Alnwick Castle, with other poem / Fitz-Greene Halleck [electronic text]

FROM THE ITALIAN.

EYES with the same blue witchery as those Of Psyche, which caught Love in his own wiles; Lips of the breath and hue of the red rose, That move but with kind words, and sweetest smiles; A power of motion and of look, whose art Throws, silently, around the wildest heart The net it would not break; a form which vies With that the Grecian imaged in his mind, And gazed upon in dreams, and sighed to find His breathing marble could not realize.

Know ye this picture? There is one alone Can call its penciled lineaments her own. She whom, at morning, when the summer air Wanders, delighted, o'er her face of flowers, And lingers in the ringlets of her hair, We deem the Hebe of Jove's banquet hours;

She who, at evening, when her fingers press The harp, and wake its harmonies divine, Seems sweetest-voiced and loveliest of the Nine, The minstrel of the bowers of happiness. She whom the Graces nurtured— at her birth, The sea-born Goddess, and the Huntress maid, Beings whose beauty is not of the earth, Came from their myrtle home, and forest shade, Blending immortal joy with mortal mirth: And Dian said, "Fair sister, be she mine "In her heart's purity, in beauty thine." The smiling infant listened, and obeyed.