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Among Milton’s poems are these lines: –
Dicite sacrorum præsides nemorum Deæ, etc.
Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine
Natura solers finxit humanum genus ?
Eternus, incorruptus, æquævus polo,
Unusque et universus exemplar Dei. – And afterwards,
Non cui profundum Cæcitas lumen dedit
Dircæus augur vidit hunc alto sinu, etc.

*By winged Fantasy,
My embassy is given,
Till secrecy shall knowledge be
In the environs of Heaven.”

She ceas’d – and buried then her burning cheek
Abash’d, amid the lilies there, to seek
A shelter from the fervour of His eye ;
For the stars trembled at the Deity.
She stirr’d not – breath’d not – for a voice was there
How solemnly pervading the calm air !
A sound of silence on the startled ear
Which dreamy poets name “the music of the sphere.”
Ours is a world of words : Quiet we call
“Silence” – which is the merest word of all.
All Nature speaks, and ev’n ideal things
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings –
But ah ! not so when, thus, in realms on high
The eternal voice of God is passing by,
And the red winds are withering in the sky !

�”What tho’ in worlds which sightless cycles run,
Link’d to a little system, and one sun –
Where all my love is folly and the crowd
Still think my terrors but the thunder cloud,
The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath –
(Ah ! will they cross me in my angrier path ?)
What tho’ in worlds which own a single sun
The sands of Time grow dimmer as they run,

[* Seltsamen Tochter Jovis
Seinem Schosskinde
Der Phantasie. – Göethe.]

[� Sightless – too small to be seen – Legge.]

Yet thine is my resplendency, so given
To bear my secrets thro’ the upper Heaven.
Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,
With all thy train, athwart the moony sky –
*Apart – like fire-flies in Sicilian night,
And wing to other worlds another light !
Divulge the secrets of thy embassy
To the proud orbs that twinkle – and so be
To ev’ry heart a barrier and a ban
Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man !”

Up rose the maiden in the yellow night,
The single-mooned eve ! – on Earth we plight
Our faith to one love – and one moon adore –
The birth-place of young Beauty had no more.
As sprang that yellow star from downy hours
Up rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,
And bent o’er sheeny mountain and dim plain
�Her way – but left not yet her Therasæan reign.

[* I have often noticed a peculiar movement of the fire-flies ; – they
will collect in a body and fly off, from a common centre, into innumerable
radii.]

[� Therasæa, or Therasea, the island mentioned by Seneca, which, in a
moment, arose from the sea to the eyes of astonished mariners.]

Part II.

HIGH on a mountain of enamell’d head –
Such as the drowsy shepherd on his bed
Of giant pasturage lying at his ease,
Raising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees
With many a mutter’d “hope to be forgiven”
What time the moon is quadrated in Heaven –
Of rosy head, that towering far away
Into the sunlit ether, caught the ray
Of sunken suns at eve – at noon of night,
While the moon danc’d with the fair stranger light –
Uprear’d upon such height arose a pile
Of gorgeous columns on th’ unburthen’d air,
Flashing from Parian marble that twin smile
Far down upon the wave that sparkled there,
And nursled the young mountain in its lair.
*Of molten stars their pavement, such as fall
Thro’ the ebon air, besilvering the pall
Of their own dissolution, while they die –
Adorning then the dwellings of the sky.
A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,
Sat gently on these columns as a crown –
A window of one circular diamond, there,
Look’d out above into the purple air,