Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/152

116 And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,

And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,

Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,

And thou art distant in Humanity.

'I know what was, I feel full well what is,

And I should rage, if spirits could go mad;

Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss,

That paleness warms my grave, as though I had

A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss

To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad;

Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel

A greater love through all my essence steal.'

The Spirit mourn'd 'Adieu!'—dissolved, and left

The atom darkness in a slow turmoil;

As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,

Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,

We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,

And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:

It made sad Isabella's eyelids ache,

And in the dawn she started up awake.

'Ha! ha!' said she, 'I knew not this hard life,

I thought the worst was simple misery;

I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife

Portion'd us—happy days, or else to die;

But there is crime—a brother's bloody knife!

Sweet Spirit, thou hast school'd my infancy:

I 'll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes,

And greet thee morn and even in the skies.'

When the full morning came, she had devised

How she might secret to the forest hie;

How she might find the clay, so dearly prized,

And sing to it one latest lullaby;

How her short absence might be unsurmised,

While she the inmost of the dream would try.

Resolved, she took with her an aged nurse,

And went into that dismal forest-hearse.

See, as they creep along the river side,

How she doth whisper to that aged Dame,

And, after looking round the champaign wide,

Shows her a knife.—'What feverous hectic flame

Burns in thee, child?—what good can thee betide,

That thou shouldst smile again?'—The evening came,

And they had found Lorenzo's earthy bed;

The flint was there, the berries at his head.

Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard,

And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,

Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,

To see skull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole;

Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd,

And filling it once more with human soul?

Ah! this is holiday to what was felt

When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

She gazed into the fresh-thrown mould, as though

One glance did fully all its secrets tell;