Apart from Heaven's Eternity - and yet how far

from Hell!

What guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim,

Heard not the stirring summons of that hymn?

But two: they fell: for Heaven no grace imparts

To those who hear not for their beating hearts.

A maiden-angel and her seraph-lover

O! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over)

Was Love, the blind, near sober Duty known?

Unguided Love hath fallen - 'mid "tears of perfect

moan."

He was a goodly spirit - he who fell:

A wanderer by moss-y-mantled well

A gazer on the lights that shine above

A dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:

What wonder? for each star is eye-like there,

And looks so sweetly down on Beauty's hair

And they, and ev'ry mossy spring were holy

To his love-haunted heart and melancholy.

The night had found (to him a night of wo)

Upon a mountain crag, young Angelo

Beetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,

And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.

Here sate he with his love - his dark eye bent

With eagle gaze along the firmament:

Now turn'd it upon her - but ever then

It trembled to the orb of EARTH again.

"lanthe, dearest, see! how dim that ray!

How lovely 'tis to look so far away!

She seem'd not thus upon that autumn eve

I left her gorgeous halls - nor mourn'd to leave.

That ese - that eve - I should remember well

The sun-ray dropp'd, in Lemnos, with a spell

On th' Arabesque carving of a gilded hall

Wherein I sate, and on the draperied wall

And on my eye-lids - О the heavy light!

How drowsily it weigh'd them into night!

On flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran

With Persian Saadi in his Gulistan:

But О that light! - I slumber'd - Death, the while,