Running far on within its inmost halls, The home of darkness; but the cavernmouth,

Half overtrailed with a wanton weed, Gives birth to a brawling brook, that passing lightly

Adown a natural stair of tangled roots,
Is presently received in a sweet grave
Of eglantines, a place of burial

Far lovelier than its cradle; for unseen,
But taken with the sweetness of the place,
It makes a constant bubbling melody
That drowns the nearer echoes. Lower
down

Spreads out a little lake, that, flooding, leaves

Low banks of yellow sand; and from the

What marvel my Camilla told me all?
It was so happy an hour, so sweet a place,
And I was as the brother of her blood,
And by that name I moved upon her
breath;

Dear name, which had too much of nearness in it

And heralded the distance of this time! At first her voice was very sweet and low, As if she were afraid of utterance; But in the onward current of her speech (As echoes of the hollow-banked brooks Are fashion'd by the channel which they keep),

Her words did of their meaning borrow sound,

Her check did catch the color of her words.
I heard and trembled, yet I could but hear;
My heart paused-my raised eyelids would
not fall,

But still I kept my eyes upon the sky.
I seem'd the only part of Time stood still,
And saw the motion of all other things;

While her words, syllable by syllable,
Like water, drop by drop, upon my car
Fell; and I wish'd, yet wish'd her not to
speak;

But she spake on, for I did name no wish.
What marvel my Camilla told me all
Her maiden dignities of Hope and Love-
"Perchance," she said, “return'd." Even
then the stars

Did tremble in their stations as I gazed; But she spake on, for I did name no wish, No wish-no hope. Hope was not wholly dead,

But breathing hard at the approach of
Death,-

Camilla, my Camilla, who was mine
No longer in the dearest sense of mine-
For all the secret of her inmost heart.
And all the maiden empire of her mind,
Lay like a map before me, and I saw
There, where I hoped myself to reign as
king,

There, where that day I crown'd myself as king,

There in my realm and even on my throne, Another! Then it seem'd as tho' a link Of some tight chain within my inmost frame

Was riven in twain: that life I heeded not Flow'd from me, and the darkness of the

grave,

The darkness of the grave and utter night,
Did swallow up my vision; at her feet,
Even the feet of her I loved, I fell,
Smit with exceeding sorrow unto Death.

Then had the earth beneath me yawning
cloven

With such a sound as when an iceberg splits

From cope to base-had Heaven from all her doors,

With all her golden thresholds clashing, roll'd

Her heaviest thunder-I had lain as dead, Mute, blind and motionless as then I lay; Dead, for henceforth there was no life for me!

Mute, for henceforth what use were words to me!

Blind, for the day was as the night to me!

The night to me was kinder than the day;
The night in pity took away my day,
Because my grief as yet was newly born
Of eyes too weak to look upon the light;
And thro' the hasty notice of the ear
Frail Life was startled from the tender
love

Of him she brooded over. Would I had lain

Until the plaited ivy-treɛs had wound Round my worn limbs, and the wild brier had driven

Its knotted thorns thro' my unpaining brows,

Leaning its roses on my faded eyes. The wind had blown above me, and the rain

Had fall'n upon me, and the gilded snake

Fair speech was his and delicate of phrase, Falling in whispers on the sense, address'd More to the inward than the outward ear, As rain of the midsummer midnight soft, Scarce heard, recailing fragrance and the

green

Of the dead spring: but mine was wholly dead,

No bud, no leaf, no flower, no fruit for

me.

Yet who had done, or who had suffer'd wrong?

And why was I to darken their pure love, If, as I found, they two did love each other,

Because my own was darken'd? Why was I

To cross between their happy star and them?

To stand a shadow by their shining doors, And vex them with iny darkness? Did I love her?

Ye know that I did love her; to this present

My full-orb'd love has waned not. Did I love her,

And could I look upon her tearful eyes? What had she done to weep? Why should she weep?

O innocent of spirit-let my heart
Break rather-whom the gentlest airs of

Heaven

Should kiss with an unwonted gentleness. Her love did murder mine? What then? She deem'd

I wore a brother's mind: she call'd me brother:

She told me all her love: she shall not weep.

The brightness of a burning thought, awhile

In battle with the glooms of my dark will,

Moon-like emerged, and to itself lit up There on the depth of an unfathom'd woc Reflex of action. Starting up at once, As from a dismal dream of my own death, 1, for I loved her, lost my love in Love; 1, for I loved her, graspt the hand she lov'd,

And laid it in her own, and sent my cry Thro' the blank night to Him who loving made

The happy and the unhappy love, that He Would hold the hand of blessing over them,

Lionel, the happy, and her, and her, his bride!

Let them so love that men and boys may say,

"Lo! how they love each other!" till their love

Shall ripen to a proverb, unto all Known, when their faces are forgot in the land

One golden dream of love, from which may death

Awake them with heaven's music in a life More living to some happier happiness,

Swallowing its precedent in victory.
And as for me, Camilla, as for me,-
The dew of tears is an unwholesome dew,
They will but sicken the sick plant the

more.

