Had fall’n upon me, and the gilded snake
  Had nestled in this bosomthrone of love,
  But I had been at rest for evermore. 
  Long time entrancement held me:  all too soon,
  Life (like a wanton too-officious friend
  Who will not hear denial, vain and rude
  With proffer of unwished for services)
  Entering all the avenues of sense,
  Pass’d thro’ into his citadel, the brain
  With hated warmth of apprehensiveness: 
  And first the chillness of the mountain stream
  Smote on my brow, and then I seem’d to hear
  Its murmur, as the drowning seaman hears,
  Who with his head below the surface dropt,
  Listens the dreadful murmur indistinct
  Of the confused seas, and knoweth not
  Beyond the sound he lists:  and then came in
  O’erhead the white light of the weary moon,
  Diffused and molten into flaky cloud. 
  Was my sight drunk, that it did shape to me
  Him who should own that name? or had my fancy
  So lethargised discernment in the sense,
  That she did act the step-dame to mine eyes,
  Warping their nature, till they minister’d
  Unto her swift conceits?  ’Twere better thus
  If so be that the memory of that sound
  With mighty evocation, had updrawn
  The fashion and the phantasm of the form
  It should attach to.  There was no such thing.—­
  It was the man she loved, even Lionel,
  The lover Lionel, the happy Lionel,
  All joy; who drew the happy atmosphere
  Of my unhappy sighs, fed with my tears,
  To him the honey dews of orient hope. 
  Oh! rather had some loathly ghastful brow,
  Half-bursten from the shroud, in cere cloth bound,
  The dead skin withering on the fretted bone,
  The very spirit of Paleness made still paler
  By the shuddering moonlight, fix’d his eyes on mine
  Horrible with the anger and the heat
  Of the remorseful soul alive within,
  And damn’d unto his loathed tenement. 
  Methinks I could have sooner met that gaze! 
  Oh, how her choice did leap forth from his eyes! 
  Oh, how her love did clothe itself in smiles
  About his lips!  This was the very arch-mock
  And insolence of uncontrolled Fate,
  When the effect weigh’d seas upon my head
  To twit me with the cause. 
                          Why how was this? 
  Could he not walk what paths he chose, nor breathe
  What airs he pleased!  Was not the wide world free,
  With all her interchange of hill and plain
  To him as well as me?  I know not, faith: 
  But Misery, like a fretful, wayward child,
  Refused to look his author in the face,
  Must he come my way too?  Was not the South,
  The East, the West, all open, if he had fall’n
  In love in twilight?  Why should he come my way,
  Robed in those robes of light I must not wear,
  With that great crown of beams about his brows? 
  Come like an angel to a damned soul?