XLIV.

PRESENTIMENTS

PRESENTIMENTS! they judge not right Who deem that ye from open light Retire in fear of shame;

All heaven-born Instincts shun the touch Of vulgar sense,-and, being such,

Such privilege ye claim.

The tear whose source I could not guess,
The deep sigh that seemed fatherless,

Were mine in early days;
And now, unforced by time to part
With fancy, I obey my heart,

And venture on your praise.
What though some busy foes to good,
Too potent over nerve and blood,
Lurk near you-and combine
To taint the health which ye infuse;
This hides not from the moral Muse
Your origin divine.

How oft from you, derided Powers!
Comes Faith that inauspicious hours
Builds castles, not of air:
Bodings unsanctioned by the will
Flow from your visionary skill,
And teach us to beware.

The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift,
That no philosophy can lift,

Shall vanish, if ye please,

Like morning mist: and, where it lay,
The spirits at your bidding play

In gaiety and ease.

Star-guided contemplations move

That men have lived for whom, With dread precision, ye made clear The hour that in a distant year

Should knell them to the tomb. Unwelcome insight! Yet there are Blest times when mystery is laid bare, Truth shows a glorious face, While on that isthmus which commands The councils of both worlds, she stands, Sage Spirits! by your grace.

God, who instructs the brutes to scent All changes of the element,

Whose wisdom fixed the scale

Of natures, for our wants provides
By higher, sometimes humbler, guides,
When lights of reason fail.

When it reveals, in evening majesty,
Features half lost amid their own pure light.
Poised like a weary cloud, in middle air
He hung, then floated with angelic ease

above

Prognostics that ye rule;

The naked Indian of the wild,

And haply, too, the cradled Child,
Are pupils of your school.

But who can fathom your intents,
Number their signs or instruments?
A rainbow, a sunbeam,

A subtle smell that Spring unbinds,
Dead pause abrupt of midnight winds,
An echo, or a dream.

The laughter of the Christmas hearth
With sighs of self-exhausted mirth
Ye feelingly reprove;

And daily, in the conscious breast,
Your visitations are a test

And exercise of love.

When some great change gives boundless

Till he had reached a summit sharp and bare, Where oft the venturous heifer drinks the noon

ocean,

The melancholy gates of Death
Respond with sympathetic motion;
Though all that feeds on nether air,
Howe'er magnificent or fair,
Grows but to perish, and entrust
Its ruins to their kindred dust:

Yet, by the Almighty's ever-during care,
Her procreant vigils Nature keeps
Amid the unfathomable deeps;
And saves the peopled fields of earth
From dread of emptiness or dearth.

Thus, in their stations, lifting tow'rd the sky
The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty,
The shadow-casting race of trees survive:
Thus, in the train of Spring, arrive
Sweet flowers-what living eye hath viewed
Their myriads?--endlessly renewed,
Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray;
Where'er the subtle waters stray;
Wherever sportive breezes bend

Their course, or genial showers descend!
Mortals, rejoice! the very Angels quit
Their mansions unsusceptible of change,
Amid your pleasant bowers to sit,

And through your sweet vicissitudes to range!"

Him rather suits it, side by side with thee,
Wrapped in a fit of pleasing indolence,
While thy tired lute hangs on the hawthorn-tree,
To lie and listen-till o'er-drowsèd sense
Sinks, hardly conscious of the influence-
To the soft murmur of the vagrant Bee.
-A slender sound yet hoary Time
Doth to the Soul exalt it with the chime
Of all his years-a company
Of ages coming, ages gone;
(Nations from before them sweeping,
Regions in destruction steeping,)
But every awful note in unison
With that faint utterance, which tells
Of treasure sucked from buds and bells,
For the pure keeping of those waxen cells;
Where She-a statist prudent to confer
Upon the common weal; a warrior bold,
Radiant all over with unburnished gold,
And armed with living spear for mortal fight;
A cunning forager

That spreads no waste; a social builder; one In whom all busy offices unite

With all fine functions that afford delightSafe through the winter storm in quiet dwells!