Deem that I love thee but as brothers do, So shalt thou love me still as sisters do; Or if thou dream aught farther, dream but how

I could have loved thee, had there been none else

To love as lovers, loved again by thee.

Or this, or somewhat like to this, I spake,

When I beheld her weep so ruefully; For sure my love should ne'er indue the front

And mask of Hate, who lives on others'

moans.

Shall Love pledge Hatred in her bitter draughts,

And batten on her poisons? Love forbid! Love passeth not the threshold of cold Hate,

And Hate is strange beneath the roof of Love.

O Love, if thou be'st Love, dry up these

tears

Shed for the love of Love; for tho' mine image,

The subject of thy power, be cold in her, Yet, like cold snow, it melteth in the

source

Of these sad tears, and feeds their downward flow.

So Love, arraign'd to judgment and to death,

Received unto himself a part of blame, Being guiltless, as an innocent prisoner, Who, when the woful sentence hath been past,

And all the clearness of his fame hath gone

Beneath the shadow of the curse of man, First falls asleep in swoon, wherefrom awaked,

And looking round upon his tearful friends,

Forthwith and in his agony conceives
A shameful sense as of a cleaving crime-
For whence without some guilt should
such grief be?

So died that hour, and fell into the abysm

Of forms outworn, but not to me outworn, Who never hail'd another--was there one? There might be one--one other, worth the life

That made it sensible. So that hour died Like odor rapt into the winged wind Borne into alien lands and far away.

There be some hearts so airily built, that they,

They-when their love is wreck'd--if Love can wreck-

On that sharp ridge of utmost doom ride highly

That spired above the wood; and with mad hand

Tearing the bright leaves of the ivy-screen, I cast them in the noisy brook beneath, And watch'd them till they vanish'd from my sight

Beneath the bower of wreathed eglantines:

And all the fragments of the living rock (Huge blocks, which some old trembling of the world

Had lo sen'd from the mountain, till they fell

Half digging their own graves) these in my agony

Did I make bare of all the golden moss, Wherewith the dashing runnel in the spring

Had liveried them all over. In my brain The spirit seem'd to flag from thought to thought,

As moonlight wandering thro' a mist: my blood

Crept like marsh drains thro' all my lan guid limbs;

The motions of my heart seem'd far with

Ruins, the ruin of all my life and me!

Sometimes I thought Camilla was no

more,

Some one had told she was dead, and ask'd

me

If I would see her burial; then I seem'd To rise. and through the forest-shadow borne

With more than mortal swiftness, 1 ran down

The steepy sea-bank. till I came upon
The rear of a procession, curving round
The silver-sheeted bay: in front of which
Six stately virgins, all in white, upbare
A broad earth-sweeping pall of whitest
jawn,

Wreathed round the bier with garlands: in the distance,

From out the yellow woods upon the hill
Look'd forth the summit and the pinnacles
Of a gray steeple-thence at intervals
A low bell tolling. All the pageantry,
Save those six virgins which upheld the
bier,

Were stoled from head to foot in flowing black:

One walk'd abreast with me, and veil'd his brow,

And he was loud in weeping and in praise Of her he follow'd: a strong sympathy Shook all my soul: I flung myself upon him

In tears and cries: I told him all my love, How I had loved her from the first; whereat

He shrank and howl'd, and from his brow drew back

dream:

The moanings in the forest, the loud brook,

Cries of the partridge like a rusty key Turn'd in a lock, owl-whcop and dorhawk-whir

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 without the twilight realm of dreams,

Which wander round the bases of the hills,

And murmur at the low-dropt eaves of sleep,

Half-entering the portals. Oftentimes The vision had fair prelude, in the end Opening on darkness, stately vestibules To caves and shows of Death: whether the mind,

With some 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 blunted 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 transferr'd, became
Anguish intolerable.

The very face and form of Lionel Flash'd thro my eyes into my innermost brain,

And at his feet I seemed to faint and fall, To fall and die away. I could not rise Albeit I strove to follow. They past on, The lordly Phantasms! in their floating folds

They past and were no more: but I had fallen

Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass.

Alway the 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 cloud-pavilion'd element, the wood, The mountain, the three cypresses, the

cave,

Storm, sunset, glows and glories of the

moon

Below black firs, when silent-creeping winds

Laid the long night in silver streaks and bars,

With smiles of tranquil bliss, which broke in light

Like morning from her eyes-her eloquent eyes

(As I have seen them many a hundred times),

Filled all with pure clear fire, thro' mine down rain'd

Their spirit-searching splendors. 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 the excess of sweetness and of

awe,

Makes the heart tremble, and the sight

run over

Upon his steely gyves; so those fair eyes Shone on my darkness, forms which ever stood

Within the magic cirque of memory,