Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/155

Rh O Echo, Echo, on some other day,

From isles Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!

Spirits of grief, sing not your 'Well-a-way!'

For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;

Will die a death too lone and incomplete,

Now they have ta'en away her Basil sweet.

Piteous she look'd on dead and senseless things,

Asking for her lost Basil amorously:

And with melodious chuckle in the strings

Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry

After the Pilgrim in his wanderings,

To ask him where her Basil was; and why

'T was hid from her: 'For cruel 'tis,' said she,

'To steal my Basil-pot away from me.'

And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,

Imploring for her Basil to the last.

No heart was there in Florence but did mourn

In pity of her love, so overcast.

And a sad ditty of this story born

From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd:

Still is the burthen sung—'O cruelty,

To steal my Basil-pot away from me!'

aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.

So thou wast blind!—but then the veil was rent,

For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live,

And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,

And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;

Ay on the shores of darkness there is light,

And precipices show untrodden green;

There is a budding morrow in midnight;

There is a triple sight in blindness keen:

Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befell

To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!

May I sing to thee

As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiae?

Or may I woo thee

In earlier Sicilian? or thy smiles

Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles,

By bards who died content on pleasant sward,

Leaving great verse unto a little clan?

O, give me their old vigour, and unheard

Save of the quiet Primrose, and the span

Of heaven and few ears,

Rounded by thee, my song should die away

Content as theirs,

Rich in the simple worship of a day.