Page:The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats, 1899.djvu/72

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dark vapours have oppress'd our plains

For a long dreary season, comes a day

Born of the gentle South, and clears away

From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.

The anxious month, relievedrelievèd [sic] its pains,

Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;

The eyelids with the passing coolness play,

Like rose leaves with the drip of summer rains.

And calmest thoughts come round us; as, of leaves

Budding,—fruit ripening in stillness,—Autumn suns

Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves,—

Sweet Sappho's cheek,—a sleeping infant's breath,—

The gradual sand that through an hourglass runs,—

A woodland rivulet,—a Poet's death.

pleasant tale is like a little copse:

The honied lines so freshly interlace,

To keep the reader in so sweet a place,

So that he here and there full-hearted stops;

And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops

Come cool and suddenly against his face,

And, by the wandering melody, may trace

Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.

Oh! what a power has white simplicity!

What mighty power has this gentle story!

I, that do ever feel athirst for glory,

Could at this moment be content to lie

Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings

Were heard of none beside the mournful robins.

spirit is too weak—mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

Yet 't is a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.

Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—

A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

forgive me that I cannot speak

Definitively of these mighty things;

Forgive me, that I have not Eagle's wings—

That what I want I know not where to seek: