Too late thou leav'st the high command

To which thy weakness clung;

All evil spirit as thou art,

It is enough to grieve the heart,

To see thine own unstrung;

To think that God's fair world hath been The footstool of a thing so mean;

And Earth hath spilt her blood for him,
Who thus can hoard his own!

And Monarchs bowed the trembling limb,
And thanked him for a throne!
Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear,
When thus thy mightiest foes their fear
In humblest guise have shown.
Oh! ne'er may tyrants leave behind
A brighter name to lure mankind!

Thine evil deeds are writ in gore,
Nor written thus in vain -
Thy triumphs tell of fame no more,
Or deepen every stain-
If thou hadst died as honour dies,
Some new Napoleon might arise,

To shame the world again -
But who would soar the solar height,
To set in such a starless night?

Weighed in the balance, hero dust
Is vile as vulgar clay;

Thy scales, Mortality! are just

To all that pass away;

But yet methought the living great
Some higher sparks should animate,

To dazzle and dismay;

Nor deemed Contempt could thus make mirth Of these, the Conquerors of the earth.

And she, proud Austria's mournful flower,
Thy still imperial bride;

How bears her breast the torturing hour?
Still clings she to thy side?

Must she too bend, must she too share
Thy late repentance, long despair,
Thou thornless Homicide?

If still she loves thee, hoard that gem,
"Tis worth thy vanished diadem!

Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle,
And gaze upon the sea;
That element may meet thy smile,
It ne'er was ruled by thee!
Or trace with thine all idle hand
In loitering mood upon the sand
That Earth is now as free!
That Corinth's pedagogue hath now
Transferred his by-word to thy brow.

Thou Timour! in his captive's cage
What thoughts will there be thine,

While brooding in thy prisoned rage? But one "The world was mine!" Unless like he of Babylon,

All sense is with thy sceptre gonc,
Life will not long confine

That spirit poured so widely forth-
So long obeyed so little worth!

Or like the thief of fire from heaven
Wilt thou withstand the shock?
And share with him, the unforgiven,
His vulture and his rock!

Foredoomed by God — by man accurst,
And that last act, though not thy worst,
The very Fiend's arch mock;
He in his fall preserved his pride,

And, if a mortal, had as proudly died!

THE DREAM.

OUR life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become

A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;

They pass like spirits of the past, — they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power

The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

They make us what we were not what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows - Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind? - The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed

Perchance in sleep for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity, the last

As 't were the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs; the hill
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem

Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,
Not by the sport of nature, but of man:
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself-but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful:
And both were young - yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;

He had no breath nor being, but in hers;
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which colored all his objects: - he had ceased
To live within himself; she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all upon a tone,

A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,