Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TWO COLUMNS. I Saw two Columns, by a southern shore ; One, standing in its Dorian majesty, Simple, and stern, and natural it might be; So blended with the hills the shape it wore. But some Cyclopean hand, ere time was hoar, Had reared it up to Neptune ; and his sea Still bellows out beneath, memorially; Marking the moments' flight with tumbling roar. O'erthrown the other, of inferior race; Spiral and fretted, as a beechen bole, That thin green stems of ivy overlace ; Between their dates did twenty ages roll; And still the first, with his Homeric grace, Stood scathless ; lifting up the gazer's soul. THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS. " Oh weak unstable wandering memory ;" Came forth a sudden voice from an old tomb, By the way-side, like Pompeii's : " for the doom Of Ephesus, so, justly clings to me ; Making my love a byword ; I am she Thenceforward called The Widow, since the gloom Of funeral caverns was my bridal room ; But how that deed unholy came to be, Ask many a feeble utterance of strong will, Many a faint priest of fame's divinity ;" So said the mourning voice, and then was still : But from the thronging drear infinity Of shades, that answered to the summons, I Sped, as the heron speeds, under a hill. TO THE FOUNTAIN AT FRASCATI. Not by Aldobrandini's watery show, Still plashing at his portal never dumb, Minished of my devotion, shalt thou come, Leaving thy natural fount on Algido, Wild winged daughter of the Sabine snow; Now creeping under quiet Tusculum ; Now gushing from those caverns old and numb ; Dull were his heart who gazed upon thee so. Emblem art thou of Time, memorial stream, Which in ten thousand fancies, being here, We waste, or use, or fashion, as we deem ; But if its backward voice comes ever ...