’Nothing in nature is unbeautiful,
  So, brother, pluck and spare not.’  So I wove
  Even the dull-blooded poppy, ’whose red flower
  Hued with the scarlet of a fierce sunrise,
  Like to the wild youth of an evil king,
  Is without sweetness, but who crowns himself
  Above the secret poisons of his heart
  In his old age’—­a graceful thought of hers
  Graven on my fancy!  As I said, with these
  She crown’d her forehead.  O how like a nymph,
  A stately mountain-nymph, she look’d! how native
  Unto the hills she trod on!  What an angel! 
  How clothed with beams!  My eyes, fix’d upon hers,
  Almost forgot even to move again. 
  My spirit leap’d as with those thrills of bliss
  That shoot across the soul in prayer, and show us
  That we are surely heard.  Methought a light
  Burst from the garland I had woven, and stood
  A solid glory on her bright black hair: 
  A light, methought, broke from her dark, dark eyes,
  And shot itself into the singing winds;
  A light, methought, flash’d even from her white robe,
  As from a glass in the sun, and fell about
  My footsteps on the mountains.

                      About sunset
  We came unto the hill of woe, so call’d
  Because the legend ran that, long time since,
  One rainy night, when every wind blew loud,
  A woful man had thrust his wife and child
  With shouts from off the bridge, and following, plunged
  Into the dizzy chasm below.  Below,
  Sheer thro’ the black-wall’d cliff the rapid brook
  Shot down his inner thunders, built above
  With matted bramble and the shining gloss
  Of ivy-leaves, whose low-hung tresses, dipp’d
  In the fierce stream, bore downward with the wave. 
  The path was steep and loosely strewn with crags
  We mounted slowly:  yet to both of us
  It was delight, not hindrance:  unto both
  Delight from hardship to be overcome,
  And scorn of perilous seeming:  unto me
  Intense delight and rapture that I breathed,
  As with a sense of nigher Deity,
  With her to whom all outward fairest things
  Were by the busy mind referr’d, compared,
  As bearing no essential fruits of excellence. 
  Save as they were the types and shadowings
  Of hers—­and then that I became to her
  A tutelary angel as she rose,
  And with a fearful self-impelling joy
  Saw round her feet the country far away,
  Beyond the nearest mountain’s bosky brows,
  Burst into open prospect—­heath and hill,
  And hollow lined and wooded to the lips—­
  And steep down walls of battlemented rock
  Girded with broom or shiver’d into peaks—­
  And glory of broad waters interfused,
  Whence rose as it were breath and steam of gold;
  And over all the great wood rioting
  And climbing, starr’d at slender intervals
  With blossom tufts of purest white; and last,
  Framing the mighty landskip to the West,
  A purple range of purple cones, between
  Whose interspaces gush’d, in blinding bursts,
  The incorporate light of sun and sea.