'Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,

The glorious sun uprist;

Then all averred I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.

""Twas right," said they, "such birds to slay That bring the fog and mist."

'The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

'Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be;

And we did speak only to break

The silence of the sea!

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody sun at noon

Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the moon.

'Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

'Water, water everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

'The very deep did rot; O Christ!
That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

'About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.

And some in dreams assured were
Of the spirit that plagued us so ;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

'And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;

We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

'Ah, well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.

PART III.

'There passed a weary time. Each throat

Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!

How glazed each weary eye!

When looking westward I beheld
A something in the sky.

'At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;

It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

'A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!

And still it neared and neared:

As if it dodged a water-sprite,

It plunged, and tacked, and veered.

'With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

We could nor laugh nor wail;

Through utter drought all dumb we stood;

I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,

And cried: "A sail! a sail!"

'With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

Agape they heard me call;

Gramercy they for joy did grin,

And all at once their breath drew in,

As they were drinking all.

""See! see!" I cried, "she tacks no more,

Hither to work us weal;

Without a breeze, without a tide,

She steadies with upright keel."

'The western wave was all a-flame,
The day was well-nigh done,
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun;

When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.

'And straight the sun was flecked with bars-
Heaven's mother send us grace!—

As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face.

'Alas! thought I, and my heart beat loud,
How fast she nears and nears;

Are those her sails that glance in the sun
Like restless gossameres?

'Are those her ribs through which the sun
Did peer, as through a grate;

And is that woman all her crew?
Is that a death, and are there two?

Is death that woman's mate?

'Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold;

Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The nightmare Life-in-death was she,

Who thicks man's blood with cold.

'The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice;

"The game is done! I've won, I've won!" Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

'The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out,

At one stride comes the dark;

With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea
Off shot the spectre-bark.

'We listened and looked sideways up;

Fear at my heart, as at a cup,

My life-blood seemed to sip.

The stars were dim, and thick the night,

The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;

From the sails the dew did drip

Till clomb above the eastern bar

The horned moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.

'One after one, by the star-dogged moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.

'Four times fifty living men-
And I heard nor sigh nor groan-
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.

'The souls did from their bodies fly-
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul it passed me by
Like the whizz of my cross-bow.'

PART IV.

'I fear thee, ancient mariner,

I fear thy skinny hand!

And thou art long, and lank, and brown,

As is the ribbed sea-sand.

'I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand so brown.' 'Fear not, fear not, thou wedding-guest, This body dropped not down.

'Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

'The many men so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on, and so did I.

'I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;

I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

'I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;

But or ever a prayer had gushed,

A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

'I closed my lids, and kept them close,

And the balls like pulses beat ;

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky,

Lay like a load on my weary eye,

And the dead were at my feet.

'The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they;

The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.

'An orphan's curse would drag to hell

A spirit from on high;

But oh! more horrible than that

Is a curse in a dead man's eye!

Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.

'The moving moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide :
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.

'Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoarfrost spread;

But where the ship's huge shadow lay
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

'Beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water-snakes ;

They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

"Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.

'O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware :
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

"The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

PART V.

'Oh, sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole!

To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from heaven, That slid into my soul.

'The silly buckets on the deck, That had so long remained,

I dreamt that they were filled with dew; And when I awoke it rained.

'My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank;

Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.

'I moved, and could not feel my limbs :

I was so light-almost

I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.

'And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come anear;

But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.

'The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen;

To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,

The wan stars danced between.

'And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge;

And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The moon was at its edge.

'The thick black cloud was cleft, and still

The moon was at its side:

Like waters shot from some high crag,

The lightning fell with never a jag,

A river steep and wide.

"The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the moon
The dead men gave a groan.

'They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;

It had been strange, even in a dream,

To have seen those dead men rise.

"The helmsman steered, the ship moved on, Yet never a breeze up blew ;

The mariners all 'gan work the ropes
Where they were wont to do ;

They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-
We were a ghastly crew.

'The body of my brother's son

Stood by me, knee to knee:

The body and I pulled at one rope,

But he said nought to me.'

'Around, around, flew each sweet sound,

Then darted to the sun;

Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.

'Sometimes, a-dropping from the sky,
I heard the skylark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,

How they seemed to fill the sea and air,
With their sweet jargoning!

