Nor yet the reign of Summer closed:
At night in their own homes reposed
The fugitives, on either side,
Who 'scaped the death their comrades died;
When lo! with many a giddy shock,
The mountain-cliffs began to rock,
And deep below the hollow ground
Ran a strange mystery of sound,
As if, in chains and torments there,
Spirits were venting their despair.
That sound, those shocks the sleepers woke;
In trembling consternation, broke
Forth from their dwellings, young and old:
Nothing abroad their eyes behold
But darkness so intensely wrought,
'Twas blindness in themselves they thought.
Anon, aloof, with sudden rays,
Issued so fierce, so broad a blaze,
That darkness started into light,
And every eye, restored to sight,
Gazed on the glittering crest of snows,
Whence the bright conflagration rose,
Whose flames condensed at once aspire,
—A pillar of celestial fire,
Alone amidst infernal shade,
In glorious majesty display'd:
Beneath, from rifted caverns broke
Volumes of suffocating smoke,
That roll'd in surges, like a flood,
By the red radiance turn'd to blood.
Morn look'd aghast upon the scene,
Nor could a sunbeam pierce between
The panoply of vapours, spread
Above, around, the mountain's head.

In distant fields, with drought consumed,
Joy swell'd all hearts, all eyes illumed,
When from that peak, through lowering skies,
Thick curling clouds were seen to rise.

And hang o'er all the darken'd plain,
The presage of descending rain.
The exulting cattle bound along,
The tuneless birds attempt a song,
The swain, amidst his sterile lands,
With outstretcht arms of rapture stands.
But, fraught with plague and curses, canie
The insidious progeny of flame:
Ah! then,—for fertilizing showers,
The pledge of herbage, fruits, and flowers,—
Words cannot paint, how every eye
(Bloodshot and dim with agony !)
Was glazed, as by a palsying spell,
When light sulphureous ashes fell,
Dazzling, and eddying to and fro,
Like wildering sleet or feathery snow:
Strewn with gray pumice Nature lies,
At every motion quick to rise,
Tainting with livid fumes the air;
—Then hope lies down in prone despair,
And man and beast, with misery dumb,
Sullenly brood on woes to come.

The mountain now, like living earth,
Pregnant with some stupendous birth,
Heaved, in the anguish of its throes,
Sheer from its crest the incumbent snows;
And where of old they chill'd the sky,
Beneath the sun's meridian eye,
Or, purpling in the golden west,
Appear'd his evening throne of rest,
There, black, and bottomless, and wide,
A caldron rent from side to side,
Simmer'd and hiss'd with huge turmoil;
Earth's diserabowell'd minerals boil,
And thence in molten torrents rush:
Water and fire, like sisters, gush
From the same source; the double stream
Meets, battles, and explodes in steam;

Meanwhile the mad volcano grew
Tenfold more terrible to view;
And thunders, such as shall be hurl'd
At the death-sentence of the world;
And lightnings, such as shall consume
Creation, and creation's tomb,
Nor leave, amidst the eternal void,
One trembling atom undestroy'd;
Such thunders crash'd, such lightnings glared:
—Another fate those outcasts shared,
When, with one desolating sweep,
An earthquake seem'd to engulf the deep,
Then threw it back, and from its bed
Hung a whole ocean overhead;
The victims shriek'd beneath the wave,
And in a moment found one grave;
Down to the abyss the flood return'd:
Alone, unseen, the mountain burn'd.

INCOGNITA.

WRITTEN AT 1EAMINGT0N, IN 1817, ON VIEWING
THE PICTURE OF AN UNKNOWN LADV.

"She was a phantom of delight."—Wordsworth.

Image of one who lived of yore!

Hail to that lovely mien,
Once quick and conscious—now no more

On land or ocean seen!
Were all earth's breathing forms to pass
Before me in Agrippa's glass,*
Many as fair as thou might be,
But oh! not one—not one like Thee!

Thou art no child of Fancy ;—Thou

The very look dost wear,
That gave enchantment to a brow,

Wreathed with luxuriant hair;
Lips of the morn embathed in dew,
And eyes of evening's starry blue;
Of all who e'er enjoy'd the sun,
Thou art the image of but One.

And who was she, in virgin prime

And May of womanhood,
Whose roses here, unpluck'd by Time,

In shadowy tints have stood;
While many a winter's withering blast
Hath o'er the dark cold chamber pass'd,
In which her once-resplendent form
Slumber'd to dust beneath the storm i

Of gentle blood ;—upon her birth,

Consenting planets smiled,
And she had seen those days of mirth,

That frolic round the child;
To bridal bloom her strength had sprung.
Behold her beautiful and young!
Lives there a record, which hath told,
That she was wedded, widow'd, old?

How long her date, 'twere vain to guess .

The pencil's cunning art
Can but a single glance express,

One motion of the heart;
A smile, a blush,—a transient grace
Of air, and attitude, and face;
One passion's changing colour mix;
One moment's flight for ages fix.

Her joys and griefs, alike in vain.

Would fancy here recall;
Her throbs of ecstasy or pain

Lull'd in oblivion all: