XI. AURAS OF DELIGHT.

Beautiful habitations, auras of delight!

Who shall bewail the crags and bitter foam

And angry sword-blades flashing left and right

Which guard your glittering height,

That none thereby may come!

The vision which we have

Revere we so,

That yet we crave

To foot those fields of ne'er-profaned snow?

I, with heart-quake,

Dreaming or thinking of that realm of Love,

See, oft, a dove

Tangled in frightful nuptials with a snake;

The tortured knot,

Now, like a kite scant-weighted, flung bewitch'd

Sunwards, now pitch'd,

Tail over head, down, but with no taste got

Eternally

Of rest in either ruin or the sky,

But bird and vermin each incessant strives,

With vain dilaceration of both lives,

‘ Gainst its abhorred bond insoluble,

Coveting fiercer any separate hell

Than the most weary Soul in Purgatory

On God's sweet breast to lie.

And, in this sign, I con

The guerdon of that golden Cup, fulfill'd

With fornications foul of Babylon,

The heart where good is well-perceiv'd and known,

Yet is not will'd;

And Him I thank, who can make live again,

The dust, but not the joy we once profane,

That I, of ye,

Beautiful habitations, auras of delight,

In childish years and since had sometime sense and sight,

But that ye vanish'd quite,

Even from memory,

Ere I could get my breath, and whisper‘ See!’

But did for me

They altogether die,

Those trackless glories glimps'd in upper sky?

Were they of chance, or vain,

Nor good at all again

For curb of heart or fret?

Nay, though, by grace,

Lest, haply, I refuse God to His face,

Their likeness wholly I forget,

Ah, yet,

Often in straits which else for me were ill,

I mind me still

I did respire the lonely auras sweet,

I did the blest abodes behold, and, at the mountains’ feet,

Bathed in the holy Stream by Hermon's thymy hill.