If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate
Can shrive you of that sin,--if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.


THE WITCH OF ATLAS.

1.
Before those cruel Twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, _50
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learned rhyme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain _55
Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.

2.
Her mother was one of the Atlantides:
The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden
In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden _60
In the warm shadow of her loveliness;--
He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden
The chamber of gray rock in which she lay--
She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.

3.
'Tis said, she first was changed into a vapour, _65
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,