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VI.

He only who hath learned to trace
The secret workings of the heart,
When gazing on thine earthly face,
May feel how beautiful thou art.

VII.

For in that truer light displayed,

The glances in thine eye that speak—

The mingled hues of sun and shade,

That pass across thy changing cheek

VIII.

Are full of loveliness, that tells

Their Heavenly Source, none else may know—

The chastened will, that passion quells,

The heart of love, the mind of snow.

IX.

Who hath the master-key that opes

Thy secret soul, to others sealed? To him a thousand holy hopes

Are in thine upward look revealed.

X.

Thy brow the faithful record bears
Of conquest o'er temptation's wile;
Of all kind thoughts, and loving prayers,
A very chronicle thy smile!

XI.

And thus upon the gentle face

Of old I scarce accounted fair, The look divine I faintly trace

The Angel shall hereafter wear!

THE SONG OF THE SYRENS.

I.

IT was broad of noon on the Grecian seas;

In the sky not a cloud, in the air not a breeze;

The waves of the blue Ionian deep

In the glow of the sunshine lay half asleep;

As they lazily rose, and sleepily fell,
Heaving with soft voluptuous swell;

And lapping, with murmur faint and low,

The Syrens' Isle, with its sands of snow.

II.

The bark of Ulysses came gliding by;

Weary the task that the rowers ply;

For to each sweet sound through the air that steals,

The deadening wax their senses seals;

Save the leader alone, who, fettered fast
With gyves of steel to the galley's mast,
Gazed where the Isle, 'mid the purple deep,
Arose, like a Dream from the womb of Sleep.

III.

There sate three Forms on the snow-white sand;
A lute each held in her fair right hand;

All around them, the shelving shores were spread
With ghastly remains of unburied dead:

The bones bleached white by so many a sun;
The corpse that had breathed but an hour agone;
And the festering heap, at whose foul decay
The boldest had trembled and turned away.
But the Chief, as he gazed on the shelving shore,
Saw the three fair Forms, and he saw no more.

IV.

Radiant and lustrous their beauty seemed,

Such as sight ne'er shaped, nor hath fancy dreamed. The brightest and fairest of ancient days,

Whose charms are the theme of immortal lays, Whose loveliness lured from their thrones on high

The Sovereign Lords of the Earth and Sky:

And the bliss divine of their love that shared, Were lifeless and cold, when with these compared.

V.

They touched their lutes, and a wondrous spell
Over sea and land in an instant fell.

The rustle of leaves into stillness died;

Into stillness the plash of the rippling tide:
It seemed as if, hushed by that signal sweet,
The pulses of Nature had ceased to beat:
And feeling and thought, in the tide of sound,
Like rills in a torrent, were lost and drowned.

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