My fair vision, vanish!
In mercy-or banish

My fond soul by saying you love, or you hate;
Give Hope some dear token,

Or be the spell broken,

Whose web has enthralled me, the captive of Fate.

The long night is waning,

I cease my complaining;

Perchance ere another dark year rolls its sand,
The boatman that ever

Doth cross the Black River,

Shall point the way o'er to a mystical land!

What e'er Fate's decreeing,

Thou, beautiful being!

Shalt live in my heart, like the fire of the Greeks;
There, there, at its altar,

When Hope's voice shall falter,

Thy name shall be last, of all else that she speaks!

TO MY COUSIN,

MRS. F. M. GARDINER.

In thine eye's dark fountain,

I can see there swelling,
Gold and silver sands,

From Truth's sacred dwelling,

In the light of Love evermore upwelling.

I feel those mystic waters

Make it understood,

That a kindred nature,

Joining us in blood,

Poured from one same fountain our being's living flood

As oft upon a mountain

A clear spring gushes forth,

To right and left departing

From its spot of birth,

One flowing far to southward, the other to the north.

то MRS. F.

M.

GARDINER.

169

Still wide and wider wending,

By rock and chasm riven,
Divided still by distance,

Apart still ever driven,

Till gathered and united as the sea mists are in heaven!

Yet ere we've reached Death's ocean,

On Life's broad continent,

'Tis sweet to mingle, and to find

Floods from the peaks of being sent

Thus to bless each other as their tides are blent.

Yet though my heart's stream darkly
A night-shade shore doth lave,
Winds through a land of shadows,

A plain with many a grave,

Yet shall it grow more lucid commingled with thy wave.

And thus with thee united

I would wander to that sea
Whose broad spread vista opens.
So calm and tranquilly

On that unknown Pacific, the blue Eternity!

то

THOMAS BUCHANAN READ,

ON HIS DEPARTURE FROM AMERICA FOR ITALY.

Now, fare thee well! Bard of my own backwoods!

New Minnesinger of the Occident!

Thy beaded track be on the dark blue floods-
A Milky Way on towards the Orient.

The flying Angel of the Winds shall press
His unseen hands against thy bellied sail;

Thy ship the desert ocean's wilderness

Sweep, like a white cloud o'er a deep blue vale.
Bard of the woody West! we part. Around
The dark clue of life's mingled cord
Thy friendship, as a golden band has wound,
Circling, like fairy flowered rings the sward.

то THOMAS

BUCHANAN

READ.

171

I've seen thee touch, as with a wand of fire.

The lifeless canvas-till a living soul

Thou didst from out the shades inspire:

Like crimson horsemen round the midnight pole. But rarer yet, Agrippa's glass thou hast,

Where Nature's panorama is displayed;

The poet's shell, where, ere the vision's past,
'Tis burnt in words of golden light and shade!

Friend of my heart! I do confess me weak,

And own thy praise hath made my pure muse proud, As though an albatross should, in his beak,

Bear from the wave a sea-weed to the cloud!
To me thou leav'st a picture of thy face-
Though broke, upon my heart it shall be whole,
And memory's eyes into thine own shall gaze-
Those open windows of thy sunny soul!
And wilt thou, friend, in some calm, musing mood,
Shoot back an arrow from thy heart to mine-

A sunbeam from thine Alpine solitude

A thought as brief as bead upon the wine? Be it when twilight on the Arno's wave,

With purple pinions deepening into gloom, Lulls all to sleep and shadowed silence, save

Night's sweet flowers bursting from daylight's tomb! At such an hour, then mark you some one star That seems to hover o'er our blessed West. Be sure, my friend, I've fixed one East afar, And he beneath, in silence, I have blessed.