Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, 185
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. 
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course, 190
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

Roused by the shock he started from his trance—­
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods, 195
Spread round him where he stood.  Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight?  The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation?  His wan eyes 200
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean’s moon looks on the moon in heaven. 
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts.  He eagerly pursues 205
Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade;
He overleaps the bounds.  Alas!  Alas! 
Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined
Thus treacherously?  Lost, lost, for ever lost
In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, 210
That beautiful shape!  Does the dark gate of death
Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep?  Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake,
Lead only to a black and watery depth, 215
While death’s blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung,
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales
Hides its dead eye from the detested day,
Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms? 
This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart; 220
The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung
His brain even like despair. 
While daylight held
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul.  At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream, 225
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness.—­As an eagle, grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with the poison, and precipitates
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, 230
Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight
O’er the wide aery wilderness:  thus driven
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,
Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,
Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, 235
Startling with careless step the moonlight snake,
He fled.  Red morning dawned upon his flight,
Shedding the mockery of its vital hues