208

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN.

More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

4.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

5.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens over-wrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats.

AN ANTIQUE INTAGLIO.

(Le Jeune Homme caressant sa chimère: agate rouge, trouvée près de Sorrente, rapportée au Musée de Naples.)

A BOY of eighteen years mid myrtle-boughs
Lying love-languid on a morn of May,
Watched half asleep his goats insatiate browse
Thin shoots of thyme and lentisk by the spray
Of biting sea-winds bitter made and grey:
Therewith when shadows fell, his waking thought
Of love into a wondrous dream was wrought.

A woman lay beside him,-
-so it seemed;
For on her marble shoulders, like a mist
Irradiate with ruddy splendour, gleamed
Thick silken tresses; her white woman's wrist,
Glittering with snaky gold and amethyst,

Upheld a dainty chin; and there beneath

Her twin breasts shone like pinks that lilies wreath.

What colour were her eyes I cannot tell;

For as he gazed thereon, at times they darted Dun rays like water in a dusky well;

Then turned to topaz: then like rubies smarted With smouldering flames of passion tiger-hearted; Then 'neath blue-veinéd lids swam soft and tender With pleadings and shy timorous surrender.

300

AN ANTIQUE INTAGLIO.

Thus far a woman: but the breath that lifted

Her panting breast with long melodious sighs, Stirred o'er her neck and hair broad wings that sifted The perfumes of meridian Paradise;

Dusk were they, furred like velvet, gemmed with eyes Of such dull lustre as in isles afar

Night-flying moths spread to the summer star.

Music these pinions made—a sound and surge
Of pines innumerous near lisping waves—
Rustlings of reeds and rushes on the verge
Of level lakes and Naiad-haunted caves-
Drowned whispers of a wandering stream that laves
Deep alder-boughs and tracts of ferney grass
Bordered with azure-belled campanulas.

Potent they were: for never since her birth
With feet of woman this fair siren pressed
Sleek meadow-swards or stony ways of earth;
But neath the milky marvel of her breast,
Displayed in sinuous length of coil and crest,
Glittered a serpent's tail, fold over fold,
In mazy labyrinths of langour rolled.

Ah me! what fascination! what faint stars
Of emerald and opal, with the shine

Of rubies intermingled, and dim bars

Of twisting turquoise and pale coralline!

What rings and rounds! what thin streaks sapphirine Freckled that gleaming glory, like the bed

Of Eden streams with gems enamelléd!

There lurked no loathing, no soul-freezing fear,
But luxury and love these coils between:
Faint grew the boy; the siren filled his ear
With singing sweet as when the village-green
Re-echoes to the tinkling tambourine,

And feet of girls aglow with laughter glance
In myriad mazy errors of the dance.

How long he dallied with delusive joy

I know not: but thereafter nevermore

The peace of passionless slumber soothed the boy;
For he was stricken to the very core
With sickness of desire exceeding sore,
And through the radiance of his eyes there shone
Consuming fire too fierce to gaze upon.

He, ere he died-and they whom lips divine
Have touched, fade flower-like and cease to be-
Bade Charicles on agate carve a sign

Of his strange slumber: therefore can we see
Here in the ruddy gem's transparency
The boy, the myrtle-boughs, the triple spell
Of moth and snake and white witch terrible.

F. A. Symonds.

302

CLEON.

CLEON.

"As certain also of your own poets have said".

CLEON the poet, (from the sprinkled isles,

Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea,

And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece")To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!

They give thy letter to me, even now:
I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.
The master of thy galley still unlades
Gift after gift; they block my court at last
And pile themselves along its portico
Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee:
And one white she-slave from the group dispersed
Of black and white slaves, (like the chequer-work
Pavement, at once my nation's work and gift,
Now covered with this settle-down of doves)
One lyric woman, in her crocus vest

Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands
Commends to me the strainer and the cup
Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.

Well-counselled, king, in thy munificence!
For so shall men remark, in such an act
Of love for him whose song gives life its joy,
Thy recognition of the use of life;

Nor call thy spirit barely adequate