V.

Of vision ?-o'er this tempting flower
And is She brought within the power
Hovering until the petals stay

Her flight, and take its voice away!-
Observe each wing!--a tiny van!
The structure of her laden thigh,
How fragile yet of ancestry
Mysteriously remote and high;
High as the imperial front of man;
The roseate bloom on woman's cheek;
The soaring eagle's curvéd beak:
The white plumes of the floating swan;
Old as the tiger's paw, the lion's mane
Ere shaken by that mood of stern disdain

At which the desert trembles.-Humming Bee!
Thy sting was needless then, perchance un-

known,

DEVOTIONAL INCITEMENTS.

"Not to the earth confined,
Ascend to heaven."

WHERE will they stop, those breathing Powers,
The Spirits of the new-born flowers?
They wander with the breeze, they wind
Where'er the streams a passage find;
Up from their native ground they rise
In mute aerial harmonies;
From humble violet- modest thyme-
Exhaled, the essential odours climb,
As if no space below the sky
Their subtle flight could satisfy:
Heaven will not tax our thoughts with pride
If like ambition be their guide.

Roused by this kindliest of May-showers,
The spirit-quickener of the flowers,
That with moist virtue softly cleaves
The buds, and freshens the young leaves,
The birds pour forth their souls in notes
Of rapture from a thousand throats-
Here checked by too impetuous haste,
While there the music runs to waste,
With bounty more and more enlarged,
Till the whole air is overcharged:
Give ear, O Man! to their appeal
And thirst for no inferior zeal,
Thou, who canst think, as well as feel.

Mount from the earth; aspire! aspire !
So pleads the town's cathedral quire,
In strains that from their solemn height

Sun,

Be present at his setting; or the pomp
Of Persian mornings would ye fill, and stand
Poising your splendours high above the heads
Of worshippers kneeling to their up-risen God?
Whence, whence, ye Clouds! this eagerness of
speed?

Speak, silent creatures. - They are gone, are fled,
Buried together in yon gloomy mass

That loads the middle heaven; and clear and bright

And vacant doth the region which they thronged
Appear; a calm descent of sky conducting
Down to the unapproachable abyss,
Down to that hidden gulf from which they rose
To vanish-fleet as days and months and years,
Fleet as the generations of mankind,
Power, glory, empire, as the world itself,
The lingering world, when time hath ceased to

be.

But the winds roar, shaking the rooted trees,
And see a bright precursor to a train
Perchance as numerous, overpeers the rock
That sullenly refuses to partake

Of the wild impulse. From a fount of life
Invisible, the long procession moves
Luminous or gloomy, welcome to the vale
Which they are entering, welcome to mine eye
That sees them, to my soul that owns in them,
And in the bosom of the firmament

O'er which they move, wherein they are contained,

A type of her capacious self and all
Her restless progeny.

A humble walk

Here is my body doomed to tread, this path,
A little hoary line and faintly traced,
Work, shall we call it, of the shepherd's foot
Or of his flock?-joint vestige of them both.
pace it unrepining, for my thoughts

1

Admit no bondage and my words have wings.
Where is the Orphean lyre, or Druid harp,
To accompany the verse? The mountain blast
Shall be our hand of music; he shall sweep
The rocks, and quivering trees, and billowy lake.
And search the fibres of the caves, and they
Shall answer, for our song is of the Clouds,
And the wind loves them and the gentle gales --
Which by their aid re-clothe the naked lawn
With annual verdure, and revive the woods,
And moisten the parched lips of thirsty flowers-
Love them; and every idle breeze of air
Bends to the favourite burthen. Moon and stars
Keep their most solemn vigils when the Clouds
Watch also, shifting peaceably their place
Like bands of ministering Spirits, or when they
lic,

As if some Protean art the change had wrought,
In listless quiet o'er the ethereal deep
Scattered, a Cyclades of various shapes
And all degrees of beauty. O ye Lightnings!
Ye are their perilous offspring and the Sun-
Source inexhaustible of life and joy.

