Mother of this unfathomable world! 
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched 20
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries.  I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, 25
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are.  In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, 30
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears,
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made 35
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge:...and, though ne’er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought, 40
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain 45
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.

There was a Poet whose untimely tomb 50
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o’er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:—­
A lovely youth,—­no mourning maiden decked 55
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:—­
Gentle, and brave, and generous,—­no lorn bard
Breathed o’er his dark fate one melodious sigh: 
He lived, he died, he sung in solitude. 60
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. 
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, 65
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

By solemn vision, and bright silver dream
His infancy was nurtured.  Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air,
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. 70
The fountains of divine philosophy
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great,
Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt