rigid lay, unto its breast,
Such as its arms, it rushed her fragile form
As bosomed bulks of tempest in their joy
With arms of winds drag to their black embrace
A fairy mist of white that flecks the summer
With shadeless wings of gauze, and 'tis no more
Heaved on the rapture of its thundering heart.

The snowy flowers shuddered and grew still
With withered faces bowed, and on the stream--
Where all the day it was their wont to stand
In silent sisterhood down-gazing at their charms--
Withered and limp and dead laid their fair brows.
Flames hissed aloft like fiery whips of snakes
Blasting and killing all the fragrant sprites
That make the dewy zephyrs their dim haunts.

O foam-fair daughters of Oceanus!
In vain you seek your mate and chide the flowers
For hiding her 'neath their broad, snowy palms;
Nor is she hidden in that pearly shell,
Which, like a pinky babe cast from the sea,
Moans at your pallid feet washed with white spray.
But, sitting by the tumbling blue of waves,
Mourn to your billows on the foamy sands
The falseness of the god who grasps the storm!

DEMETER.

Demeter sad! the wells of sorrow lay
Eternal gushing in thy lonely path.

Methinks I see her now--an awful shape
Tall o'er a dragon team in frenzied search
From Argive plains unto the jeweled shores
Of the remotest Ind, where Usha's hand
Tinged her grief-cloven brow with kindly touch,
And Savitar wheeled genial thro' the skies
O'er palmy regions of the faneless Brahm.

In melancholy search I see her roam
O'er the steep peaks of Himalayas keen
With the unmellowed frosts of Boreal storms,
Then back again with that wild mother woe
Writ in the anguished fire of her eyes,--
Back where old Atlas groans 'neath weight of worlds,
And the Cimmerian twilight glooms the soul.
Deep was her sleep in Persia's haunted vales,
Where many a languid Philomela moaned
The bursting sorrow of a bursting soul.
I see her nigh Ionia's swelling seas
Cull from the sands a labyrinthine shell,
And hark the mystery of its eery voice
Float from the hollow windings of its curl,
Then cast it far into the weedy sea
To view the salt-spray flash, like one soft plume
Dropped from the wings of Eros, 'gainst the flame
Of Helios' car down-sloping toward his bath.