Click here to return to The Bluestocking Archive
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thy own soft-concher ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awakened eyes?
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-beneath on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjionted by soft-handed slumber,
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
The winged boy I knew;
But who was thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!O lastest born and loviest vision far
Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Pheabe's sapphire-region'd star,
Or vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky:
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor alter heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-chior tp make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung cemsor teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pail-mouth'd prophet dreamingO brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir'd
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olymians,
So let me by thy chior, and make me a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy vioce, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.Yes, I will be thy priest, and build thy fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant
pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind;
Far, far around those cluster'd trees
Fledged by wild-edged mountains steep by steep
And there by zephers, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardner fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thy all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm love in!