LXVIII.

I CANNOT See the features right,

When on the gloom I strive to paint

The face I know; the hues are faint, And mix with hollow masks of night:

Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
A hand that points, and palled shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

And crowds that stream from yawning doors, And shoals of puckered faces drive;

Dark bulks that tumble half alive,

And lazy lengths on boundless shores :

Till all at once, beyond the will,

I hear a wizard music roll,

And through a lattice on the soul

Looks thy fair face, and makes it still.

LXIX.

SLEEP, kinsman thou to death and trance
And madness, thou hast forged at last
A night-long Present of the Past

In which we went through summer France.

Hadst thou such credit with the soul?
So bring an opiate treble-strong,

Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong, That thus my pleasure might be whole;

While now we talk, as once we talked

Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old we walked

Beside the river's wooded reach,

The fortress, and the mountain ridge,
The cataract flashing from the bridge,

The breaker breaking on the beach.

LXX.

RISEST thou thus, dim dawn, again,
And howlest, issuing out of night,

With blasts that blow the poplar white, And lash with storm the streaming pane?

Day, when my crowned estate begun
To pine in that reverse of doom,
Which sickened every living bloom,
And blurred the splendor of the sun;

Who usherest in the dolorous hour

With thy quick tears that make the rose

Pull sideways, and the daisy close Her crimson fringes to the shower;

Who mightst have heaved a windless flame Up the deep East, or, whispering, played A checker-work of beam and shade

From hill to hill, yet looked the same,

As wan, as chill, as wild, as now;

Day, marked as with some hideous crime, When the dark hand struck down through time, And cancelled nature's best: but thou,

Lift as thou mayst thy burthened brows

Through clouds that drench the morning star,
And whirl the ungarnered sheaf afar,

And sow the sky with flying boughs,

And up thy vault with roaring sound

Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day; Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray, And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

LXXI.

So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be,

How know I what had need of thee,
For thou wert strong as thou wert true?

The fame is quenched that I foresaw,

The head hath missed an earthly wreath : I curse not nature; no, nor death, For nothing is that errs from law.

We pass the path that each man trod
Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds:
What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age? It rests with God.

O hollow wraith of dying fame,

Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
And self-infolds the large results

Of force that would have forged a name.