Classic Poem

I.

How beautiful, how beautiful you streamed upon my sight,
In glory and in grandeur, as a gorgeous sunset-light!
How softly, soul-subduing, fell your words upon mine ear,
Like low aerial music when some augel hovers near!
What tremulous, faint ecstacy to clasp your hand in mine,
Till the darkness fell upon me of a glory too divine!
The air around grew languid with our intermingled breath,
And in your beauty's shadow I sank motionless as death.
I saw you not, I heard not, for a mist was on my brain —
I only felt that life could give no joy like that again.

II.

And this was Love — I knew it not, but blindly floated on,
And now I'm on the ocean waste, dark, desolate, alone;
The waves are raging round me — I'm reckless where they guide;
No hope is left to light me, no strength to stem the tide.
As a leaf along the torrent, a cloud across the sky,
As dust upon the whirlwind, so my life is drifting by.
The dream that drank the meteor's light — the form from Heav'n has flown —
The vision and the glory, they are passing — they are gone.
Oh! love is frantic agony, and life one throb of pain;
Yet I would bear its darkest woes to dream that dream again.