TO A SKYLARK. | 159

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains ?
_ What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of
pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne’er knew loves had satiety.

Waking or asleep
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal
stream ?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught ;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought.

Yet, if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear,
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear, /
I know not how thy joy we ever should come nea:

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From thy lips would flow
The world should listen then as I am listening now

— from Shelley's Poems.