With pillow’d head all gracefully reclined,
  And grape-like curls in languid clusters wreath’d,
  Within a cottage room she sits to die;
  Where from the window, in a western view,
  Majestic ocean rolls.—­A summer eve
  Shines o’er the earth, and all the glowing air
  Stirs faintly, like a pulse; against the shore
  The waves unrol them with luxurious joy,
  While o’er the midway deep she looks, where like
  A sea god glares the everlasting Sun
  O’er troops of billows marching in his beam!—­
  From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, her eyes
  Are lifted, bright with wonder and with awe,
  Till through each vein reanimation rolls! 
  ’Tis past; and now her filmy glance is fix’d
  Upon the heavens, as though her spirit gazed
  On that immortal world, to which ’tis bound: 
  The sun hath sunk.—­her soul hath fled without
  A pang, and left her lovely in her death,
  And beautiful as an embodied dream.

MORTALITY.

  All that we love and feel on Nature’s face,
  Bear dim relations to our common doom. 
  The clouds that blush, and die a beamy death,
  Or weep themselves away in rain,—­the streams
  That flow along in dying music,—­leaves
  That fade, and drop into the frosty arms
  Of Winter, there to mingle with dead flowers,—­
  Are all prophetic of our own decay.

BEAUTY

  How oft, as unregarded on a throng
  Of lovely creatures, in whose liquid eyes
  The heart-warm feelings bathe, I’ve look’d
  With all a Poet’s passion, and have wish’d
  That years might never pluck their graceful smiles—­
  How often Death, as with a viewless wand,
  Has touch’d the scene, and witch’d it to a tomb! 
  Where Beauty dwindled to a ghastly wreck,
  And spirits of the Future seem’d to cry,—­
  Thus will it be when Time has wreak’d revenge.

MELANCHOLY.

  When mantled with the melancholy glow
  Of eve, she wander’d oft:  and when the wind,
  Like a stray infant down autumnal dales
  Roam’d wailingly, she loved to mourn and muse: 
  To commune with the lonely orphan flowers,
  And through sweet Nature’s ruin trace her own.

VISION OF HEAVEN.

  An empyrean infinitely vast
  And irridescent, roof’d with rainbows, whose
  Transparent gleams like water-shadows shone,
  Before me lay:  Beneath this dazzling vault—­
  I felt, but cannot paint the splendour there! 
  Glory, beyond the wonder of the heart
  To dream, around interminably blazed. 
  A spread of fields more beautiful than skies
  Flush’d with the flowery radiance of the west;
  Valleys in greenest glory, deck’d with trees
  That trembled music to the ambrosial airs
  That chanted round them,—­vein’d with glossy streams,
  That gush’d, like feelings from a raptured soul: