To look upon the wild, unquiet clouds,
Or watch the rainy Hyades uprise
Above the horizon, or the Pleiades,

Or great Orion: yet I know full well
That I am minishing and losing me

Like a snow-heap floating on the waters' breast;
And soon I go to mingle with the streams
Which flow to the great bosom of the earth.

330

TO JENNY.

(From the French of Victor Hugo.)

YESTERDAY, darling of mine, a twelvemonth old!
Happy you babble as, under the manifold

Delicate leafage that lies on the dear Spring's breast,
The year's new birdlets, opening their strange, wide

eyes,

Cheep and twitter from out the warmth of the nest,

For the joy of the young plumes' growth and of life's surprise.

O rose-lipt Jenny of mine, in those big books

Whose pictures are worth your crowings and happy looks,
The books I must suffer your fingers to crumple or tear;
There is many a beautiful poem, but none so rare
As you, my poem, when, catching sight of me,
Your whole little body thrills and leaps with glee.
The greatest men for writing have written ne'er

A better thing than the thought a-dawn in your eye, And the musing strange and vague of one who scans The earth and man with an angel's ignorance.

Ay, Jenny, God's not far off when you are nigh.

FROM VICTOR HUGO'S "MAZEPPA."

PART II.

THUS, when a mortal on whom his God is outpour'd

indeed,

Is bound on thy fateful croupe, O genius, fiery steed, He struggles in vain; with a bound, untoucht of his hand or heel,

From the real thou bearest him forth, whose gates burst and break as they feel

Thy feet, feet of steel.

Thou clearest the deserts with him, and the hoary tops of the proud

Old hills of strength, crossest seas, and beyond the depths of cloud

Where darkness heavily lies; and, awak'd by thy footsteps' sound,

A thousand spirits impure in their legion close press

round

Thy traveller bound.

In one flight on thy wings of flame he reaches and sees the whole

Wide fields of the possible there stretcht out, and all realms of the soul;

He drinks from the river eternal: in storm-night or star

night now

His locks with the locks of comets commingled, all flaming glow

On the firmament's brow.

The six moons of Herschel he sees; the ring of old Saturn there;

And the pole that bends round her brow the nightly Aurora fair;

All he sees; the ideal horizon, the limitless world's, in

his sight

Moveth on till it knoweth no limit, displac'd through the darkness and light

By thy untir'd flight.

And who, saving only the demons and angels, may know or may dream

What he suffers in following thee, or guess the strange lightnings that gleam

On his eyes, and the scorching and burning of many a fiery spark,

And how, in the night, those cold wings shall strike at his brow in the dark,

And no one shall mark.

Affrighted he cries, but in vain: relentless, thy flight will

not fail,

The flight that o'erwhelms him and crushes; exhausted, and gasping, and pale,

Each step thou dost take seems to hollow his tomb and he sinks in affright;

Till the end comes-he runs, and he flies, and he falls— and he rises upright,

A king in his might.