Out of the day and night
  A joy has taken flight;
    Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar
  Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
    No more—­O, never more!

THE POET’S DREAM.

[From Prometheus Unbound.]

  On a poet’s lips I slept
  Dreaming like a love-adept
  In the sound his breathing kept. 
  Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
  But feeds on the aerial kisses
  Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses. 
  He will watch from dawn to gloom
  The lake-reflected sun illume
  The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,
  Nor heed nor see what things they be;
  But from these create he can
  Forms more real than living man,
    Nurslings of immortality.

GEORGE GORDON BYRON.

ELEGY ON THYRZA.

  And thou art dead, as young and fair
    As aught of mortal birth: 
  And form so soft and charms so rare,
    Too soon returned to earth: 
  Though earth received them in her bed,
  And o’er the spot the crowd may tread
    In carelessness or mirth,
  There is an eye which could not brook
  A moment on that grave to look.

  I will not ask where thou liest low
    Nor gaze upon the spot;
  There flowers or weeds at will may grow,
    So I behold them not: 
  It is enough for me to prove
  That what I loved and long must love
    Like common earth can rot;
  To me there needs no stone to tell
  ’Tis nothing that I loved so well.

  Yet did I love thee to the last
    As fervently as thou,
  Who didst not change through all the past
    And canst not alter now. 
  The love where death has set his seal
  Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,
    Nor falsehood disavow: 
  And, what were worse, thou canst not see
  Or wrong, or change, or fault in me.

  The better days of life were ours;
    The worst can be but mine: 
  The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,
    Shall never more be thine. 
  The silence of that dreamless sleep
  I envy now too much to weep,
    Nor need I to repine
  That all those charms have passed away,
  I might have watched through long decay.

  The flower in ripened bloom unmatched
    Must fall the earliest prey;
  Though by no hand untimely snatched,
    The leaves must drop away: 
  And yet it were a greater grief
  To watch it withering leaf by leaf,
    Than see it plucked to-day;
  Since earthly eye but ill can bear
  To trace the change to foul from fair.

  I know not if I could have borne
    To see thy beauties fade;
  The night that followed such a morn
    Had worn a deeper shade: 
  Thy day without a cloud hath past,
  And thou wert lovely to the last,
    Extinguished, not decayed;
  As stars that shoot along the sky
  Shine brightest as they fall from high.