, a delight more true | |
| Than that in which the brother Poets joy’d, | 5 |
| Who with combined powers, their wit employ’d | |
| To raise a trophy to the drama’s muses. | |
| The thought of this great partnership diffuses | |
| Over the genius loving heart, a feeling | |
| Of all that’s high, and great, and good, and healing. | 10 |
| |
| Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee | |
| Past each horizon of fine poesy; | |
| Fain would I echo back each pleasant note | |
| As o’er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float | |
| ’Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted, | 15 |
| Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted: | |
| But ’tis impossible, far different cares | |
| Beckon me sternly from soft “Lydian airs,” | |
| And hold my faculties so long in thrall, | |
| That I am oft in doubt whether at all | 20 |
| I shall again see Phoebus in the morning: | |
| Or flush’d Aurora in the roseate dawning! | |
| Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream; | |
| Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam; | |
| Or again witness what with thee I’ve seen, | 25 |
| The dew by fairy feet swept from the green, | |
| After a night of some quaint jubilee | |
| Which every elf and fay had come to see: | |
| When bright processions took their airy march | |
| Beneath the curved moon’s triumphal arch. | 30 |
| |
| But might I now each passing moment give | |
| To the coy muse, with me she would not live | |
| In this dark city, nor would condescend | |
| ’Mid contradictions her delights to lend. | |
| Should e’er the fine-eyed maid to me be kind, | 35 |
| Ah! surely it must be whene’er I find | |
| Some flowery spot, sequester’d, wild, romantic, | |
| That often must have seen a poet frantic; | |
| Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing, | |
| And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing; | 40 |
| Where the dark-leav’d laburnum’s drooping clusters | |
| Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres, | |
| And intertwined the cassia’s arms unite, | |
| With its own drooping buds, but very white. | |
| Where on one side are covert branches hung, | 45 |
| ’Mong which the nightingales have always sung | |
| In leafy quiet; where to pry, aloof, | |
| Atween the pillars of the sylvan roof, | |
| Would be to find where violet beds were nestling, | |
| And where the bee with cowslip bells was wrestling. | 50 |
| There must be too a ruin dark, and gloomy, | |
| To say “joy not too much in all that’s bloomy.” | |
| |
| Yet this is vain—O Mathew lend thy aid | |
| To find a place where I may greet the maid— | |
| Where we may soft humanity put on, | 55 |
| And sit, and rhyme and think on Chatterton; | |
| And that warm-hearted Shakspeare sent to meet him | |
| Four laurell’d spirits, heaven-ward to intreat him. | |
| With reverence would we speak of all the sages | |
| Who have left streaks of light athwart their ages: | 60 |
| And thou shouldst moralize on Milton’s blindness, | |
| And mourn the fearful dearth of human kindness | |
| To those who strove with the bright golden wing | |
| Of genius, to flap away each sting | |
| Thrown by the pitiless world. We next could tell | 65 |
| Of those who in the cause of freedom fell; | |
| Of our own Alfred, of Helvetian Tell; | |
| Of him whose name to ev’ry heart’s a solace, | |
| High-minded and unbending William Wallace. | |
| While to the rugged north our musing turns | 70 |
| We well might drop a tear for him, and Burns. | |
| |
| Felton! without incitements such as these, | |
| How vain for me the niggard Muse to tease; | |
| For thee, she will thy every dwelling grace, | |
| And make “a sunshine in a shady place:” | 75 |
| For thou wast once a flowret blooming wild, | |
| Close to the source, bright, pure, and undefil’d, | |
| Whence gush the streams of song: in happy hour | |
| Came chaste Diana from her shady bower, | |
| Just as the sun was from the east uprising; | 80 |
| And, as for him some gift she was devising, | |
| Beheld thee, pluck’d thee, cast thee in the stream | |
| To meet her glorious brother’s greeting beam. | |
| I marvel much that thou hast never told | |
| How, from a flower, into a fish of gold | 85 |
| Apollo chang’d thee; how thou next didst seem | |
| A black-eyed swan upon the widening stream; | |
| And when thou first didst in that mirror trace | |
| The placid features of a human face: | |
| That thou hast never told thy travels strange, | 90 |
| And all the wonders of the mazy range | |
| O’er pebbly crystal, and o’er golden sands; | |
Kissing thy daily food from Naiad’s pearly hands.
November, 1815. | |
| |
| See Notes. |
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