Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, 635
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink
Of that obscurest chasm;—­and thus he lay,
Surrendering to their final impulses
The hovering powers of life.  Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear 640
Marred his repose; the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintly smiling:—­his last sight 645
Was the great moon, which o’er the western line
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,
With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed
To mingle.  Now upon the jagged hills
It rests; and still as the divided frame 650
Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet’s blood,
That ever beat in mystic sympathy
With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still: 
And when two lessening points of light alone
Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp 655
Of his faint respiration scarce did stir
The stagnate night:—­till the minutest ray
Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. 
It paused—­it fluttered.  But when heaven remained
Utterly black, the murky shades involved 660
An image, silent, cold, and motionless,
As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. 
Even as a vapour fed with golden beams
That ministered on sunlight, ere the west
Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame—­ 665
No sense, no motion, no divinity—­
A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings
The breath of heaven did wander—­a bright stream
Once fed with many-voiced waves—­a dream
Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, 670
Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.

Oh, for Medea’s wondrous alchemy,
Which wheresoe’er it fell made the earth gleam
With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale
From vernal blooms fresh fragrance!  O, that God, 675
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice
Which but one living man has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever, 680
Lone as incarnate death!  O, that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave,
Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law 685
Of this so lovely world!  But thou art fled,
Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams,—­ah! thou hast fled! 
The brave, the gentle and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius.  Heartless things