CXX.

   Alas! our young affections run to waste,
   Or water but the desert:  whence arise
   But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,
   Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes,
   Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies,
   And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants
   Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies
   O’er the world’s wilderness, and vainly pants
For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.

CXXI.

   O Love! no habitant of earth thou art —
   An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,—­
   A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,
   But never yet hath seen, nor e’er shall see,
   The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
   The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
   Even with its own desiring phantasy,
   And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquenched soul—­parched—­wearied—­wrung—­and riven.

CXXII.

   Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
   And fevers into false creation;—­where,
   Where are the forms the sculptor’s soul hath seized? 
   In him alone.  Can Nature show so fair? 
   Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
   Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
   The unreached Paradise of our despair,
   Which o’er-informs the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again.

CXXIII.

   Who loves, raves—­’tis youth’s frenzy—­but the cure
   Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds
   Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
   Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind’s
   Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
   The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,
   Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
   The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize—­wealthiest when most undone.

CXXIV.

   We wither from our youth, we gasp away —
   Sick—­sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,
   Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
   Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first —
   But all too late,—­so are we doubly curst. 
   Love, fame, ambition, avarice—­’tis the same —
   Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst —
   For all are meteors with a different name,
And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

CXXV.

   Few—­none—­find what they love or could have loved: 
   Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
   Necessity of loving, have removed
   Antipathies—­but to recur, ere long,
   Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
   And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
   And miscreator, makes and helps along
   Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust—­the dust we all have trod.