gh sometime eloquent to me;
And where my pictures hang with other forms
Instinct from what I know: where friends portrayed
Like ghosts loom on me from another world.
Then what remains, but, like a child worn out
With weeping, that I sink me down to rest,
To sleep, not dream--and if I could to die?

III. MY LADY'S VOICE FROM HEAVEN.

I had been sitting by her tomb
In torpor one dark night;
When fitful tremours shook the doom
Of cold lethargic settled gloom,
That weighed upon my sight:

And while I sat, and sickly heaves
Disturbed my spirit's sloth,
A wind came, blown o'er distant sheaves,
That hissing, tore and lashed the leaves
And lashed the undergrowth:

It roared and howled, it raged about
With some determined aim;
And storming up the night, brought out
The moon, that like a happy shout,
Called forth My Lady's name,

In sudden splendour on the stone.
Then, for an instant, I
Snatched and heaped up my past, bestrown
With hopes and kisses, struggling moan,
And pangs: as suddenly,

Oppressed with overwhelming weight,
Down fell the edifice;
When touched, as by the hand of Fate,
My gloom was gone. I felt my state
So light, I sobbed for bliss.

The loud winds, spent in seeking rest,
Dropped dead. My fevered brow
Drank coolness from the grass it pressed;
And in my desolated breast
A change began to grow,

While feeling those tears slowly drain
The load of grief which had
A sluggish curse within me lain,
Save when remembrance wrought my brain
For vivid moments mad.

My tears, as treasures of a wreck
That in the ocean slept,
Recovered, ran without a check;
And earth was my good mother's neck
To which I clung and wept.

I rose at length, and felt a dense
Benumbed dead weight. And now
The night air hung in deep suspense!
A singing hush that pressed my sense
And stunned me like a blow:

Through my lids clenched the living air
In gold and purple rings
Danced musically round me there,
The light it held throbbed with the glare
And beat of rapid wings.

Mine eyes I dared not try to raise;
My Lady's beamed on me
In fixed serenity of gaze,
And were what old sunshiny days
In childhood used to be.

A gasping lapse; and I was whirled
Round the faint void of space;
In dizzy circles hugely hurled,
I saw the constellated world
With every orb embrace,

To one stupendous vortex-light,
Spinning a fiery ram,
Then fail