Hence, ye profane! I feel a former dread, A thousand visions float around my head: Hark! hollow blasts through empty courts resound, And shadowy forms with staring eyes stalk round; See! moats and bridges, walls and castles rise, Ghosts, fairies, demons, dance before our eyes; Lo! magic verse inscribed on golden gate, And bloody hand that beckons on to fate:-- 'And who art thou, thou little page, unfold? Say, doth thy lord my Claribel withhold? Go tell him straight, Sir Knight, thou must resign The captive queen;--for Claribel is mine.' Away he flies; and now for bloody deeds, Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds; The giant falls; his recreant throat I seize, And from his corslet take the massy keys:-- Dukes, lords, and knights in long procession move, Released from bondage with my virgin love:-- She comes! she comes! in all the charms of youth, Unequalled love and unsuspected truth! Ah! happy he who thus, in magic themes, O'er worlds bewitched, in early rapture dreams, Where wild Enchantment waves her potent wand, And Fancy's beauties fill her fairy land; Where doubtful objects strange desires excite, And Fear and Ignorance afford delight. But lost, for ever lost, to me these joys, Which Reason scatters, and which Time destroys; Too dearly bought: maturer judgement calls My busied mind from tales and madrigals; My doughty giants all are slain or fled, And all my knights, blue, green, and yellow, dead! No more the midnight fairy tribe I view, All in the merry moonshine tippling dew; E'en the last lingering fiction of the brain, The church-yard ghost, is now at rest again; And all these wayward wanderings of my youth Fly Reason's power and shun the light of truth. With fiction then does real joy reside, And is our reason the delusive guide? Is it then right to dream the syrens sing? Or mount enraptured on the dragon's wing? No, 'tis the infant mind, to care unknown, That makes the imagined paradise its own; Soon as reflections in the bosom rise, Light slumbers vanish from the clouded eyes: The tear and smile, that once together rose, Are then divorced; the head and heart are foes. Enchantment bows to Wisdom's serious plan, And Pain and Prudence make and mar the man. While thus, of power and fancied empire vain, With various thoughts my mind I entertain; While books my slaves, with tyrant hand I seize, Pleased with the pride that will not let them please; Sudden I find terrific thoughts arise, And sympathetic sorrow fills my eyes; For, lo! while yet my heart admits the wound, I see the CRITIC army ranged around.