The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;

Sudden, at unawares,

Self-moved, fly-to the doors,

Nor sword of angels could reveal

What they conceal.

MERLIN.

II.

THE rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs;
Balance-loving Nature

Made all things in pairs.

To every foot its antipode;

Each color with its counter glowed;

To every tone beat answering tones,
Higher or graver;

Flavor gladly blends with flavor;
Leaf answers leaf upon the bough;
And match the paired cotyledons.
Hands to hands, and feet to feet,
In one body grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal meet.
Light's far furnace shines,
Smelting balls and bars,

Forging double stars,

Glittering twins and trines.

The animals are sick with love,

Lovesick with rhyme;

Each with all propitious Time
Into chorus wove.

Like the dancers' ordered band,
Thoughts come also hand in hand;
In equal couples mated,

Or else alternated;

Adding by their mutual gage,

One to other, health and age.

Solitary fancies go

Short-lived wandering to and fro,

Most like to bachelors,

Or an ungiven maid,

Not ancestors,

With no posterity to make the lie afraid,

Or keep truth undecayed.

Perfect-paired as eagle's wings,

Justice is the rhyme of things;

Trade and counting use
The self-same tuneful muse;

And Nemesis,

Who with even matches odd,

Who athwart space redresses
The partial wrong,

Fills the just period,

And finishes the song.

Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,
Murmur in the house of life,
Sung by the Sisters as they spin;
In perfect time and measure they
Build and unbuild our echoing clay.
As the two twilights of the day
Fold us music-drunken in.

BACCHUS.

BRING me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,

Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,

Suffer no savor of the earth to scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute

From a nocturnal root,

Which feels the acrid juice

Of Styx and Erebus;

And turns the woe of Night,

By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled

Among the silver hills of heaven

Draw everlasting dew;

Wine of wine,

Blood of the world,

Form of forms, and mould of statures,

That I intoxicated,

And by the draught assimilated,

May float at pleasure through all natures;

The bird-language rightly spell,

And that which roses say so well.

Wine that is shed

Like the torrents of the sun

Up the horizon walls,

Or like the Atlantic streams, which run When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread,

Food which needs no transmuting,
Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,
Wine which is already man,

Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is,

Music and wine are one,

That I, drinking this,

Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;

Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.

Quickened so, will I unlock

Every crypt of every rock.

Winds of remembering

Of the ancient being blow,

And seeming-solid walls of use

Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;

Retrieve the loss of me and mine!

Vine for vine be antidote,

And the grape requite the lote !

Haste to cure the old despair,
Reason in Nature's lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;

Give them again to shine;

Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;

Refresh the faded tints,

Recut the aged prints,

And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,

Upon the tablets blue,

The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

MEROPS.

WHAT care I, so they stand the same,
Things of the heavenly mind,—
How long the power to give them name
Tarries yet behind?

Thus far to-day your favors reach,
O fair, appeasing presences!
Ye taught my lips a single speech,
And a thousand silences.

Space grants beyond his fated road
No inch to the god of day;
And copious language still bestowed
One word, no more, to say.