For some new death than for a life Dreaming some rival, sought and found

To their charm'd circle, and, half-killing And this, at times, she mingled with his

With kisses, round him closed and claspt And this destroy'd him; for the wicked

man's

But Lionel, when at last he freed himself Confused the chemic labour of the blood, From wife and child, and lifted up a face And tickling the brute brain within the All over glowing with the sun of life, And love, and boundless thanks-the Made havock among those tender cells, sight of this and check'd

So frighted our good friend, that turning His power to shape : he loathed himself;

to me

And saying, 'It is over: let us go’—

and once

After a tempest woke upon a morn

There were our horses ready at the doors-That mock'd him with returning calm,

'Storm, and what dreams, ye holy Gods, what dreams!

chance

Yet often when the woman heard his foot
Return from pacings in the field, and ran For thrice I waken'd after dreams. Per-
To greet him with a kiss, the master took
Small notice, or austerely, for his mind
Half buried in some weightier argument,
Or fancy-borne perhaps upon the rise
And long roll of the Hexameter-he past
To turn and ponder those three hundred
scrolls

Left by the Teacher whom he held divine.
She brook'd it not; but wrathful, petulant,

We do but recollect the dreams that come
Just ere the waking: terrible! for it seem'd
A void was made in Nature; all her bonds
Crack'd; and I saw the flaring atom-

streams

And torrents of her myriad universe,
Ruining along the illimitable inane,
Fly on to clash together again, and make

Another and another frame of things
For ever that was mine, my dream, I

knew it

Of and belonging to me, as the dog With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies

His function of the woodland but the next!

I thought that all the blood by Sylla shed Came driving rainlike down again on earth,

Not ev'n a rose, were offer'd to thee?
thine,

Forgetful how my rich proœmion makes
Thy glory fly along the Italian field,
In lays that will outlast thy Deity?

'Deity? nay, thy worshippers. My tongue

Trips, or I speak profanely. Which of these

Angers thee most, or angers thee at all? And where it dash'd the reddening mea- Not if thou be'st of those who, far aloof

dow, sprang

No dragon warriors from Cadmean teeth,

From envy, hate and pity, and spite and

scorn,

For these I thought my dream would show Live the great life which all our greatest

to me,

But girls, Hetairai, curious in their art,
Hired animalisms, vile as those that made
The mulberry-faced Dictator's orgies

worse

Than aught they fable of the quiet Gods.
And hands they mixt, and yell'd and round
me drove

In narrowing circles till I yell'd again
Half-suffocated, and sprang up, and saw—
Was it the first beam of my latest day?

'Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the breasts,

The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword

Now over and now under, now direct,
Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down
shamed

At all that beauty; and as I stared, a fire,
The fire that left a roofless Ilion,
Shot out of them, and scorch'd me that I
woke.

fain

Would follow, center'd in eternal calm.

'Nay, if thou canst, O Goddess, like

ourselves

Touch, and be touch'd, then would I cry
to thee

To kiss thy Mavors, roll thy tender arms
Round him, and keep him from the lust

of blood

That makes a steaming slaughter-house of
Rome.

'Ay, but I meant not thee; I meant

not her,

Whom all the pines of Ida shook to see
Slide from that quiet heaven of hers, and

tempt

The Trojan, while his neat-herds were abroad;

Nor her that o'er her wounded hunter

wept

Her Deity false in human-amorous tears;
Nor whom her beardless apple-arbiter

'Is this thy vengeance, holy Venus, Decided fairest. Rather, O ye Gods, thine, Poet-like, as the great Sicilian called Because I would not one of thine own Calliope to grace his golden verseAy, and this Kypris also did I take

doves,

Which things appear the work of mighty Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roast

Not follow the great law? My master Whether I mean this day to end myself,

I prest my footsteps into his, and meant
Surely to lead my Memmius in a train
Of flowery clauses onward to the proof
That Gods there are, and deathless. Greatly for them, nor rather plunge at

| Allotted by the Gods: but he that holds
The Gods are careless, wherefore need he

I have forgotten what I meant : my mind Being troubled, wholly out of sight, and Stumbles, and all my faculties are lamed.

Body toward death, and palsy, death-in- Picus and Faunus, rustic Gods? a tale
life,
To laugh at-more to laugh at in myself-
And wretched age-and worst disease of For look! what is it? there? yon arbutus

'How should the mind, except it loved Before the rest-A satyr, a satyr, see,

To make a truth less harsh, I often grew And even his bones long laid within the
Tired of so much within our little life,
Or of so little in our little life-
Poor little life that toddles half an hour
Crown'd with a flower or two, and there
an end-

Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, Into the unseen for ever,-till that hour, And since the nobler pleasure seems to My golden work in which I told a truth

Not I; not he, who bears one name with Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity,

Whose death-blow struck the dateless Who fail to find thee, being as thou art Without one pleasure and without one pain,