I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile, Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. Thou shouldst have seem'd a treasure-house divine Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;-- Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine The very sweetest had to thee been given. A picture had it been of lasting ease, Elysian quiet, without toil or strife; No motion but the moving tide; a breeze; Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, Such picture would I at that time have made; And seen the soul of truth in every part, A steadfast peace that might not be betray'd. So once it would have been,--'tis so no more; I have submitted to a new control: A power is gone, which nothing can restore; A deep distress hath humanized my soul. Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea, and be what I have been: The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old; This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the friend If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore, This work of thine I blame not, but commend; This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. O 'tis a passionate work!--yet wise and well, Well chosen is the spirit that is here; That hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, --Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time-- The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. --Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind. But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne! Such sights, or worse, as are before me here:-- Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. _W. Wordsworth_ CCCXXIV _THE POET'S DREAM_ On a Poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept; Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aërial kisses Of shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see what things they be-- But from these create he can Forms more real than living Man, Nurslings of Immortality! _P. B. Shelley_ CCCXXV _GLEN-ALMAIN, THE NARROW GLEN_