Sighing to reach the other far-off land.
Did they not ask in their long solitude
Of silence, of all nature, of the sky,
Star-shining?—and from the deep sea, one sound.
One only tone of the beloved voice
They never more might hear.
Mysterious enthusiasm, Love!
The heart's supremest power;—which doth combine
Within itself religion, poetry,
And heroism. Love, what may befall
When destiny has bade us separate
From him who has the secret of our soul;
Who gave us the heart's life, celestial life.
What may befall when absence, or when death
Isolate woman on this earth?—She pines,
She sinks. How often have these rocks
Offer'd their cold support to the forlorn!
Those once worn in the heart;—those once sustain’d
Upon a hero's arm.
Before you is Sorrento:—dwelling there
Was Tasso's sister, when the pilgrim came
Asking asylum 'gainst the prince unjust
From humble friends: long grief had almost quench'd
Reason's clear light, but genius still was left.
Yet kept he knowledge of the things divine,
When earthly images were all obscured.
Thus shrinking from the desert spread around
Doth Genius wander through the world, and finds
No likeness to itself; no echo given
By Nature; and the Common crowd but hold
As madness that desire of the rapt soul,
Which finds not in this world enough of air—
Of high enthusiasm, or of hope.
For Destiny compels exalted minds:—
The poet, whose imagination draws
Its power from loving and from suffering,—
They are the vanish'd from another sphere.
For the Almighty goodness might not frame
All for the few—th’ elect or the proscribed.
Why spoke the ancients with such awe of Fate?
What had this terrible Fate to do with them,
The common and the quiet, who pursue
The seasons, and still follow timidly
The beaten track of ordinary life?
But she, the priestess of the oracle,
Shook with the presence of the cruel power,
