Ah me; alas, this crushing wretchedness! And I a vainer fool than one who yearns Clutching at rainbows spanned across the sky! Ah, hope diseased! My spirit lured astray By siren hope drifts hard by some dark fate: And hope alternating despair has mixed My life so long with charnelled death, that I Can scarce resolve the present from my past, Nor what might once have been from what is now. Ah, Dearest! shall I never see thy face Again: not ever; never any more? I know that fancy was but naught, and one Born of past hope: I know thy earthly form Is mouldering in its tomb; but yet, O Love, Thy spirit must dwell somewhere in this waste Of worlds, that fill the overwhelming heavens With light and motion; that could never die; And wilt thou not vouchsafe one beaming look To ease a lonely heart that beats in pain For loss of thee, and only thee, O Love? Or hast thou found in that pure life thou livest My soul was an unworthy choice for thine, And therefore takest no count of its despair? And yet, yea verily, thy love was true; I would not wrong thee with another thought: I would not enter at the gates of heaven By thinking else than that thy love was true. But I obtain no response to my cries, Making within my soul all void, and cold, And comfortless. Ay, empty, as this grate, Of life, wherefrom the fire has well nigh fled, Leaving but chasmed ugliness and ruin: And weak as faltering of these taper flames Half sunken in their sockets, by whose gleam I see, though faintly, where my books stand ranged Most mute; though sometime eloquent to me; And where my pictures hang with other forms Instinct from what I know: where friends portrayed Like ghosts loom on me from another world. Then what remains, but, like a child worn out With weeping, that I sink me down to rest, To sleep, not dream--and if I could to die? III. MY LADY'S VOICE FROM HEAVEN. I had been sitting by her tomb In torpor one dark night; When fitful tremours shook the doom Of cold lethargic settled gloom, That weighed upon my sight: And while I sat, and sickly heaves Disturbed my spirit's sloth, A wind came, blown o'er distant sheaves, That hissing, tore and lashed the leaves And lashed the undergrowth: It roared and howled, it raged about With some determined aim; And storming up the night, brought out The moon, that like a happy shout, Called forth My Lady's name, In sudden splendour on the stone. Then, for an instant, I Snatched and heaped up my past, bestrown With hopes and kisses, struggling moan, And pangs: as suddenly, Oppressed with overwhelming weight, Down fell the edifice; When touched, as by the hand of Fate, My gloom was gone. I felt my state So light, I sobbed for bliss. The loud winds, spent in seeking rest, Dropped dead. My fevered brow Drank coolness from the grass it pressed; And in my desolated breast A change began to grow,