His proud museums may with marble groan, Who warms them from the marble-at his breast; DESCRIPTION OF THE VENUS OF MILO. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. EXTRACTS. I SHALL come and live in the Louvre, I think. I feel as if I never want to go away. I had not been ten minutes in the place before I fell in love with the most beautiful creature the world has ever seen. She was standing, silent and majestic, in the centre of one of the rooms of the statue gallery, and the very first glimpse of her struck one breathless with a sense of her beauty. I could not see the color of her eyes and hair exactly, but the latter is light, and the eyes, I should think, are gray. Her complexion is of a beautiful warm marble tinge. She is not a clever woman, evidently; I do not think she laughs or talks much-she seems too lazy to do more than smile. She is only beautiful. This divine creature has lost her arms, which have been cut off at the shoulders, but she looks none the less lovely for the accident. She may be some two and thirty years old, and she was born two thousand years ago. Her name is the Venus of Milo. O Victrix! O lucky Paris! How could he give the apple to any else but this enslaver, this joy of gods and men? at whose benign presence the flowers spring up, and the smiling ocean sparkles, and the soft skies beam with serene light!.... O thou generous Venus! O thou beautiful, bountiful calm! At thy soft feet let me kneel on cushions of Tyrian purple! OZYMANDIÁS OF EGYPT. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. I MET a traveller from an antique land TO A SKYLARK. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. HAIL to thee, blithe spirit! That from heaven, or near it, In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the setting sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run, Like an embodied joy whose race is just begun. The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of heaven, In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight. Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. 1 All the earth and air As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed. What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see, As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not; Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower; Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aerial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view; Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingéd thieves. Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, All that ever was Joyous and clear and fresh thy music doth surpass. Teach us, sprite or bird, What sweet thoughts are thine! I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. Chorus hymeneal, Or triumphal chant, Matched with thine, would be all But an empty vaunt,— A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? |