And type of man's far-darting reason, therefore
In old time worshipped as the god of verse,
A blazing intellectual deity-

Loves his own glory in their looks, and showers
Upon that unsubstantial brotherhood
Visions with all but beatific light

Enriched-too transient were they not renewed

In silent rapture, credulous desire
Nourish the hope that memory lacks not power
To keep the treasure unimpaired. Vain
thought!

Yet why repine, created as we are
For joy and rest, albeit to find them only
Lodged in the bosom of eternal things?

As no unworthy Partner in their flight
Through seas of ether, where the ruffling sway
Of nether air's rude billows is unknown;
Whom Sylphs, if e'er for casual pastime they
Through India's spicy regions wing their way,
Might bow to as their Lord. What character,
Of all thy feathered progeny
O sovereign Nature! I appeal to thee,

Is so unearthly, and what shape so fair?
Green, sable, shining yellow shadowy brown,
So richly decked in variegated down,
Tints softly with each other blended,
Hues doubtfully begun and ended;
Or intershooting, and to sight

Lost and recovered, as the rays of light
Glance on the conscious plumes touched here
and there?

Full surely, when with such proud gifts of life Began the pencil's strife,

O'erweening Art was caught as in a snare.

A sense of seemingly presumptuous wrong Gave the first impulse to the Poet's song; But, of his scorn repenting soon, he drew A juster judgment from a calmer view: And, with a spirit freed from discontent, Thankfully took an effort that was meant Not with God's bounty, Nature's love, to vie, Or made with hope to please that inward eye Which ever strives in vain itself to satisfy, But to recal the truth by some faint trace Of power ethereal and celestial grace, That in the living Creature find on earth a place.

The Mother-her thou must have seen,

In spirit, ere she came

To dwell these rifted rocks between,
Or found on earth a name;
An image, too, of that sweet Boy,
Thy inspirations give-
Of playfulness, and love, and joy,
Predestined here to live.

Downcast, or shooting glances far,
How beautiful his eyes,
That blend the nature of the star
With that of summer skies!
I speak as if of sense beguiled;
Uncounted months are gone,
Yet and I with the Jewish Child,
That exquisite Saint John.

I see the dark-brown curls, the brow,
The smooth transparent skin,
Refined, as with intent to show
The holiness within;
The grace of parting Infancy
By blushes yet untamed;
Age faithful to the mother's knee,
Nor of her arms ashamed.

Two lovely Sisters still and sweet
As flowers, stand side by side:
Their soul-subduing looks might cheat
The Christian of his pride:
Such beauty hath the Eternal poured
Upon them not forlorn,
Though of a lineage once abhorred,
Nor yet redeemed from scorn.

Mysterious safeguard, that, in spite
Of poverty and wrong,
Doth here preserve a living light,
From Hebrew fountains sprung;
That gives this ragged group to cast
Around the dell a gleam

Of Palestine, of glory past,
And proud Jerusalem!

1828

LI.

ON THE POWER OF SOUND.

ARGUMENT.

The Ear addressed, as occupied by a spiritual functionary, in communion with sounds, indi. vidual, or combined in studied harmony.-Sources and effects of those sounds to the close of 6th Stanza).-The power of music, whence proceeding, exemplified in the idiot. -Origin of music, and its effect in early ages-how produced (to the middle of roth Stanza). The mind recalled to sounds acting casually and severally. - Wish uttered (11th Stanza) that these could be united into a scheme or system for moral interests and intellectual contemplation. (Stanza 12th). The Pythagorean theory of numbers and music, with their supposed power over the motions of the universe-imaginations consonant with such a theory.-Wish expressed (in 11th Stanza) realized, in some degree, by the representation of all sounds under the form of thanksgiving to the Creator.-(Last