Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, And fevers into false creation;--where, Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone. Can Nature show so fair? Where are the charms and virtues which we dare Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, The unreached Paradise of our despair, Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen, And overpowers the page where it would bloom again. CXXIII. Who loves, raves--'tis youth's frenzy--but the cure Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds Which robed our idols, and we see too sure Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds The fatal spell, and still it draws us on, Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds; The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun, Seems ever near the prize--wealthiest when most undone. CXXIV. We wither from our youth, we gasp away-- Sick--sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst, Though to the last, in verge of our decay, Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first-- But all too late,--so are we doubly curst. Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same-- Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst-- For all are meteors with a different name, And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame. CXXV. Few--none--find what they love or could have loved: Though accident, blind contact, and the strong Necessity of loving, have removed Antipathies--but to recur, ere long, Envenomed with irrevocable wrong; And Circumstance, that unspiritual god And miscreator, makes and helps along Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod, Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod. CXXVI. Our life is a false nature--'tis not in The harmony of things,--this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew-- Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see-- And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new. CXXVII. Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base Abandonment of reason to resign Our right of thought--our last and only place Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine: Though from our birth the faculty divine Is chained and tortured--cabined, cribbed, confined, And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine Too brightly on the unprepared mind, The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind. CXXVIII.