Selected Poems and Prose

  Let not too much however be expected from this system. The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived, is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been, had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable ages?—Indubitably not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of the relinquishing all unnatural habits, no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes, for want of its accustomed supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water. […]

  I address myself not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chace by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies, should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals. The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation, and is afflicted with a variety of painful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change produced without the risk of poisonous medicines. The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease, and unaccountable deaths incident to her children, are the causes of incurable unhappiness, would on this diet experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual healths and natural playfulness.* The most valuable lives are daily destroyed by diseases, that it is dangerous to palliate and impossible to cure by medicine. How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe?

  ‘Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed’

  Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;

  Yes, I was firm—they did not flow.

  My baffled looks did long yet dread

  To meet your looks … I could not know

  5How anxiously they sought to shine

  With soothing pity into mine.

  To sit and curb the soul’s mute rage

  Which preys upon itself alone—

  To curse that life which is the cage

  10 Of fettered grief, that dares not groan,

  Hiding from many a careless eye

  The scorned load of agony,

  Whilst you alone saw not regarded

  The paleness you alone should see—

  15To spend years thus—and be rewarded

  As you, sweet love, requited me

  When none were nigh—oh, I did wake

  From torture for that moment’s sake.

  Upon my heart your accents sweet

  20 Of peace and pity fell like dew

  On flowers half dead, thy lips did meet

  Mine tremblingly, thy dark eyes threw

  Their soft persuasion on my brain,

  Charming away its dream of pain.

  25We are not happy, sweet, our state

  Is strange, and full of doubt and fear;

  More need for Truth, that ills and hate,

  Reserve or censure come not near

  Our sacred friendship, lest there be

  30No solace left for you and me.

  Gentle and good and mild thou art,

  Nor can I live if thou appear

  Aught but thyself—or turn thine heart

  Away from me or stoop to wear

  35The mask of scorn—although it be

  To hide the love you feel for me.

  ‘O! there are spirits of the air’

  ∆ΑΚΡΥΣΙ ∆ΙΟΙΣΩ ΠΟΤΜΟΝ ΑΠΟΤΜΟΝ

  O! there are spirits of the air,

  And genii of the evening breeze,

  And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair

  As star-beams among twilight trees:—

  5Such lovely ministers to meet

  Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.

  With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

  And moonlight seas, that are the voice

  Of these inexplicable things

  10 Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice

  When they did answer thee; but they

  Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.

  And thou hast sought in starry eyes

  Beams that were never meant for thine,

  15 Another’s wealth:—tame sacrifice

  To a fond faith! still dost thou pine?

  Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,

  Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?

  Ah! wherefore didst thou build thine hope

  20 On the false earth’s inconstancy?

  Did thine own mind afford no scope

  Of love, or moving thoughts to thee?

  That natural scenes or human smiles

  Could steal the power to wind thee in their wiles?

  25 Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled

  Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;

  The glory of the moon is dead;

  Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;

  Thine own soul still is true to thee,

  30But changed to a foul fiend through misery.

  This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever

  Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,

  Dream not to chase;—the mad endeavour

  Would scourge thee to severer pangs.

  35Be as thou art. Thy settled fate,

  Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.

  A Summer-Evening Church-Yard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire

  The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere

  Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;

  And pallid evening twines its beaming hair

  In duskier braids around the languid eyes of day:

  5Silence and twilight, unbeloved of men,

  Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

  They breathe their spells towards the departing day,

  Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;

  Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,

  10Responding to the charm with its own mystery.

  The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass

  Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

  Thou too, aerial Pile! whose pinnacles

  Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,

  15Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,

  Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,

  Around whose lessening and invisible height

  Gather among the stars the clouds of night.

  The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:

  20And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound

  Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

  Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

  And mingling with the still night and mute sky

  Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

  25Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild

  And terrorless as this serenest night:

  Here could I hope, like some enquiring child

  Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

  Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep

  30That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.

  Sonnet. From the Italian of Dante

  Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti

  Guido, I would that Lappo, thou, and I,

  Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend

  A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
r />   With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend,

  5And that no change, nor any evil chance,

  Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be,

  That even satiety should still enhance

  Between our hearts their strict community:

  And that the bounteous wizard then would place

  10Vanna and Bice and my gentle love,

  Companions of our wandering, and would grace

  With passionate talk wherever we might rove

  Our time, and each were as content and free

  As I believe that thou and I should be.

  To Wordsworth

  Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

  That things depart which never may return:

  Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,

  Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

  5These common woes I feel. One loss is mine

  Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.

  Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine

  On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:

  Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood

  10Above the blind and battling multitude:

  In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

  Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—

  Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

  Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

  Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte

  I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan

  To think that a most unambitious slave,

  Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave

  Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne

  5Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer

  A frail and bloody pomp which time has swept

  In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre,

  For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,

  Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,

  10And stifled thee, their minister. I know

  Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,

  That virtue owns a more eternal foe

  Than force or fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,

  And bloody Faith the foulest birth of time.

  Mutability

  We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

  How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

  Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon

  Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

  5Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

  Give various response to each varying blast,

  To whose frail frame no second motion brings

  One mood or modulation like the last.

  We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;

  10 We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;

  We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

  Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

  It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,

  The path of its departure still is free:

  15Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

  Nought may endure but Mutability.

  ALASTOR;

  OR,

  THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE

  PREFACE

  The poem entitled ‘ALASTOR,’ may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind. It represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

  The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

  ‘The good die first,

  And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust,

  Burn to the socket!’

  December 14, 1815.

  Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

  Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.

  Confess. St. August.

  EARTH, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!

  If our great Mother has imbued my soul

  With aught of natural piety to feel

  Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;

  5If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,

  With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,

  And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness;

  If autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood,