Fragment: 'Welcome Joy and welcome Sorrow'

Under the flag

Of each his faction, they to battle bring

Their embryo atoms.

Milton.

Published in Life, Letters and Literary Remains, without date.

Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow,

      Lethe's weed and Hermes' feather;

Come to-day, and come to-morrow,

      I do love you both together!

      I love to mark sad faces in fair weather;

And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder;

      Fair and foul I love together.

Meadows sweet where flames are under,

And a giggle at a wonder;

Visage sage at pantomime;

Funeral, and steeple-chime;

Infant playing with a skull;

Morning fair, and shipwrecked hull;

Nightshade with the woodbine kissing;

Serpents in red roses hissing;

Cleopatra regal-dress'd

With the aspic at her breast;

Dancing music, music sad,

Both together, sane and mad;

Muses bright, and muses pale;

Sombre Saturn, Momus hale;—

Laugh and sigh, and laugh again;

Oh, the sweetness of the pain!

Muses bright and muses pale,

Bare your faces of the veil;

Let me see; and let me write

Of the day, and of the night—

Both together:—let me slake

All my thirst for sweet heart-ache!

Let my bower be of yew,

Interwreath'd with myrtles new;

Pines and lime-trees full in bloom,

And my couch a low grass-tomb.