TO JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS, ON HIS LINES UPON THE STORY OF RIMINI. REYNOLDS, whose Muse, from out thy gentle em braces, Holding a little crisp and dewy flower, Came to me in my close-entwined bower, Where many fine-eyed Friendships and glad Graces, ON HIS GIVING ME A LOCK OF MILTON'S HAIR. I FELT my spirit leap, and look at thee Thou didst turn short, and bending pleasantly TO THE SAME, ON THE SAME SUBJECT. It lies before me there, and my own breath Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed, With their heaped locks, or his own Delphic wreath. Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me TO THE SAME, ON THE SAME OCCASION. A LIBERAL taste, and a wise gentleness Of those old Grecian busts; and helps to bless To add to these an ear for the sweet hold Of music, and an eye, ay and a hand For forms which the smooth Graces tend and follow, Shews thee indeed true offspring of the bland And vital god, whom she of happy mould, The Larissæan beauty, bore Apollo. THE NILE. Ir flows through old hushed Egypt and it's sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands,— Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng, And the void weighs on us; and then we wake, And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along Twixt villages, and think how we shall take Our own calm journey on for human sake. |