The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar
Sleeps or feigns slumber
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of Time.
This poor tooting creaking cricket,
Pan half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never:
Tis his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain-chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps & Andes cold.
Haply else we could not live
Life would be too wild an ode
Sun & planet would explode

But God will keep his promise yet
Trees & clouds are prophets sure
And new & finer forms of life
Day by day approach the pure.

But O to see his solar eyes
Like meteors which chose their way
And rived the dark like a new day
Not lazy gazing on all they saw
Each chimney pot & cottage door
Farmgear & every picket fence
But feeding on magnificence
They bounded to the horizon's edge
And searched with the sun's privilege
Landward they reached the mountains old
Where pastoral tribes the flocks infold
Saw rivers run seaward from forest high
And the seas wash the low hung sky
Saw the endless rack of the firmament
And the sailing moon where the cloud was rent

As I walked in the wood
The silence into music broke
Sang the thrush in the dark oak
I unwilling to intrude
Slink into nigh solitude
Till warned by a scout of a jay
That flying courier so gay
That he sees me if I see not him
His eyes are bright if mine are dim

The sea reflects the rosy sky,
The sky doth marry the blue main.

The brave Empedocles defying fools
Pronounced the word that mortals hate to hear
“I am divine I am not mortal made
I am superior to my human weeds”
Not sense but Reason is the Judge of truth
Reason's twofold; part human part divine
That human part may be described & taught
The other portion language cannot speak

How smiles he at a generation ranked
In gloomy noddings over life! They pass.
Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked,
Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass.
But he can spy that little twist of brain
Which moved some weighty leader of the blind,
Unwitting 'twas the goad of personal pain,
To view in curst eclipse our Mother's mind,
And show us of some rigid harridan
The wretched bondmen till the end of time.
O lived the Master now to paint us Man,
That little twist of brain would ring a chime
Of whence it came and what it caused, to start

‘Sirs! may I shake your hands?
My countrymen, I see!
I've lived in foreign lands
Till England's Heaven to me.
A hearty shake will do me good,
And freshen up my sluggish blood.’

Into his hard right hand we struck,
Gave the shake, and wish'd him luck.

‘—From Austria I come,
An English wife to win,
And find an English home,
And live and die therein.
Great Lord! how many a year I've pined
To drink old ale and speak my mind!’

Loud rang our laughter, and the shout

LVIII

Desire, alas, my master and my foe,
So sore altered, thyself how mayst thou see?
Sometime I sought that drives me to and fro;
Sometime thou ledst that leadeth thee and me.
What reason is to rule thy subjects so
By forced law and mutability?
For where by thee I doubted to have blame,
Even now by hate again I doubt the same.

Ill—omen'd bird! whose cries portentous float
O'er yon savannah with the mournful wind;
While, as the Indian hears your piercing note,
Dark dread of future evil fills his mind;
Wherefore with early lamentation break
The dear delusive visions of repose?
Why from so short felicity awake
My wounded senses to substantial woes?
O'er my sick soul thus rous'd from transient rest,
Pale Superstition sheds her influence drear,
And to my shuddering fancy would suggest
Thou com'st to speak of every woe I fear.