I saw but them-they were the world to me.
I saw but them-saw only them for hours-
Saw only them until the moon went down.
What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten
Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres!

How dark a wo! yet how sublime a hope!
How silently serene a sea of pride!

How daring an ambition! yet how deep-
How fathomless a capacity for love!

But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,
Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;
And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees
Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained.
They would not go--they never yet have gone.
Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,
They have not left me (as my hopes have) since.
They follow me--they lead me through the years.
They are my ministers--yet I their slave.
Their office is to illumine and enkindle--
My duty, to be saved by their bright light,
And purified in their electric fire,
And sanctified in their elysian fire.

'They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope,)
And are far up in Heaven-the stars I kneel to
In the sad, silent watches of my night;
While even in the meridian glare of day
I see them still-two sweetly scintillant
Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!

ΤΟ

Nor long ago, the writer of these lines,
In the mad pride of intellectuality,

Maintained the power of words "--denied that ever
A thought arose within the human brain

Beyond the utterance of the human tongue :
And now, as if in mockery of that boast,
Two words-two foreign soft dissyllables—
Italian tones, made only to be murmured
By angels dreaming in the moonlit " dew
That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,”
Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,

Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,
Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions

Than even seraph harper, Israfel,

(Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,") Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.

The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.

With thy dear name as text, though bidden by thee,

I cannot write-I cannot speak or think—

Alas, I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling,
This standing motionless upon the golden
Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams,
Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,
And thrilling as I see, upon the right,
Upon the left, and all the way along,
Amid unpurpled vapors, far away

To where the prospect terminates—thee only.

ULALUME.

THE skies they were ashen and sober;

The leaves they were crisped and sereThe leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid region of Weir—–
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir

Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of

cypress, I roamed with my Soul--
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

These were days when my heart was volcanic

As the scoriac rivers that roll