Was of so wide a compass it took in
  All I had loved, and my dull agony. 
  Ideally to her transferred, became
  Anguish intolerable. 
                 The day waned;
  Alone I sat with her:  about my brow
  Her warm breath floated in the utterance
  Of silver-chorded tones:  her lips were sunder’d
  With smiles of tranquil bliss, which broke in light
  Like morning from her eyes—­her eloquent eyes
  (As I have seen them many hundred times),
  Fill’d all with clear pure fire, thro’ mine down rain’d
  Their spirit-searching splendours.  As a vision
  Unto a haggard prisoner, iron-stay’d
  In damp and dismal dungeons underground
  Confined on points of faith, when strength is shock’d
  With torment, and expectancy of worse
  Upon the morrow, thro’ the ragged walls,
  All unawares before his half-shut eyes,
  Comes in upon him in the dead of night,
  And with th’ excess of sweetness and of awe,
  Makes the heart tremble, and the eyes run over
  Upon his steely gyves; so those fair eyes
  Shone on my darkness forms which ever stood
  Within the magic cirque of memory,
  Invisible but deathless, waiting still
  The edict of the will to reassume
  The semblance of those rare realities
  Of which they were the mirrors.  Now the light,
  Which was their life, burst through the cloud of thought
  Keen, irrepressible. 
                        It was a room
  Within the summer-house of which I spoke,
  Hung round with paintings of the sea, and one
  A vessel in mid-ocean, her heaved prow
  Clambering, the mast bent, and the revin wind
  In her sail roaring.  From the outer day,
  Betwixt the closest ivies came a broad
  And solid beam of isolated light,
  Crowded with driving atomies, and fell
  Slanting upon that picture, from prime youth
  Well-known, well-loved.  She drew it long ago
  Forth gazing on the waste and open sea,
  One morning when the upblown billow ran
  Shoreward beneath red clouds, and I had pour’d
  Into the shadowing pencil’s naked forms
  Colour and life:  it was a bond and seal
  Of friendship, spoken of with tearful smiles;
  A monument of childhood and of love,
  The poesy of childhood; my lost love
  Symbol’d in storm.  We gazed on it together
  In mute and glad remembrance, and each heart
  Grew closer to the other, and the eye
  Was riveted and charm-bound, gazing like
  The Indian on a still-eyed snake, low crouch’d
  A beauty which is death, when all at once
  That painted vessel, as with inner life,
  ’Gan rock and heave upon that painted sea;
  An earthquake, my loud heartbeats, made the ground
  Roll under us, and all at once soul, life,
  And breath, and motion, pass’d and flow’d away
  To those unreal billows:  round and round
  A whirlwind caught and bore us; mighty gyves,