Always th' inaudible, invisible thought Artificer and subject, lord and slave Shaped by the audible and visible, Moulded the audible and visible; All crisped sounds of wave, and leaf and wind, Flatter'd the fancy of my fading brain; The storm-pavilion'd element, the wood, The mountain, the three cypresses, the cave, Were wrought into the tissue of my dream. The moanings in the forest, the loud stream, Awoke me not, but were a part of sleep; And voices in the distance, calling to me, And in my vision bidding me dream on, Like sounds within the twilight realms of dreams, Which wander round the bases of the hills, And murmur in the low-dropt eaves of sleep, But faint within the portals. Oftentimes The vision had fair prelude, in the end Opening on darkness, stately vestibules To cares and shows of Death; whether the mind, With a revenge even to itself unknown, Made strange division of its suffering With her, whom to have suffering view'd had been Extremest pain; or that the clear-eyed Spirit, Being blasted in the Present, grew at length Prophetical and prescient of whate'er The Future had in store; or that which most Enchains belief, the sorrow of my spirit Was of so wide a compass it took in All I had loved, and my dull agony. Ideally to her transferred, became Anguish intolerable. The day waned; Alone I sat with her: about my brow Her warm breath floated in the utterance Of silver-chorded tones: her lips were sunder'd With smiles of tranquil bliss, which broke in light Like morning from her eyes--her eloquent eyes (As I have seen them many hundred times), Fill'd all with clear pure fire, thro' mine down rain'd Their spirit-searching splendours. As a vision Unto a haggard prisoner, iron-stay'd In damp and dismal dungeons underground Confined on points of faith, when strength is shock'd With torment, and expectancy of worse Upon the morrow, thro' the ragged walls, All unawares before his half-shut eyes, Comes in upon him in the dead of night, And with th' excess of sweetness and of awe, Makes the heart tremble, and the eyes run over Upon his steely gyves; so those fair eyes Shone on my darkness forms which ever stood Within the magic cirque of memory, Invisible but deathless, waiting still The edict of the will to reassume The semblance of those rare realities Of which they were the mirrors. Now the light, Which was their life, burst through the cloud of thought Keen, irrepressible. It was a room Within the summer-house of which I spoke, Hung round with paintings of the sea, and one A vessel in mid-ocean, her heaved prow Clambering, the mast bent, and the revin wind In her sail roaring. From the outer day, Betwixt the closest ivies came a broad And solid beam of isolated light, Crowded with driving atomies, and fell Slanting upon that picture, from prime youth