No More Learning

And there the body lay, age after age.
Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying, _610
Like one asleep in a green hermitage,
With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing,
And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life; while they were still arraying
In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind _615
And fleeting generations of mankind.

72.
And she would write strange dreams upon the brain
Of those who were less beautiful, and make
All harsh and crooked purposes more vain
Than in the desert is the serpent's wake _620
Which the sand covers--all his evil gain
The miser in such dreams would rise and shake
Into a beggar's lap;--the lying scribe
Would his own lies betray without a bribe.

73.
The priests would write an explanation full, _625
Translating hieroglyphics into Greek,
How the God Apis really was a bull,
And nothing more; and bid the herald stick
The same against the temple doors, and pull
The old cant down; they licensed all to speak _630
Whate'er they thought of hawks, and cats, and geese,
By pastoral letters to each diocese.

74.
The king would dress an ape up in his crown
And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat,
And on the right hand of the sunlike throne _635
Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat
The chatterings of the monkey. --Every one
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet
Of their great Emperor, when the morning came,
And kissed--alas, how many kiss the same! _640

75.
The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and
Walked out of quarters in somnambulism;
Round the red anvils you might see them stand
Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm,
Beating their swords to ploughshares;--in a band _645
The gaolers sent those of the liberal schism
Free through the streets of Memphis, much, I wis,
To the annoyance of king Amasis.

76.
And timid lovers who had been so coy,
They hardly knew whether they loved or not, _650
Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy,
To the fulfilment of their inmost thought;
And when next day the maiden and the boy
Met one another, both, like sinners caught,
Blushed at the thing which each believed was done _655
Only in fancy--till the tenth moon shone;

77.
And then the Witch would let them take no ill:
Of many thousand schemes which lovers find,
The Witch found one,--and so they took their fill
Of happiness in marriage warm and kind. _660
Friends who, by practice of some envious skill,
Were torn apart--a wide wound, mind from mind!
--
She did unite again with visions clear
Of deep affection and of truth sincere.

80.
These were the pranks she played among the cities _665
Of mortal men, and what she did to Sprites
And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties
To do her will, and show their subtle sleights,
I will declare another time; for it is
A tale more fit for the weird winter nights _670
Than for these garish summer days, when we
Scarcely believe much more than we can see.

NOTES:
_2 dead]deaf cj. A. C. Bradley, who cps. "Adonais" 317.
_65 first was transcript, B. ; was first edition 1824.
_84 Temple's transcript, B. ; tempest's edition 1824.
_165 was its transcript, B. ; is its edition 1824.
_184 envied so all manuscripts and editions;
envious cj. James Thomson ('B.