To The Moon [earlier Version]

WITH silent step behold her steal Over those envious clouds that hid Till now her face, then stand—a seal Of silver on heaven’s mighty lid! So round me would I have her light In one broad burst of beauty play, And who whilst thus she rules the night Would wish the day, Nor feel his yearning spirit fraught With sweetly solemn strains of visionary thought? Love of my childhood! for but when A child I loved thee of all things— Yea, with what ecstacies I then Did hail thee, what dear visionings! And when between us up the sky Obscuring glooms have wildly thronged, With shortened breath and searching eye How have I longed For wings that I away might flee To kiss thy hidden face and dwell awhile with thee. I sadden! Ah, why bringest thou Yet later memories to my mind? I would but gaze upon thee now, As erst for wonder;—not to find Dim phantoms of each faded dream That fanned my heart with pinions dyed In passion, by old HAWKESBURY’S stream, Before me glide, With shades of days all figured o’er By feelings lost, and hopes that know their place no more! Nor was it thus thy beauty shone Upon me fewer summers past— Thus hopeless, world-distrusting, lone, And withering in Misfortune’s blast! Many that loved me then were nigh, Of whom now these I may not trust, And those forget—are far—or lie Cold in the dust! And never may we meet again Loving and loved as then ’neath thy nocturnal reign! O Cynthia! it would seem as though A something from our spirits fell, Like scents from flowers, Life’s eras through And by which web invisible, A gathered after-scene of all Affection builded to our loss, Is drawn thus in dim funeral The heart across: And which where stained the most with gloom Uncertain Thought is prone to map with spells of doom. But sober Reason sagelier sings These visioned mysteries are but The semblances which former things Imbued our being with, as put In act by memory, when is seen Again some marked associate sight; And thence it happens, Orb serene, Why thou to-night Look’st on me from thy native sky Like an old friend too fond to talk of things gone by. Let me this night the Past forget! For though its dying voices be At times like tones from Eden, yet It bosoms too much change for me,— That when but now my thoughts were given To all I had suffered—loved and lost! Turning mine eyes again to heaven, Tear-quenched almost, I started with a strange despair, To find thee—even thee smiling unaltered there! Hence vain regrets of secret pride! My human heart, what irks thee so, What in the scale of Nature tried Should weigh thy happiness or wo? Pale millions, so by Fortune cursed, Have loved for sorrow in the light Of this yet youthful Moon, since first She claimed the night, And thus mature even from her birth, Chased with pale beam the glooms that swathed the infant Earth. And be it humbling too, to know That when this pile of haughty clay For ages shall have ceased to glow, Shall be a heap of ashes grey— Which as the invading ploughshare drills The unremembered burial ground, The winds may o’er a hundred hills Scatter around— That in the midnight heavens thou Shalt hang thy unfaded lamp and smile serene as now. Nay, more than this: could even those, The Edenites, who sorrow’d here Ere Noah’s tilted ark arose Or Nimrod chased the bounding deer, Wherever sepulchered, could they Shake the cold bonds of death and doom But for a moment now away,— Into each tomb Solemnly gazing, thee they’d find Even as they dying left thee, watchful Moon, behind! But shall my thoughts thus widely range And I no profit therein know? Seeing that wither, waste and change Must all that lives thine Orb below; Shall I not turn with this sole aim, In act to shun, in heart control, Whatever dims the heavenward flame, The essential soul I feel within, and which must be A living thing when thou art quenched eternally?