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Poems, 1799



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THE FIRST BOOK.

  Orleans was hush'd in sleep. Stretch'd on her couch  The delegated Maiden lay: with toil  Exhausted and sore anguish, soon she closed  Her heavy eye-lids; not reposing then,  For busy Phantasy, in other scenes  Awakened. Whether that superior powers,  By wise permission, prompt the midnight dream,  Instructing so the passive [1] faculty;  Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog,  Flies free, and soars amid the invisible world,  And all things 'are' that [2] 'seem'.

                               Along a moor,  Barren, and wide, and drear, and desolate,  She roam'd a wanderer thro' the cheerless night.  Far thro' the silence of the unbroken plain  The bittern's boom was heard, hoarse, heavy, deep,  It made most fitting music to the scene.  Black clouds, driven fast before the stormy wind,  Swept shadowing; thro' their broken folds the moon  Struggled sometimes with transitory ray,  And made the moving darkness visible.  And now arrived beside a fenny lake  She stands: amid its stagnate waters, hoarse  The long sedge rustled to the gales of night.  An age-worn bark receives the Maid, impell'd  By powers unseen; then did the moon display  Where thro' the crazy vessel's yawning side  The muddy wave oozed in: a female guides,  And spreads the sail before the wind, that moan'd  As melancholy mournful to her ear,  As ever by the dungeon'd wretch was heard  Howling at evening round the embattled towers  Of that hell-house [3] of France, ere yet sublime  The almighty people from their tyrant's hand  Dash'd down the iron rod.                           Intent the Maid  Gazed on the pilot's form, and as she gazed  Shiver'd, for wan her face was, and her eyes  Hollow, and her sunk cheeks were furrowed deep,  Channell'd by tears; a few grey locks hung down  Beneath her hood: then thro' the Maiden's veins  Chill crept the blood, for, as the night-breeze pass'd,  Lifting her tattcr'd mantle, coil'd around  She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart.

  The plumeless bat with short shrill note flits by,  And the night-raven's scream came fitfully,  Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid  Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank  Leaps, joyful to escape, yet trembling still  In recollection.

                    There, a mouldering pile  Stretch'd its wide ruins, o'er the plain below  Casting a gloomy shade, save where the moon  Shone thro' its fretted windows: the dark Yew,  Withering with age, branched there its naked roots,  And there the melancholy Cypress rear'd  Its head; the earth was heav'd with many a mound,  And here and there a half-demolish'd tomb.

  And now, amid the ruin's darkest shade,  The Virgin's eye beheld where pale blue flames  Rose wavering, now just gleaming from the earth,  And now in darkness drown'd....