The Library of Poetry and Song

Reclining lovers, in the lonely dale,
Poured forth at large the sweetly tortured
heart;

Or, sighing tender passion, swelled the gale,
And taught charmed echo to resound their
smart ;

While flocks, woods, streams around, repose and peace impart.

Each sound too here to languishment inclined,
Lulled the weak bosom, and indaced ease;
Aerial music in the warbling wind,
At distance rising oft, by small degrees,
Nearer and nearer came, till o'er the trees
It hung, and breathed such soul-dissolving airs,
As did, alas! with soft perdition please :
Entangled deep in its enchanting snares,
The listening heart forgot all duties and all cares.

A certain music, never known before,
Here lulled the pensive, melancholy mind;
Full easily obtained. Behooves no more,
But sidelong, to the gently waving wind,
To lay the well-tuned instrument reclined;
From which, with airy flying fingers light,
Beyond each mortal touch the most refined,

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens, bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Infolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O that deep romantic chasm, which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail ;
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles, meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale, the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean,

And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

The god of winds drew sounds of deep delight: Ancestral voices prophesying war. Whence, with just cause, the harp of Æolus it

hight.

Ah me! what hand can touch the string so fine?
Who up the lofty diapason roll

Such sweet, such sad, such solemn airs divine,
Then let them down again into the soul:

Now rising love they fanned; now pleasing dole
They breathed, in tender musings, through the
heart;

And now a graver sacred strain they stole,
As when seraphic hands a hymn impart :

Wild warbling nature all, above the reach of art!

JAMES THOMSON.

KUBLA KHAN.*

IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.

"In the summer of the year 1797 the author, then in ill-health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was read ing the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall. The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external

senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the nnages rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the corre spondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and din recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away, like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter."THE AUTHOR, 1816.

FROM "MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM," ACT II. SC. 3.

Enter TITANIA, with her train. TITANIA. Come, now a roundel, and a fairy song;

Then, for the third part of a minute, hence; Some, to kill caukers in the musk-rose buds; Some war with rear-mice for their leathern wings, To make my small elves coats; and some keep

back

The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, and wonders

At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices, and let me rest.

COMPLIMENT TO QUEEN ELIZABETH.

FROM "MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM," ACT 11. SC. 2.

OBERON. My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou remember'st

Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,

Randolph was a masterly scholar, and a profound student of the Greek and Latin poets, whose writings he imitated in those languages, and whose influence was marked in his English writings. He died (1634) at the age of twenty-nine, not fulfilling the fame promised by his early years.

OBE. That very time I saw (but thou couldst not),

Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy free.

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell :

It fell upon a little western flower

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, And maidens call it Love-in-idleness.

FROM "ROMEO AND JULIET," ACT 1. SC. 4.

O, THEN, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep : Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs ; The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces, of the smallest spider's web; The collars, of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film ; Her wagoner, a small gray-coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid : Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut, Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, Time out of mind the fairies' coach-makers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of

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Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts, and wakes;
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two,
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night :
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes :
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them, and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.

THE FAIRIES.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We dare n't go a hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl's feather!

SHAKESPEARE.

Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds

Of the black mountain-lake, With frogs for their watch-dogs, All night awake.

High on the hill-top

The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columbkill he crosses, On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses: Or going up with music

On cold starry nights, To sup with the queen

Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long; When she came down again

Her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back,

Between the night and morrow; They thought that she was fast asleep, But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since

Deep within the lakes, On a bed of flag-leaves, Watching till she wakes.

By the craggy hillside, Through the mosses bare, They have planted thorn-trees For pleasure here and there. Is any man so daring

To dig one up in spite, He shall find the thornies set In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen, We dare n't go a hunting For fear of little men ; Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl's feather!

WIILLIAM ALLINGHAM.

KILMENY.

FROM "THE QUEEN'S WAKE."

BONNY Kilmeny gaed up the glen; But it wasna to meet Duneira's men, Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see, For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be. It was only to hear the yorlin sing, And pu' the cress-flower round the spring, The scarlet hypp, and the hindberrye, And the nut that hung frae the hazel-tree; For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be. But lang may her minny look o'er the wa', And lang may she seek i' the green-wood shaw; Lang the laird of Duneira blame,

And lang, lang greet or Kilmeny come hame.

When many a day had come and fled,
When grief grew calm, and hope was dead,
When mass for Kilmeny's soul had been sung,
When the bedesman had prayed, and the dead-
bell rung;

Late, late in a gloamin, when all was still,
When the fringe was red on the westlin hill,
The wood was sear, the moon i' the wane,
The reek o' the cot hung over the plain,
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane;
When the ingle lowed with an eiry leme,
Late, late in the gloamin Kilmeny came hame!

Where got you that joup o' the lily sheen?
That bonny snood of the birk sae green?
And these roses, the fairest that ever was seen?
Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?"

Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace, But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face ; As still was her look, and as still was her ee, As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea, Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea. For Kilmeny had been she knew not where, And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.

Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew, Where the rain never fell, and the wind never

blew;

But it seemed as the harp of the sky had rung,
And the airs of heaven played round her tongue,
When she spake of the lovely forms she had seen,
And a land where sin had never been,

A land of love, and a land of light,
Withouten sun or moon or night;
Where the river swa'd a living stream,
And the light a pure celestial beam :
The land of vision it would seem,
A still, an everlasting dream.

In yon green-wood there is a waik,
And in that waik there is a wene,
And in that wene there is a maike,
That neither has flesh, blood, nor bane;
And down in yon green-wood he walks his lane.
In that green wene Kilmeny lay,
Her bosom happed wi' the flowerets gay;
But the air was soft, and the silence deep,
And bonny Kilmeny fell sound asleep ;
She kend nae mair, nor opened her ee,
Till waked by the hymns of a far countrye.

She awaked on a couch of the silk sae slim, All striped wi' the bars of the rainbow's rim; And lovely beings around were rife, Who erst had travelled mortal life; And aye they smiled, and 'gan to speer: “What spirit has brought this mortal here?"

"Lang have I journeyed the world wide," A meek and reverend fere replied; "Baith night and day I have watched the fair Eident a thousand years and mair. Yes, I have watched o'er ilk degree,. Wherever blooms femenitye; But sinless virgin, free of stain, In mind and body, fand I nane. Never, since the banquet of time, Found I a virgin in her prime, Till late this bonny maiden I saw, As spotless as the morning snaw.

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And she heard a song,
she heard it sung,
She kend not where; but sae sweetly it rung,
It fell on her ear like a dream of the morn,
"O, blest be the day Kilmeny was born!
Now shall the land of the spirits see,
Now shall it ken, what a woman may be !
The sun that shines on the world sae bright,
A borrowed gleid frae the fountain of light;
And the moon that sleeks the sky sae dun,
Like a gouden bow, or a beamless sun,
Shall wear away, and be seen nae mair;
And the angels shall miss them, travelling the air.
But lang, lang after baith night and day,
When the sun and the world have edyed away,

Many a lang year through the world we 've gane, When the sinner has gane to his waesome doom, Commissioned to watch fair womankind,

For it's they who nurice the immortal mind.

We have watched their steps as the dawning

shone,

And deep in the greenwood walks alone;

By lily bower and silken bed

The viewless tears have o'er them shed;

Have soothed their ardent minds to sleep,

Or left the couch of love to weep.

Kilmeny shall smile in eternal bloom!"

They bore her away, she wist not how,
For she felt not arm nor rest below;

But so swift they wained her through the light,
'T was like the motion of sound or sight;
They seemed to split the gales of air,
And yet nor gale nor breeze was there.
Unnumbered groves below them grew;

We have seen! we have seen! but the time must They came, they past, and backward flew,

come,

And the angels will weep at the day of doom!

"O, would the fairest of mortal kind
Aye keep the holy truths in mind,
That kindred spirits their motions see,
Who watch their ways with anxious e’e,
And grieve for the guilt of humanitye!
O, sweet to Heaven the maiden's prayer,
And the sigh that heaves a bosom sae fair!
And dear to Heaven the words of truth
And the praise of virtue frae beauty's mouth!
And dear to the viewless forms of air
The minds that kythe as the body fair!

"O bonny Kilmeny ! free frae stain, If ever you seek the world again, That world of sin, of sorrow and fear, O, tell of the joys that are waiting here; And tell of the signs you shall shortly see; Of the times that are now, and the times that shall be."

They lifted Kilmeny, they led her away,
And she walked in the light of a sunless day;
The sky was a dome of crystal bright,
The fountain of vision, and fountain of light;
The emerald fields were of dazzling glow,
And the flowers of everlasting blow.
Then deep in the stream her body they laid,
That her youth and beauty never might fade;
And they smiled on heaven, when they saw her lie
In the stream of life that wandered by.

Like floods of blossoms gliding on,
In moment seen, in moment gone.
O, never vales to mortal view

Appeared like those o'er which they flew,
That land to human spirits given,

The lowermost vales of the storied heaven;
From whence they can view the world below,
And heaven's blue gates with sapphires glow, -
More glory yet unmeet to know.

They bore her far to a mountain green,
To see what mortal never had seen;
And they seated her high on a purple sward,
And bade her heed what she saw and heard,
And note the changes the spirits wrought;
For now she lived in the land of thought.
She looked, and she saw nor sun nor skies,
But a crystal dome of a thousand dyes;
She looked, and she saw nae land aright,
But an endless whirl of glory and light;
And radiant beings went and came,
Far swifter than wind or the linked flame;
She hid her een frae the dazzling view;
She looked again, and the scene was new.

She saw a sun on a summer sky,
And clouds of amber sailing by ;
A lovely land beneath her lay,

And that land had glens and mountains gray;
And that land had valleys and hoary piles,
And marled seas, and a thousand isles;
Its fields were speckled, its forests green,
And its lakes were all of the dazzling sheen,

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The Library of Poetry and Song, Volume 3