Alas!  I have nor hope nor health,
  Nor peace within nor calm around,
  Nor that Content surpassing wealth
  The sage in meditation found,
  And walked with inward glory crowned,—­
  Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. 
  Others I see whom these surround;
  Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

  Yet now despair itself is mild
  Even as the winds and waters are;
  I could lie down like a tired child,
  And weep away the life of care
  Which I have borne, and yet must bear,
  Till death like sleep might steal on me,
  And I might feel in the warm air
  My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

  Some might lament that I were cold,
  As I, when this sweet day is gone,
  Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
  Insults with this untimely moan;
  They might lament,—­for I am one
  Whom men love not,—­and yet regret,
  Unlike this day, which, when the sun
  Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.

[Written in the spring of 1819, when suffering from physical depression, the precursor of his death, which happened soon after.]

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
  But being too happy in thy happiness,—­
    That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
      In some melodious plot
  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
    Singest of Summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
  Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
  Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! 
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
      And purple-stained mouth,—­
  That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
    And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
  What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
  Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
    Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
      And leaden-eyed despairs,
  Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
    Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.