Lone watchings of the night,
When stars attract with beaming;
’Tis loneliness alone that gives delight,
The poet’s hour of dreaming.
Why doth the eagle soar,
With lone and wandering wing?
Ah! loves he not his silent flight the more,
Far borne from living thing?
To stand upon the shore,
And list the sounding flood,—
Is there aught music like the ocean’s roar
To child of solitude?
Who, roaming, heeds the cry
Of bittern’s piercing note;
With cadence of the stormy petrel nigh,
Now heard far off remote?
Is not the awful shade
Of dark, receding grove,
To him endeared, its leaf embow’ring glade,
Seclusion’s haunts to rove?
Why doth the enchantress pour
Mellifluous note alone?
Loves Philomel the midnight brake the more,
Plaintive, unseen, to moan.
So to the tender heart
Of maiden touched with love.
Doth covert shade of twilight eve impart—
Its secret solace prove.
Is’t not to recluse sweet,
’Mid sheltering cave reclined,
Listening in solitude to waves that beat—
To musing dreams resigned.
Is grandeur heard in sound?
Hath harmony its power?
Give me expressive silence, when ’tis found,
Nature’s own hush’d, still hour.
Sweet chord must strive in vain,
Its diapason teach;
It cannot swell like that Æolian strain
The mind’s deep tone to reach.
He who hath waked the lyre,
Can tell its potent spell;
Within is found an all-consuming fire,
That mute gaze lone may tell.
Yet he is least alone—
The child of poesy;
Who peoples ideal beings, all his own—
Creatures of fantasy,
That at his bidding come,
Like beckoned shadows dim;
Sylphs of the brain, that with Titania roam—
Fancy’s all sprighting whim:
Those shadowy tribes of mind
To call from their retreat;
Sweet parlance hold, then scatter to the wind,
Back to their airy seat.
Like melancholy Jacques,
To nurse the tender thought,
Doth fly to woods embrowned, man’s haunts forsakes,
For scenes of quiet sought,
As by some classic stream,
In idless mood reclined,
Deep moralize, or lost in fairy dream
Of meditative mind;
Or yet more thoughtful theme,
The sacred page explore;
Its holy words, as sang by Babel’s stream—
Song of the exile’s shore.
Or climb the lofty tower,
Like Plato, hoary seer;
The Chaldean sage of that star-twinkling hour,
And maze-revolving sphere.
When the cold spectral night
Gleams on the column’s stone,
As Luna pale Endymion’s locks doth light,
Kissing his forehead lone,
Be mine with silence found,
When, through the gloom o’erstealing,
Is traced the lingering, pensive nymph profound,
Her shadowy form revealing.