'And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute;

And now it is an angel's song,

That makes the heavens be mute.

"It ceased; yet still the sails made on

A pleasant noise till noon,

A noise like of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.'

[The ship is driven onward, but at length the curse is finally expiated. A wind springs up:

It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring-
It mingled strangely with my fears.
Yet it felt like a welcoming.

The mariner sees his native country. The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light, each waving his hand to the shore. A boat with a pilot and hermit on board approaches the ship, which suddenly sinks. The mariner is rescued; he entreats the hermit to shrive him, and the penance of life falls on him.]

'Since then, at an uncertain hour

That agony returns;

And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me :

To him my tale I teach.

'What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there :

But in the garden-bower the bride
And bridemaids singing are:
And hark! the little vesper-bell
Which biddeth me to prayer.

'O wedding-guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea :

So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

'O sweeter than the marriage-feast,

'Tis sweeter far to me,

To walk together to the kirk

With a goodly company!

'To walk together to the kirk,

And all together pray,

While each to his great Father bends,

Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou wedding-guest :
He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

'He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.'

The mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone and now the wedding-guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn :

A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

From the Ode to the Departing Year' (1795).
Spirit who sweepest the wild harp of time!
It is most hard, with an untroubled ear
Thy dark inwoven harmonies to hear!
Yet, mine eye fixed on heaven's unchanging clime
Long when I listened, free from mortal fear,

With inward stillness, and submitted mind;
When lo! its folds far waving on the wind,
I saw the train of the departing year!

Starting from my silent sadness,

Then with no unholy madness,

Ere yet the entered cloud foreclosed my sight,

I raised the impetuous song, and solemnised his flight.

Hither, from the recent tomb,
From the prison's direr gloom,

From Distemper's midnight anguish ;

And thence, where Poverty doth waste and languish ;
Or where, his two bright torches blending,
Love illumines manhood's maze;

Or where, o'er cradled infants bending,
Hope has fixed her wishful gaze,
Hither, in perplexed dance,

Ye Woes! ye young-eyed Joys! advance!
By Time's wild harp, and by the hand
Whose indefatigable sweep

Raises its fateful strings from sleep,

I bid you haste, a mixed tumultuous band!

From every private bower,

And each domestic hearth,
Haste for one solemn hour;

And with a loud and yet a louder voice,
O'er Nature struggling in portentous birth

Weep and rejoice!

Still echoes the dread name that o'er the earth
Let slip the storm, and woke the brood of hell:
And now advance in saintly jubilee

Justice and Truth! They, too, have heard thy spell;
They, too, obey thy name, divinest Liberty!

I marked Ambition in his war-array!

I heard the mailèd monarch's troublous cry"Ah! wherefore does the northern conqueress stay! Groans not her chariot on its onward way?'

Fly, mailed monarch, fly!

Stunned by Death's twice mortal mace,
No more on Murder's lurid face

The insatiate hag shall gloat with drunken eye!
Manes of the unnumbered slain !

Ye that gasped on Warsaw's plain!
Ye that erst at Ismail's tower,

When human ruin choked the streams,

Fell in conquest's glutted hour,

'Mid women's shrieks and infants' screams! Spirits of the uncoffined slain,

Sudden blasts of triumph swelling,

Oft, at night, in misty train,

Rush around her narrow dwelling!

The exterminating fiend is fled

Foul her life, and dark her doom-
Mighty armies of the dead

Dance like death-fires round her tomb!
Then with prophetic song relate
Each some tyrant-murderer's fate!

Departing year! 'twas on no earthly shore
My soul beheld thy vision! Where alone,
Voiceless and stern, before the cloudy throne,
Aye Memory sits: thy robe inscribed with gore,
With many an unimaginable groan

Thou storied'st thy sad hours! Silence ensued,
Deep silence o'er the ethereal multitude,
Whose locks with wreaths, whose wreaths with
glories shone.

Then, his eye wild ardours glancing,
From the choirèd gods advancing,
The Spirit of the earth made reverence meet,
And stood up, beautiful, before the cloudy seat.

Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,
O Albion! O my mother isle !
Thy valleys, fair as Eden's bowers,
Glitter green with sunny showers;
Thy grassy uplands' gentle swells

Echo to the bleat of flocks

(Those grassy hills, those glittering dells
Proudly ramparted with rocks);
And Ocean, 'mid his uproar wild,
Speaks safety to his island-child!
Hence, for many a fearless age
Has social Quiet loved thy shore !
Nor ever proud invader's rage

Or sacked thy towers, or stained thy fields with gore.

Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni.
Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star
In his steep course? So long he seems to pause
On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc !
The Arvé and Arveiron at thy base
Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form!
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines,
How silently! Around thee and above,
Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass; methinks thou piercest it,
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,

Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer,
I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody
So sweet, we know not we are listening to it,

Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my thought,
Yea, with my life and life's own secret joy;
Till the dilating soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty vision passing-there,

As in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven!

Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale!
Oh, struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,

Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink!
Companion of the morning-star at dawn,
Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald wake, O wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth?
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents, fiercely glad!
Who called you forth from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns called you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,

For ever shattered, and the same for ever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,
Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?

And who commanded-and the silence came-
Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
'God!' let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, 'God!'
'God!' sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, 'God!'

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost!
Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest !
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain storm!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds !
Ye signs and wonders of the element !

Utter forth God,' and fill the hills with praise !

Thou too, hoar mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene, Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breastThou too, again, stupendous mountain! thou, That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears, Solemnly seemest like a vapoury cloud To rise before me-Rise, oh, ever rise; Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth! Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills, Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven, Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

Love.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,

And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o'er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,

Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene,
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!

She leaned against the armed man,
The statue of the armed knight;
She stood and listened to my lay

Amid the lingering light.

Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope, my joy, my Genevieve!
She loves me best whene'er I sing

The songs that make her grieve.

I played a soft and doleful air,
I sang an old and moving story—
An old rude song that suited well
That ruin wild and hoary.

77

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
For well she knew I could not choose
But gaze upon her face.

I told her of the knight that wore
Upon his shield a burning brand;
And that for ten long years he wooed
The lady of the land.

I told her how he pined; and ah!
The deep, the low, the pleading tone
With which I sang another's love,
Interpreted my own.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
And she forgave me that I gazed

Too fondly on her face.

But when I told the cruel scorn

That crazed that bold and lovely knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night;

78

That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once,

In green and sunny glade,

There came and looked him in the face
An angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew it was a fiend,

This miserable knight !

And that, unknowing what he did,
He leaped amid a murderous band,
And saved from outrage worse than death
The lady of the land;

And how she wept and clasped his knees,
And how she tended him in vain-
And ever strove to expiate

The scorn that crazed his brain.

And that she nursed him in a cave;
And how his madness went away,
When on the yellow forest leaves

A dying man he lay;

His dying words-but when I reached
That tenderest strain of all the ditty,
My faltering voice and pausing harp
Disturbed her soul with pity!

All impulses of soul and sense
Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve-
The music and the doleful tale,

The rich and balmy eve;

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng;
And gentle wishes long subdued,

Subdued and cherished long!

She wept with pity and delight,
She blushed with love and virgin shame;
And like the murmur of a dream

I heard her breathe my name.
Her bosom heaved, she stept aside;
As conscious of my look she stept-
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,

She fled to me and wept.

She half inclosed me with her arms, She pressed me with a meek embrace, And bending back her head, looked up And gazed upon my face.

'Twas partly love, and partly fear, And partly 'twas a bashful art, That I might rather feel than see The swelling of her heart.

I calmed her fears; and she was calm, And told her love with virgin pride; And so I won my Genevieve,

My bright and beauteous bride!

From Frost at Midnight!

Dear babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and, by giving, make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the red breast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the evedrops
fall,

Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Love, Hope, and Patience in Education.

O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule,

And sun thee in the light of happy faces;

Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.
For as old Atlas on his broad neck places
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it, so
Do these upbear the little world below
Of education-Patience, Love, and Hope.
Methinks I see them grouped in seemly show,
The straitened arms upraised, the palms aslope,
And robes that touching as adown they flow,
Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow.
O part them never! If Hope prostrate lie,

Love too will sink and die.
But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive
From her own life that Hope is yet alive;
And bending o'er, with soul-transfusing eyes,
And the soft murmurs of the mother-dove,
Woos back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies;
Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to
Love.

Yet haply there will come a weary day,
When overtasked at length,
Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way.
Then with a statue's smile, a statue's strength,
Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth,
And both supporting, does the work of both.