61. 
A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see
Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep. 530
Here lay two sister twins in infancy;
There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep;
Within, two lovers linked innocently
In their loose locks which over both did creep
Like ivy from one stem;—­and there lay calm 535
Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm.

62. 
But other troubled forms of sleep she saw,
Not to be mirrored in a holy song—­
Distortions foul of supernatural awe,
And pale imaginings of visioned wrong; 540
And all the code of Custom’s lawless law
Written upon the brows of old and young: 
‘This,’ said the wizard maiden, ’is the strife
Which stirs the liquid surface of man’s life.’

63. 
And little did the sight disturb her soul.—­ 545
We, the weak mariners of that wide lake
Where’er its shores extend or billows roll,
Our course unpiloted and starless make
O’er its wild surface to an unknown goal:—­
But she in the calm depths her way could take, 550
Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide
Beneath the weltering of the restless tide.

64. 
And she saw princes couched under the glow
Of sunlike gems; and round each temple-court
In dormitories ranged, row after row, 555
She saw the priests asleep—­all of one sort—­
For all were educated to be so.—­
The peasants in their huts, and in the port
The sailors she saw cradled on the waves,
And the dead lulled within their dreamless graves. 560

65. 
And all the forms in which those spirits lay
Were to her sight like the diaphanous
Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array
Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us
Only their scorn of all concealment:  they 565
Move in the light of their own beauty thus. 
But these and all now lay with sleep upon them,
And little thought a Witch was looking on them.

66. 
She, all those human figures breathing there,
Beheld as living spirits—­to her eyes 570
The naked beauty of the soul lay bare,
And often through a rude and worn disguise
She saw the inner form most bright and fair—­
And then she had a charm of strange device,
Which, murmured on mute lips with tender tone, 575
Could make that spirit mingle with her own.

67. 
Alas!  Aurora, what wouldst thou have given
For such a charm when Tithon became gray? 
Or how much, Venus, of thy silver heaven
Wouldst thou have yielded, ere Proserpina 580
Had half (oh! why not all?) the debt forgiven
Which dear Adonis had been doomed to pay,
To any witch who would have taught you it? 
The Heliad doth not know its value yet.