Hath typified by reach of daring art

Infinity's embrace; whose guardian crest, The silent Cross, among the stars shall spread As now, when She hath also seen her breast Filled with mementos, satiate with its part Of grateful England's overflowing Dead.

1822.

William Wordsworth.

NIGHT

MYSTERIOUS Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this goodly frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
But through a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came:
And lo! Creation broadened to man's view!

Who could have guessed such darkness lay concealed

Within thy beams, O Sun? or who divined, When bud and flower and insect lay revealed, Thou to such countless worlds had'st made us blind?

Why should we then shun Death with anxious strife?

If Light conceals so much, wherefore not life? Joseph Blanco White.

1828.

SONNET ON CHILLON

ETERNAL spirit of the chainless mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart,—
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consigned,—
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless

gloom,

Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.

Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,

And thy sad floor an altar,-for 't was trod, Until his very steps have left a trace

Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod, By Bonnivard!-May none those marks efface! For they appeal from tyranny to God.

1816.

Lord Byron.

OZYMANDIAS OF EGYPT

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of

stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless

things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that

fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

1819.

I

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAP

MAN'S HOMER

MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his

demesne:

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

-Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmiseSilent, upon a peak in Darien.

1817.

2

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET

THE poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown

mead;

That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury,--he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with
fun,

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

1817.

3

ON SEEING THE ELGIN MARBLES

My spirit is too weak-mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 't is a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep, Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.

Such dim-conceivéd glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the
rude

Wasting of old Time-with a billowy main—
A sun-a shadow of a magnitude.

1817.

ON THE SEA

Ir keeps eternal whisperings around

Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. Often 't is in such gentle temper found,