The MoonAnd, like a dying lady lean and pale,Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,Out of her chamber, led by the insaneAnd feeble wanderings of her fading brain,The moon arose up in the murky eastA white and shapeless mass.Art thou pale for wearinessOf climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,Wandering companionlessAmong the stars that have a different birth,And ever changing, like a joyless eyeThat finds no object worth its constancy?

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

We—are we not formed, as notes of music are,For one another, though dissimilar;Such difference without discord, as can makeThose sweetest sounds, in which all spirits shake As trembling leaves in a continuous air?

It belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?

Yes! all is past—swift time has fled away,Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind;How long will horror nerve this frame of clay?I'm dead, and lingers yet my soul behind.Oh! powerful Fate, revoke thy deadly spell,And yet that may not ever, ever be,Heaven will not smile upon the work of Hell;Ah! no, for Heaven cannot smile on me;Fate, envious Fate, has sealed my wayward destiny.

And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers and terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem to sleep in one another's arms, and dream of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we read in their smiles, and call reality.

To hearts which near each other moveFrom evening close to morning light,The night is good; because, my love,They never say good-night.