Did you ever see that electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or legend springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?
There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the flash might pass through them,--but the fire must come down from heaven.

Ah! but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered cumulus of sluggish satiety?
I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship,--the immortal maid, who, name her what you will,--Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,--sits by the pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.
MUSA.
O my lost Beauty!--hast thou folded quite Thy wings of morning light Beyond those iron gates Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates, And Age upon his mound of ashes waits To chill our fiery dreams, Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?
Leave me not fading in these weeds of care, Whose flowers are silvered hair!-- Have I not loved thee long, Though my young lips have often done thee wrong And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
Ah, wilt thou yet return, Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?
Come to me!--I will flood thy silent shine With my soul's sacred wine, And heap thy marble floors As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores In leafy islands walled with madrepores And lapped in Orient seas, When all their feathery palm toss, plume-like, in the breeze.
Come to me!--thou shalt feed on honied words, Sweeter than song of birds;-- No wailing bulbul's throat, No melting dulcimer's melodious note, When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float, Thy ravished sense might soothe With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.
Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen, Sought in those bowers of green Where loop the clustered vines And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,-- Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines, And Summer's fruited gems, And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.
Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,-- Or stretched by grass-grown graves, Whose gray, high-shouldered stones, Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns, Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones Still slumbering where they lay While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.
Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing! Still let me dream and sing,-- Dream of that winding shore Where scarlet cardinals bloom,--for me no more,-- The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor, And clustering nenuphars Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars! Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!-- Come while the rose is red,-- While blue-eyed Summer smiles On the green ripples round you sunken piles Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles, And on the sultry air The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer! Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain With thrills of wild sweet pain!-- On life's autumnal blast, Like shrivelled leaves, youth's, passion-flowers are cast,-- Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!-- Behold thy new-decked shrine, And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!".