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| IT is not Beauty I demand, | |
| A crystal brow, the moon’s despair, | |
| Nor the snow’s daughter, a white hand, | |
| Nor mermaid’s yellow pride of hair: | |
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| Tell me not of your starry eyes, | 5 |
| Your lips that seem on roses fed, | |
| Your breasts, where Cupid tumbling lies | |
| Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed,— | |
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| A bloomy pair of vermeil cheeks | |
| Like Hebe’s in her ruddiest hours, | 10 |
| A breath that softer music speaks | |
| Than summer winds a-wooing flowers;— | |
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| These are but gauds: nay, what are lips? | |
| Coral beneath the ocean-stream, | |
| Whose brink when your adventurer slips | 15 |
| Full oft he perisheth on them. | |
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| And what are cheeks, but ensigns oft | |
| That wave hot youth to fields of blood? | |
| Did Helen’s breast, though ne’er so soft, | |
| Do Greece or Ilium any good? | 20 |
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| Eyes can with baleful ardor burn; | |
| Poison can breath, that erst perfumed; | |
| There ’s many a white hand holds an urn | |
| With lovers’ hearts to dust consumed. | |
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| For crystal brows there ’s naught within; | 25 |
| They are but empty cells for pride; | |
| He who the Siren’s hair would win | |
| Is mostly strangled in the tide. | |
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| Give me, instead of Beauty’s bust, | |
| A tender heart, a loyal mind, | 30 |
| Which with temptation I would trust, | |
| Yet never linked with error find,— | |
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| One in whose gentle bosom I | |
| Could pour my secret heart of woes, | |
| Like the care-burdened honey-fly | 35 |
| That hides his murmurs in the rose,— | |
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| My earthly Comforter! whose love | |
| So indefeasible might be | |
| That, when my spirit wonned above, | |
| Hers could not stay, for sympathy. | 40 |
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