All happiness thou holdest, happy night, For such as lie awake and feel dissolved The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool Breath hither blown from the ethereal flowers That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds, Conditioned by existence in humanity, That have such powers to heal them! slow sweet sighs Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes, Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes Of midnight with ineffable purport charged. How beautiful it is to wake at night, Another night, in darkness yet more still, Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs, Filled rather by the perfume's wandering flood Than by dispansion of the still sweet air, Shall from the furthest utter silences In glimmering secrecy have gathered up An host of whisperings and scattered sighs, To loose at last a sound as of the plunge And lapsing seethe of some Pacific wave, Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs, Rolls in to wreathe with circling foam away The flutter of the golden moths that haunt The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands. So beautiful it is to wake at night! Imagination, loudening with the surf Of the midsummer wind among the boughs, Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep, To bear me on the summit of her wave Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised Above the frontiers of infinity, To which in the full reflux of the wave Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam, Borne to those other shores--now never mine Save for a hovering instant, short as this Which now sustains me ere I be drawn back-- To learn again, and wholly learn, I trust, How beautiful it is to wake at night. NOVEMBER As I walk the misty hill All is languid, fogged, and still; Not a note of any bird Nor any motion's hint is heard, Save from soaking thickets round Trickle or water's rushing sound, And from ghostly trees the drip Of runnel dews or whispering slip Of leaves, which in a body launch Listlessly from the stagnant branch To strew the marl, already strown, With litter sodden as its own, A rheum, like blight, hangs on the briars, And from the clammy ground suspires A sweet frail sick autumnal scent Of stale frost furring weeds long spent; And wafted on, like one who sleeps, A feeble vapour hangs or creeps, Exhaling on the fungus mould A breath of age, fatigue, and cold. Oozed from the bracken's desolate track, By dark rains havocked and drenched black. A fog about the coppice drifts, Or slowly thickens up and lifts Into the moist, despondent air. Mist, grief, and stillness everywhere....