me, friend, I prithee,
  To pass my hand across my brows, and muse
  On those dear hills, that nevermore will meet
  The sight that throbs and aches beneath my touch,
  As tho’ there beat a heart in either eye;
  For when the outer lights are darken’d thus,
  The memory’s vision hath a keener edge. 
  It grows upon me now—­the semicircle
  Of dark blue waters and the narrow fringe
  Of curving beach—­its wreaths of dripping green—­
  Its pale pink shells—­the summer-house aloft
  That open’d on the pines with doors of glass,
  A mountain nest the pleasure boat that rock’d
  Light-green with its own shadow, keel to keel,
  Upon the crispings of the dappled waves
  That blanched upon its side. 
                               O Love, O Hope,
  They come, they crowd upon me all at once,
  Moved from the cloud of unforgotten things,
  That sometimes on the horizon of the mind
  Lies folded—­often sweeps athwart in storm—­
  They flash across the darkness of my brain,
  The many pleasant days, the moolit nights,
  The dewy dawnings and the amber eyes,
  When thou and I, Camilla, thou and I
  Were borne about the bay, or safely moor’d
  Beneath some low brow’d cavern, where the wave
  Plash’d sapping its worn ribs (the while without,
  And close above us, sang the wind-tost pine,
  And shook its earthly socket, for we heard,
  In rising and in falling with the tide,
  Close by our ears, the huge roots strain and creak),
  Eye feeding upon eye with deep intent;
  And mine, with love too high to be express’d
  Arrested in its sphere, and ceasing from
  All contemplation of all forms, did pause
  To worship mine own image, laved in light,
  The centre of the splendours, all unworthy
  Of such a shrine—­mine image in her eyes,
  By diminution made most glorious,
  Moved with their motions, as those eyes were moved
  With motions of the soul, as my heart beat
  Twice to the melody of hers.  Her face
  Was starry-fair, not pale, tenderly flush’d
  As ’twere with dawn.  She was dark-hair’d, dark-eyed;
  Oh, such dark eyes!  A single glance of them
  Will govern a whole life from birth to death,
  Careless of all things else, led on with light
  In trances and in visions:  look at them,
  You lose yourself in utter ignorance,
  You cannot find their depth; for they go back,
  And farther back, and still withdraw themselves
  Quite into the deep soul, that evermore,
  Fresh springing from her fountains in the brain,
  Still pouring thro’, floods with redundant light
  Her narrow portals.

                      Trust me, long ago
  I should have died, if it were possible
  To die in gazing on that perfectness
  Which I do bear within me; I had died
  But from my farthest lapse, my latest ebb,
  Thine image, like a charm of light and