FullReads

* In Scripture is this passage – “The sun shall not harm thee by day,
nor the moon by night.” It is perhaps not generally known that the moon,
in Egypt, has the effect of producing blindness to those who sleep with
the face exposed to its rays, to which circumstance the passage evidently
alludes.

They are light on the tresses,
But lead on the heart.

Ligeia ! Ligeia !
My beautiful one !
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run,
O ! is it thy will
On the breezes to toss ?
Or, capriciously still,
*Like the lone Albatross,
Incumbent on night
(As she on the air)
To keep watch with delight
On the harmony there ?

Ligeia ! whatever
Thy image may be,
No magic shall sever
Thy music from thee.
Thou hast bound many eyes
In a dreamy sleep –
But the strains still arise
Which thy vigilance keep –
The sound of the rain
Which leaps down to the flower,
And dances again
In the rhythm of the shower –
�The murmur that springs
From the growing of grass

* The Albatross is said to sleep on the wing.

� I met with this idea in an old English tale, which I am now unable
to obtain and quote from memory : – “The verie essence and, as it were,
springe-heade, and origine of all musiche is the verie pleasaunte sounde
which the trees of the forest do make when they growe.”

Are the music of things –
But are modell’d, alas ! –
Away, then my dearest,
O ! hie thee away
To springs that lie clearest
Beneath the moon-ray –
To lone lake that smiles,
In its dream of deep rest,
At the many star-isles
That enjewel its breast –
Where wild flowers, creeping,
Have mingled their shade,
On its margin is sleeping
Full many a maid –
Some have left the cool glade, and
* Have slept with the bee –
Arouse them my maiden,
On moorland and lea –
Go ! breathe on their slumber,
All softly in ear,
The musical number
They slumber’d to hear –
For what can awaken
An angel so soon

* The wild bee will not sleep in the shade if there be moonlight.
The rhyme in this verse, as in one about sixty lines before, has an
appearance of affectation. It is, however, imitated from Sir W. Scott, or
rather from Claud Halcro – in whose mouth I admired its effect :
O ! were there an island,
Tho’ ever so wild
Where woman might smile, and
No man be beguil’d, etc.

Whose sleep hath been taken
Beneath the cold moon,
As the spell which no slumber
Of witchery may test,
The rythmical number
Which lull’d him to rest ?”

Spirits in wing, and angels to the view,
A thousand seraphs burst th’ Empyrean thro’,
Young dreams still hovering on their drowsy flight –
Seraphs in all but “Knowledge,” the keen light
That fell, refracted, thro’ thy bounds, afar
O Death ! from eye of God upon that star:
Sweet was that error – sweeter still that death –
Sweet was that error – ev’n with us the breath
Of science dims the mirror of our joy –
To them ’twere the Simoom, and would destroy –
For what (to them) availeth it to know
That Truth is Falsehood – or that Bliss is Woe ?
Sweet was their death – with them to die was rife
With the last ecstacy of satiate life –
Beyond that death no immortality –
But sleep that pondereth and is not “to be” –
And there – oh ! may my weary spirit dwell –
*Apart from Heaven’s Eternity – and yet how far from Hell !