e concentration, both,
Make mere life, Love! For life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature's magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

III. HEAVEN AND EARTH. 1845.

"And there was silence in heaven for the space of half an
hour."--_Revelation._

God, who with thunders and great voices kept
Beneath thy throne, and stars most silver-paced
Along the inferior gyres, and open-faced
Melodious angels round, canst intercept
Music with music, yet, at will, hast swept
All back--all back--(said he in Patmos placed)
To fill the heavens with silence of the waste,
Which lasted half an hour! Lo! I, who have wept
All day and night, beseech Thee by my tears,
And by that dread response of curse and groan
Men alternate across these hemispheres,
Vouchsafe as such a half-hour's hush alone,
In compensation of our noisy years!
As heaven has paused from song, let earth, from moan.

IV. THE PROSPECT. 1845.

Methinks we do as fretful children do,
Leaning their faces on the window-pane
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain,
And shut the sky and landscape from their view.
And thus, alas! since God the maker drew
A mystic separation twixt those twain,
The life beyond us and our souls in pain,
We lose the prospect which we are called unto,
By grief we are fools to use. Be still and strong,
O man, my brother! hold thy sobbing breath,
And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong,
That so, as life's appointment issueth,
Thy vision may be clear to watch along
The sunset consummation-lights of death.

ROSAURA: A TALE OF MADRID.

Fourteen years have elapsed since there dwelt in Madrid a certain
student, who went by the name of El Rojo, or the Red. Not by his
acquaintances and intimates alone was he thus designated, but by all the
various classes of idlers with whom the Spanish capital abounds; by the
listless loiterers at the coffee-house doors, by the lounging gossips of
the Puerta del Sol, and by the cloaked saunterers who, when the siesta
is over, pace the Calle Alcala, puffing their beloved Havanas, retailing
the latest news, discussing the chances of a change of ministry, or the
most recent and interesting scandalous anecdote current in that gallant
metropolis. It would be wrong to infer, from his somewhat ambiguous
appellation, that the student's skin had the