Dawn to daylight; or, Gleams from the poets of twelve centuries

The Scian and the Teian Muse,

The hero's harp, the lover's lute, Have found the fame your shores refuse; Their place of birth alone is mute To sounds, which echo farther west Than your sires' "Islands of the Blest."

The mountains look on Marathon-
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And, musing there an hour alone,

I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For, standing on the Persian's grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

A king sat on the rocky brow

Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis; And ships, by thousands, lay below,

And men in nations-all were his!

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 1792-1822.

Arethusa.

RETHUSA arose

From her couch of

snows

In the Acroceraunian mountains,

From cloud and from crag

With many a jag, Shepherding her bright fountains.

She leapt down the rocks

With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams;
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing

She went, ever singing,

In murmurs as soft as sleep;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her,

As she lingered towards the deep.

Then Alpheus bold,

On his glacier cold,

With his trident the mountains strook,

And opened a chasm

In the rocks;—with the spasm

All Erymanthus shook.

And the black south wind

It concealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below:
The beard and the hair
Of the River God were
Seen through the torrent's sweep,
As he followed the light

Of the fleet nymph's flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.

ARETHUSA.

"Oh, save me! Oh, guide me! And bid the deep hide me!

For he grasps me now by the hair!" The loud Ocean heard,

To its blue depth stirred, And divided at her prayer;

And under the water

The Earth's white daughter

Fled like a sunny beam;

Behind her descended

Her billows, unblended

With the brackish Dorian stream:

Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main,

Alpheus rushed behind,

As an eagle pursuing

A dove to its ruin

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers

Sit on their pearlèd thrones ;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams.
Which amid the streams

Weave a network of coloured light;

And under the caves, Where the shadowy waves Are as green as the forest's night; Outspeeding the shark,

And the sword-fish dark, Under the ocean foam,

And up through the rifts

Of the mountain clifts They passed to their Dorian home.

And now from their fountains
In Enna's mountains,

Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,

They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap

From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of Asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;-

Like spirits that lie

In the azure sky,

When they love but live no more.

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AREWELL, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter!
(Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea,)
No pearl ever lay, under Oman's green water,
More pure in its shell than thy spirit in thee.

Oh! fair as the sea-flower close to thee growing,
How light was thy heart till love's witchery came,
Like the wind of the south o'er a Summer lute blowing,
And hushed all its music and withered its frame!

But long upon Araby's green sunny highlands,

Shall maids and their lovers remember the doom Of her who lies sleeping among the Pearl Islands, With nought but the sea-star to light up her tomb.

And still when the merry date season is burning,

And calls to the palm-grove the young and the old,
The happiest there from their pastime returning,
At sunset, will weep when thy story is told.

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