I.
Our life is two-fold:
Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things
Death and existence:
Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they becomeA portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,--they
Like Sibyls of the future: they have power--The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not--what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows--Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?--What are they?
Creations of the mind?--The mind can
Substance, and people planets of its
With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall s vision which I
Perchance in sleep--for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.
II.
I saw two beings in the hues of
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity, the
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of
Scatter'd at intervals, and wreathing
Arising from such rustic roofs; - the
Was crown'd with a peculiar
Of trees, in circular array, so
Not by he sport of nature, but of man:
These two, a maiden and a youth, were
Gazing - the one on all that was
Fair as herself - but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful:
And both were young - yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his
Had far outgrown his years, and to his
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him: he had
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in hers;
She was his voice; e did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye follow'd hers, and saw with hers,
Which colour'd all his objects:--he had
To live within himself; she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all: upon a tone,
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously--his
Unknowing of its cause of agony.
But she in these fond feelings had no share:
Her sighs were not for him; to her he
Even as a brother--but no more; 'twas much,
For brotherless she was, save in the
Her infant friendship had bestow'd on hint;
Herself the solitary scion
Of a time-honour'd race.--It was a
Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not--and why?
Time taught him a deep answer--when she
Another; even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she
Looking afar if yet her lover's
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.
II.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
There was as ancient mansion, and
Its walls there was a steed caparison'd;
Within an antique Oratory
The Boy of whom I spake;--he was alone,
And pale, and pacing to and fro:
He sate him down, and seized a pen,
Words which I could not guess of; then he
His bow'd head on his hands, and shook as
With a convulsion--then arose again,
And with his teeth and quivering hands did
What he had written, but he shed no tears,
And he did calm himself, and fix his
Into a kind of quiet: as he paused,
The Lady of his love re-entered there;
She was serene and smiling then, and
She knew she was by him beloved,--she knew,
For quickly comes such knowledge, that his
Was darken'd with her shadow, and she
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
He rose, and with a cold and gentle
He took her hand; a moment o'er his faceA tablet of unutterable
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropp'd the hand he held, and with slow
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
For they did part with mutual smiles; he pass
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repass'd that hoary threshold more.
IV.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Boy was sprung to manhood: in the
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams: he was
With strange and dusky aspects; he was
Himself like what he had been; on the
And on the shore he was a wanderer.
There was a mass of many
Crowded like waves upon me, but he wasA part of all; and in the last he
Reposing from the noontide sultriness,
Couch'd among fallen columns, in the
Of ruin'd walls that had survived the
Of those who rear'd them; by his sleeping
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly
Were fasten'd near a fountain; and a
Clad in a flowing garb did watch the while,
While many of his tribe slumber'd around:
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven.
V.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love was wed with
Who did not love her better: in her home,
A thousand leagues from his, - her native home,
She dwelt, begirt with growing Infancy,
Daughters and sons of Beauty, - but behold!
Upon her face there was the tint of grief,
The settled shadow of an inward strife,
And an unquiet drooping of the eye,
As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.
What could her grief be? - she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repress'd affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be? - she had loved him not,
Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved,
Nor could he be a part of that which
Upon her mind - a spectre of the past.
VI.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was return'd. - I saw him
Before an Altar - with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which
The Starlight of his Boyhood; as he
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there
The self-same aspect, and the quivering
That in the antique Oratory
His bosom in its solitude; and
As in that hour - a moment o'er his
The tablet of unutterable
Was traced, - and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reel'd around him; he could
Not that which was, nor that which should have
But the old mansion, and the accustom'd hall,
And the remember'd chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny,--came
And thrust themselves between him and the light:
What business had they there at such a time?
II.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love:-- Oh! she was
As by the sickness of the soul; her
Had wander'd from its dwelling, and her
They had not their own lustre, but the
Which is not of the earth; she was
The queen of a fantastic realm; her
Were combinations of disjointed things;
And forms impalpable and
Of others' sight familiar were to hers.
And this the world calls frenzy; but the
Have a far deeper madness, and the
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
What is it but the telescope of truth?
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!
II.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a
For blight and desolation, compass'd
With Hatred and Contention;
Pain was
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment; he
Through that which had been death to many men,
And made him friends of mountains: with the
And the quick Spirit of the
He held his dialogues; and they did
To him the magic of their mysteries;
To him the book of Night was open'd wide,
And voices from the deep abyss reveal'dA marvel and a secret - Be it so. IX.
MY dream was past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the
Of these two creatures should be thus traced
Almost like a reality - the one To end in madness - both in misery.
July, 1816. (stanza viii. line 8. Like to the Pontic monarch of old days.):
Mithridates of Pontus. ~ The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 3., 1819.
