nd Mortal's agony
With an Immortal's patience blending:--Vain
The struggle--vain, against the coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp,
The Old Man's clench; the long envenomed chain[pv]
Rivets the living links,--the enormous Asp
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.[pw]

CLXI.

Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,[527]
The God of Life, and Poesy, and Light--
The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot--the arrow bright
With an Immortal's vengeance--in his eye
And nostril beautiful Disdain, and Might
And Majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.

CLXII.

But in his delicate form--a dream of Love,[528]
Shaped by some solitary Nymph, whose breast
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
And maddened in that vision[529]--are exprest
All that ideal Beauty ever blessed
The mind with in its most unearthly mood,
When each Conception was a heavenly Guest--
A ray of Immortality--and stood,
Starlike, around, until they gathered to a God![px]

CLXIII.

And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven
The fire which we endure[530]--it was repaid
By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath arrayed
With an eternal Glory--which, if made
By human hands, is not of human thought--
And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid
One ringlet in the dust--nor hath it caught
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.

CLXIV.

But where is he, the Pilgrim of my Song,
The Being who upheld it through the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more--these breathings are his last--
His wanderings done--his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing:--if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could be classed
With forms which live and suffer--let that pass--
His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass,[py]

CLXV.

Which gathers shadow--substance--life, and all
That we inherit in its mortal shroud--
And spreads the dim and universal pall
Th