rifle and untouched the dove
Rose beating lustrous wings, but Ilsabe--
"God's wrath! the sight!"--fell smitten, and the blood
Sprang red from shattered brow and silent hair--
That bullet strangely thro' her brow and brain....
And what of Rudolf? ah! of him you ask?
That proud Franconian who would scoff at Fate
And scorn all state; who cried black Satan friend
Sooner than our white Christ;--why, he went mad
O' the moment, and into the haunted Harz
Fled, an unholy thing, and perished there
The prey of demons of the Dummburg. But
I one of few less superstitious who
Say, as the finale of a madman's deed,
He in the Bode, from that ragged rock,
The Devil's Dancing Place, did leap and die.

TO REVERY.

What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought,
What walls of bastioned Parian, lucid rose,
What marts of crystal, for the eyes of Thought
Hast builded on what Islands of Repose!
Vague onyx columns ranked Corinthian,
Or piled Ionic, colonnading heights
That loom above long burst of mythic seas:
Vast gynaeceums of carnelian;
Micaceous temples, far marmorean flights,
Where winds the arabesque and plastique frieze.

Where bulbous domes of coruscating ore
Cloud--like convulsive sunsets--lands that dream,
Myrrh-fragrant, over siren seas and hoar,
Dashed with stiff, breezy foam of ocean's stream.
Tempestuous architecture-revelries;
Built melodies of marble or clear glass;
Effulgent sculptures chiseled out of thought
In misty attitudes, whose majesties
Feed full the pleasure as those beauties pass
To pale extinctions which are beauty fraught.

On rebeck and on rose in plinths of spars,
On glimmering solitudes of flower and stone,
A twilight-glow swoons settled, burned with stars,
Deep violet dusk developing nor done.
Where float fair nacreous shapes like deities,--
Existences of glory musical,--
'Round whose warm hair twist fillets' coiling gold,
Their limbs Olympian lovely, and their eyes
Dark oblique fervors; and most languorous tall
In woven white with girdling gold threefold.

There darkling the consummate vintage sleeps,--
Lethe-nepenthes for Earth-agony,--
In sealed amphorae some Sybil keeps,
World-old, forever cellared secretly.
A wine of Xeres or of Syracuse?
A fierce Falernian?--Ah! no vile Sabine!--
A stol'n ambrosia of what olden god?
W