Poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) in The Amulet, 1832/Moonlight
MOONLIGHT.
BY L. E. L.
There are no stars: thou lovely moon,
Thou art alone amid the sky;
Methinks thou must be sad to hold
Such solitary watch on high!
'Tis but a tale of the old time—
When all of feeling or of thought,
And all the mysteries of the heart,
Around them some fine fiction wrought—
Which said that thou didst turn to earth
Thy radiant eyes, to watch and weep
Over the rest thou could'st not break—
Endymion's passion-haunted sleep.
Beneath this moonlight fable's guise,
They pictured the immortal mind,
Which seeks upon this weary earth
The love that it may never find.
For, though upon an eagle's wing
The spirit for a while may roam,
The pinions need some gentler tie,
The heavenward wanderer asks a home;
And deems the heart can be that home,
Deems that affection is that tie,
And gives its likeness to its hope—
The pure, the beautiful, the high.
Fair queen, this fable of thy love
Is but the doom Fate sets apart
For earth's imaginative child,
Who makes a temple of the heart!
 Painted by W. BoxallEngraved by C. Marr |