And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Where was heard the mingled measure A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! In a vision once I saw : It was an Abyssinian maid, Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome; those caves of ice; And all who heard should see them there, (1) In Xanadu. I think I recollect a variation of this stanza, as follows: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-house ordain, Through caverns measureless to man, The nice-eared poet probably thought there were too many n's in these rhymes; and man and main are certainly not the best neighbours yet there is such an opensounding and stately intonation in the words pleasurehouse ordain, and it is so superior to pleasure-dome decree, that I am not sure I would not give up the correctness of the other terminations to retain it. But what a grand flood is this, flowing down through measureless caverns to a sea without a sun! I know no other sea equal to it, except Keats's, in his Ode to a Nightingale; and none can surpass that. (2) Ancestral voices prophesying war. Was ever anything more wild, and remote, and majestic, than this fiction of the "ancestral voices ? " Methinks I hear them, out of the blackness of the past. YOUTH AND AGE. Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying, When I was young? Ah woful when! That ask no aid of sail or oar, That fear no spite of wind or tide! Nought cared this body for wind or weather, When Youth and I lived in 't together. I see these locks in silvery slips, That Youth and I are house-mates still. This is one of the most perfect poems, for style, feeling, and everything, that ever were written. THE HEATHEN DIVINITIES MERGED INTO FROM THE TRANSLATION OF SCHILLER'S PICCOLOMINI. -Fable is Love's world, his home, his birthplace: Divinities, being himself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty, That had her haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanish'd; WORK WITHOUT HOPE. LINES COMPOSED 21ST FEBRUARY, 1827. All Nature seems at work. Stags leave their lair— Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. And hope without an object cannot live. I insert this poem on account of the exquisite imaginative picture in the third and fourth lines, and the terseness and melody of the whole. Here we have a specimen of a perfect style,-unsuperfluous, straightforward, suggestive, impulsive, and serene. But how the writer of such verses could talk of "work without hope," I cannot say. What work had he better to do than to write more? and what hope but to write more still, and delight himself and the world? But the truth is, his mind was too active and self-involved to need the diversion of work; and his body, the case that contained it, too sluggish with sedentary living to like it; and so he persuaded himself that if his writings did not sell, they were of no use. Are we to disrespect these self-delusions in such a man? No; but to draw from them salutary cautions for ourselves,his inferiors. |