There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the flash might but pass through them,—­but the fire must come down from heaven.  Ah! but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumulus of sluggish satiety?  I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship,—­the immortal maid, who, name her what you will,—­Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,—­sits by the pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.

MUSA.

  O my lost Beauty!—­hast thou folded quite
     Thy wings of morning light
     Beyond those iron gates
  Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
  And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
     To chill our fiery dreams,
  Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

  Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
     Whose flowers are silvered hair!—­
     Have I not loved thee long,
  Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
  And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song? 
     Ah, wilt thou yet return,
  Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

  Come to me!—­I will flood thy silent shrine
     With my soul’s sacred wine,
     And heap thy marble floors
  As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
  In leafy islands walled with madrepores
     And lapped in Orient seas,
  When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

  Come to me!—­thou shalt feed on honeyed words,
     Sweeter than song of birds;—­
     No wailing bulbul’s throat,
  No melting dulcimer’s melodious note,
  When o’er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
     Thy ravished sense might soothe
  With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

  Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
     Sought in those bowers of green
      Where loop the clustered vines
  And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,—­
  Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
      And Summer’s fruited gems,
  And coral pendants shorn from Autumn’s berried stems.

  Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,—­
      Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
      Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
  Carved with old names Life’s time-worn roll disowns,
  Lean, lichen-spotted, o’er the crumbled bones
      Still slumbering where they lay
  While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away!

  Spread o’er my couch thy visionary wing! 
      Still let me dream and sing,—­
      Dream of that winding shore
  Where scarlet cardinals bloom,—­for me no more,—­
  The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
      And clustering nenuphars
  Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!