The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow bright
With an Immortal's vengeance—in his eye
And nostril beautiful Disdain, and Might
And Majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.
CLXII.
But in his delicate form—a dream of Love,[1]
Shaped by some solitary Nymph, whose breast
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
- ↑ [The "delicate" beauty of the statue recalled the features of a lady whom he had once thought of making his wife. "The Apollo Belvidere," he wrote to Moore (May 12, 1817), "is the image of Lady Adelaide Forbes. I think I never saw such a likeness."]
- ↑ [It is probable that lines 1-4 of this stanza contain an allusion to a fact related by M. Pinel, in his work, Sur l' Insanité, which Milman turned to account in his Belvidere Apollo, a Newdigate Prize Poem of 1812—
"Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep
By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep,
'Mid the dim twilight of the laurel grove,
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Yet on that form in wild delirious trance
With more than rev'rence gazed the Maid of France,
Day after day the love-sick dreamer stood
With him alone, nor thought it solitude!
To cherish grief, her last, her dearest care,
Her one fond hope—to perish of despair."
Milman's Poetical Works, Paris, 1829, p. 180.Compare, too, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, lines 14-16—
"A savage place, as holy and enchanted,
As e'er beneath a wailing moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover."Poetical Works, 1893, p. 94.]
