s of Nile,
Leave Isis dreaming, and the frolic Pan's
Harsh trebles follow as a roaring bull,
Far as the gleaming temples of Indra,
And mourned in Memphis by his tawny priests?
It was thy joys, sun-nourished fire of wine!
The brimming purple of the hollow gold
They tasted and they worshiped--gods themselves!
"Wan Echo sat once in a spiral shell;
She, from its sea-dyed maziness of pearl,
Saw the mixed pageant dancing on the strand,
Where Nereus slept upon an isle of crags,
And o'er the slope of his far-foaming head
The strangeness of the orgies wildly cried,
Till the frore god shook many a billow curl,
Serened his face and stretched a welcome hand
With civil utt'rance for the Bacchus horn.
But now there tarries in her eye-balls' disks
That nomad troop, and naught her tongue may say
Save jostling words that haunt her muffled ears
Like feeble wave-beats in a deep sea-cave.
"Ah! the white stars, O Dionysos! now
Have dropped their glittering blossoms slowly down
Behind the snowy mountains in the West.
Aegeus sleeps, hushed by my murmuring harp,
And I have sung thy triumph; let me die!"
HACKELNBERG.
When down the Hartz the echoes swarm
He rides beneath the sounding storm
With mad "halloo!" and wild alarm
Of hound and horn--a wonder,
With his hunter black as night,
Ban-dogs fleet and fast as light,
And a stag as silver white
Drives before, like mist, in flight,
Glimmering 'neath the bursten thunder.
The were-wolf shuns his ruinous track,
Long-howling hid in braken black;
Around the forests reel and crack
And mountain torrents tumble;
And the spirits of the air
Whistling whirl with scattered hair,
Teeth that flash and eyes that glare,
'Round him as he chases there
With a noise of rains that rumble.
From thick Thuringian thickets growl
Fierce, fearful monsters black and foul;
And close before him a stritch-owl
Wails like a ghost unquiet:
Then the clouds aside are driven
And the moonlight, stormy striven.
Falls around the castle riven
Of the Dumburg, and the heaven
Maddens then with blacker riot.
THE LIMNAD.
I.
The lake she haunts lies dreamily
'Neath sleepy boughs of melody,
And far away an olden sea,
An olden sea booms mellow;
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