'Tis that delightful transport we can feel,
Which painters cannot paint, or words reveal.
Nor any art we know of,—can conceal.
Canst thou describe the sun-beams to the blind,
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?
So neither can we by description show
This first of all felicities below.

When happy Love pours magic o'er the soul,
And all our thoughts in sweet delirium roll;
When Contemplation spreads its rainbow wings,
And every flutter some new rapture brings;
How sweetly then our moments glide away,
And dreams repeat the raptures of the day;
We live in ecstasy to all things kind,
For love can teach a moral to the mind.
But are there not some other marks that prove,
What is this wonder of the soul, call'd love?

O yes, there are, but of a different kind,
The dreadful horrors of a dismal mind.
Some jealous fury throws her poison'd dart,
And rends in pieces the distracted heart,

When love's a tyrant, and the soul a slave,
No hopes remain to thought, but in the grave;
In that dark den, it sees an end to grief,
And what was once its dread, becomes relief.

What are the iron chains that hands have wrought?
The hardest chains to break, are those of thought.
Think well of this, ye lovers, and be kind,
Nor play with torture—or a tortured mind.

Through rivers of veins on the nameless quest
The tide of my life goes hurriedly sweeping,
Till it reaches that curious wheel o' the breast,
The human heart, which is never at rest.
Faster, faster, it cries, and leaping,
Plunging, dashing, speeding away,
The wheel and the river work night and day.

I know not wherefore, I know not whither,
This strange tide rushes with such mad force:
It glides on hither, it slides on thither,
Over and over the selfsame course,
With never an outlet and never a source;
And it lashes itself to the heat of passion
And whirls the heart in a mill-wheel fashion.

I can hear in the hush of the still, still night,
The ceaseless sound of that mighty river;
I can hear it gushing, gurgling, rushing,
With a wild, delirious, strange delight,
And a conscious pride in its sense of might,
As it hurries and worries my heart forever.

And I wonder oft as I lie awake,
And list to the river that seethes and surges
Over the wheel that it chides and urges —
I wonder oft if that wheel will break
With the mighty pressure it bears, some day,
Or slowly and wearily wear away.

For little by little the heart is wearing,
Like the wheel of the mill, as the tide goes tearing
And plunging hurriedly through my breast,
In a network of veins on a nameless quest,
From and forth, unto unknown oceans,
Bringing its cargoes of fierce emotions,
With never a pause or an hour for rest.