III.

No voice as yet had made the air
Be music with your name: yet why
That asking look? That yearning sigh?
That sense of promise everywhere?
Beloved! flew your spirit by?

IV.

As when a mother doth explore

The rose-mark on her long lost child,
I met, I loved you, maiden mild!
As whom I long had loved before;
So deeply had I been beguiled.

V.

You stood before me like a thought,

A dream remember'd in a dream.
But when those meek eyes first did seem
To tell me, Love within you wrought,-
O Greta, dear domestic stream!

VI.

Has not, since then, Love's prompture deep,
Has not Love's whisper evermore,
Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar?
Sole voice, when other voices sleep,

Dear under-song in clamour's hour.'

1 Roar....hour.] If, as Coleridge says in the Table Talk, then and again made no rhyme to his ear, how could he spoil this exquisitely-finished poem by such a rhyme as roar and hour?

However, it is not his worst. In one of the stanzas of Kubla Khan, for instance, we have dulcimer, saw, and Abora, the three words, doubtless, intended to rhyme. In The Ancient Mariner, gusht rhymes with dust.

ON RE-VISITING THE SEA-SHORE,

AFTER LONG ABSENCE, UNDER STRONG

MEDICAL RECOMMENDATION

NOT TO BATHE.*

OD be with thee, gladsome Ocean! How gladly greet I thee once more !

Ships and waves, and ceaseless motion,

And men rejoicing on thy shore.

Dissuading spake the mild physician, "Those briny waves for thee are death! But my soul fulfill'd her mission,

And lo! I breathe untroubled breath!

Fashion's pining sons and daughters,
That seek the crowd they seem to fly,
Trembling, they approach thy waters;
And what cares Nature, if they die ?

Me a thousand hopes and pleasures,
A thousand recollections bland,
Thoughts sublime, and stately measures,
Revisit on thy echoing strand:

* Printed in 1801. It appears more clearly from the original title, that the writer did bathe :-"Ode after bathing in the sea, contrary to medical advice." We are inclined to conclude, after reading the poem, that the physician was right.

Dreams, (the soul herself forsaking,) Tearful raptures, boyish mirth ; Silent adorations, making

A blessed shadow of this Earth!

O ye hopes, that stir within me,
Health comes with you from above!
God is with me, God is in me!
I cannot die, if Life be Love.

III. MEDITATIVE POEMS

IN BLANK VERSE.

"Yea, he deserves to find himself deceived,
Who seeks a heart in the unthinking man.
Like shadows on a stream, the forms of life
Impress their characters on the smooth forehead:
Nought sinks into the bosom's silent depth.
Quick sensibility of pain and pleasure
Moves the light fluids lightly; but no soul
Warmeth the inner frame."-SCHILLER.

HYMN

BEFORE SUNRISE, IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.*

Besides the rivers, Arve and Arveiron, which have their sources in the foot of Mont Blanc, five conspicuous torrents rush down its sides; and within a few paces of the glaciers, the gentiana major grows in immense numbers, with its "flowers of loveliest blue."

AST thou a charm to stay the morn

ing-star

In his steep course? So long he
seems to pause

On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc !
The Arve and Arveiron at thy base

* So the heading is arranged in the edition of 1834. The poem was first printed in 1802. Compare with it

Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form !
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines,
How silently! Around thee and above
Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it,
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent Mount! I gazed1 upon thee,
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in
prayer

I worshipp'd the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my thought,

Shelley's poem, dated June, 1816,-" Mont Blanc. Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni." Shelley was staying, with his first wife, at Keswick, in the winter of 1811-12, and called, more than once, at Greta Hall; but he only found Southey. Coleridge was gone, never to return.

I gazed, &c.] "He never was at Chamouni, or near it, in his life," says Wordsworth, in 1844.-Prose Works, iii. 442. Wordsworth himself was equally a deceiver, who tells he made up his friend Matthew out of a dozen different persons. Listen to Coleridge's original note:--"If any of my readers have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident that they will not find the sentiments and feelings expressed, or attempted to be expressed,"-a subtle touch!-" in the following poem, extravagant."

The poem, in fact, as De Quincey tells us, is "an expansion of a short poem in stanzas upon the same subject by Frederica Brun, a female poet of Germany, previously known to the world under her maiden name of Münter."

We append a literal rendering of the German poem,