Page:Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia.djvu/14

 :Yet she shall move the strange desires of men; For in her lie dim glories that she dreams Not of, and on her ever broods a light Her Cyprian eyes ne’er saw; and evermore Round her pale face shall pleading faces press; Round her shall mortal passion beat and ebb. Years hence, as waves on islands burst in foam, Madly shall lives on her strange beauty break.

When she is yours and in ambrosial glooms You secretly would chain her kiss by kiss, Though close you hold her in your hungering arms, And with voluptuous pantings you and she Mingle, and seem the insentient moment one, Yet will your groping soul but lean to her Across the dusk, as hill to lonely hill, And in your warmest raptures you shall learn There is a citadel surrenders not To any captor of the outer walls; In sorrow you shall learn there is a light Illumines not, a chamber it were best To leave untrod. O Ares, dread the word That silences this timorous nightingale, The touch that wakens strings too frail for hands; For, giving her, I gain what you shall lose; Forsaking her, I hold her closer still. The sea shall take a deeper sound; the stars Stranger and more mysterious henceforth Shall seem, the darkening sky-line of the West