On REMBRANT; occasioned by his Picture of Jacob’s Dream.

As in that twilight, superstitious age
When all beyond the narrow grasp of mind
Seem’d fraught with meanings of supernal kind,
When e’en the learned philosophic sage,
Wont with the stars thro’ boundless space to range. 
Listen’d with rev’rence to the changeling’s tale;
E’en so, thou strangest of all beings strange! 
E’en so thy visionary scenes I hail;
That like the ramblings of an idiot’s speech,
No image giving of a thing on earth. 
Nor thought significant in Reason’s reach,
Yet in their random shadowings give birth
To thoughts and things from other worlds that come,
And fill the soul, and strike the reason dumb.

Sonnet

On the Luxembourg Gallery.

There is a Charm no vulgar mind can reach. 
No critick thwart, no mighty master teach;
A Charm how mingled of the good and ill! 
Yet still so mingled that the mystick whole
Shall captive hold the struggling Gazer’s will,
’Till vanquish’d reason own its full control. 
And such, oh Rubens, thy mysterious art,
The charm that vexes, yet enslaves the heart! 
Thy lawless style, from timid systems free,
Impetuous rolling like a troubled sea,
High o’er the rocks of reason’s lofty verge
Impending hangs; yet, ere the foaming surge
Breaks o’er the bound, the refluent ebb of taste
Back from the shore impels the wat’ry waste.

Sonnet

To my venerable Friend, the President of the Royal Academy.

From one unus’d in pomp of words to raise
A courtly monument of empty praise,
Where self, transpiring through the flimsy pile,
Betrays the builder’s ostentatious guile,
Accept, oh West, these unaffected lays,
Which genius claims and grateful justice pays. 
Still green in age, thy vig’rous powers impart
The youthful freshness of a blameless heart;
For thine, unaided by another’s pain,
The wiles of envy, or the sordid train
Of selfishness, has been the manly race
Of one who felt the purifying grace
Of honest fame; nor found the effort vain
E’en far itself to love thy soul-ennobling art.

The Mad Lover

At the Grave of his Mistress.

Stay, gentle Stranger, softly tread! 
  Oh, trouble not this hallow’d heap. 
Vile Envy says my Julia’s dead;
  But Envy thus Will never sleep.

Ye creeping Zephyrs, hist you, pray,
  Nor press so hard yon wither’d leaves;
For Julia sleeps beneath this clay—­
  Nay, feel it, how her bosom heaves!

Oh, she was purer than the stream
  That saw the first created morn;
Her words were like a sick man’s dream
  That nerves with health a heart forlorn.

And who their lot would hapless deem
  Those lovely, speaking lips to view;
That light between like rays that beam
  Through sister clouds of rosy hue?