uage writ in radiance!
O blessed smiles! heaven's golden sunrays shed
On life's cold stream,
Renewed summer when the old is fled
Like a dream!
O voice tinct with the spirit's sweetness,
Last tone of heaven's clear harmonies
Ere in the silence of wide space it dies,
Music's completeness!
O gentle laughters! rising from the crystal spring
Of joyance and free-hearted sympathy,
Pure rills to trickle sunnily
From eyes and rosy lips in liquid warbling,
Sweetly ye win us
To shrine the blest spirit of Beauty
Within us!

O tender heart! Love's everlasting dwelling,
Beautiful fountain of all generous thoughts,
From whose unsealed fulness, ever welling,
Come to mankind their purest pleasure draughts;
O gentle heart! Grief's only sanctuary,
Safe refuge from the rude assaults of woe,
Throbbing with mild compassion constantly,
That never change nor withering can know;
From the pure spring of virgin slumbers
Peace falls upon the soul when thou art by,
Lulling it sweeter than Philomel's numbers,
Lapping it deep within felicity.
O brightest! dearest! still there floats to thee
The incense of pure minds eternally,
Thoughts sown of loveliness, that bud and bloom,
And through the summer-time of after years
Shed sweet perfume,
Love-imaginings that rise through tears
Like rainbows, and soft dreams
That are the heaven-gleams,
Caught from the deep
Of Elysian sleep!

THE POET.

You might think, to look upon them with their arms around each
other,
And the tale that he is breathing softly crimsoned on her cheek,
That a sweeter spell enwound them than the love she bears a brother,
And that sweeter words are spoken than the words that brothers
speak.

For, fair one, she loves him dearly, dearly as a woman's spirit
Full of gentleness and beauty loves all pure and holy things,
Just as though some blessed angel, screened from sight, were
floating near it,
Fanning every tender feeling into motion with its wings.

So she hears with echoed rapture hopes that in his breast are
swelling,
Of the glory and the honour that have sunned his poet's dream,
Charmed him by their bright illusion madly from his quiet dwelling
To immerse him in life's ocean, there to lose him like a stream.