And, if our Muse have sketched with pencil true
The wife--the mother--firm, yet gentle too--
Whose soul, wrapt up in ties itself hath spun,
Trembles, if touched in the remotest one;
Who loves--yet dares even Love himself disown,
When Honor's broken shaft supports his throne:
If such our Ina, she may scorn the evils,
Dire as they are, of Critics and--Blue Devils.
THE DAY-DREAM.[1]
They both were husht, the voice, the chords,--
I heard but once that witching lay;
And few the notes, and few the words.
My spell-bound memory brought away;
Traces, remembered here and there,
Like echoes of some broken strain;--
Links of a sweetness lost in air,
That nothing now could join again.
Even these, too, ere the morning, fled;
And, tho' the charm still lingered on,
That o'er each sense her song had shed,
The song itself was faded, gone;--
Gone, like the thoughts that once were ours,
On summer days, ere youth had set;
Thoughts bright, we know, as summer flowers,
Tho' _what_ they were we now forget.
In vain with hints from other strains
I wooed this truant air to come--
As birds are taught on eastern plains
To lure their wilder kindred home.
In vain:--the song that Sappho gave,
In dying, to the mournful sea,
Not muter slept beneath the wave
Than this within my memory.
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