The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death
Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled,
Did he resign his high and holy soul
To images of the majestic past,
630 That paused within his passive being now,
Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe
Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place
His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk
Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone
635 Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest,
Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink
Of that obscurest0 chasm;?and thus he lay, darkest
Surrendering to their final impulses
The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,
640 The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear
Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
645 At peace, and faintly smiling:?his last sight
Was the great moon, which o'er the western line
3. The moon is crescent shaped with the points new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms.' rising, as in Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode': 'the 4. Invisible, or perhaps 'unseeing.'
.
ALASTOR / 75 1
Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,
With whose dun? beams inwoven darkness seemed darkened
To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills
650 It rests, and still as the divided frame Of the vast meteor5 sunk, the Poet's blood,
That ever beat in mystic sympathy
With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:
And when two lessening points of light alone
655 Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp
Of his faint respiration scarce did stir
The stagnate night:6?till the minutest ray
Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.
It paused?it fluttered. But when heaven remained
660 Utterly black, the murky shades involved
An image, silent, cold, and motionless,
As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. Even as a vapour0 fed with golden beams cloud That ministered on7 sunlight, ere the west
665 Eclipses it, was now that wonderous frame?
No sense, no motion, no divinity?
A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings
The breath of heaven did wander?a bright stream
Once fed with many-voiced waves?a dream
670 Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever,
Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now.
O, for Medea's wondrous alchemy,
Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam
With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale
