Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.

"O ye, whom wrath consumes! who, passion-stung,

Writhe at defeat, and nurse your agonies!

Shut up your senses, stifle up your ears,
My voice is not a bellows unto ire.
Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I bring
proof

How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop:

And in the proof much comfort will I give,

If ye will take that comfort in its truth. We fall by course of Nature's law, not force

Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou

Hast sifted well the atom-universe;
But for this reason, that thou art the
King,

And only blind from sheer supremacy,
One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,
Through which I wandered to eternal
truth.

And first, as thou wast not the first of

In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed, But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,

In sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay,

Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed

Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;

Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;

Blissfully havened both from joy and pain;

Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray:

Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,

As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

Stolen to this paradise, and so entranced,

Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress,

And listened to her breathing, if it chanced

To wake into a slumberous tender

ness;

Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,

And breathed himself: then from the

closet crept,

Noiseless as fear in a wide wilder

ness,

And over the hushed carpet, silent, stept,

And 'tween the curtains peeped, where, lo! - how fast she slept.

Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon

Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he

set

A table, and, half anguished, threw thereon

A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:

O for some drowsy Morphean amulet! The boisterous, midnight, festive

clarion,