JOVE descends in sleet and snow,
Howls the vexed and angry deep;
Every storm forgets to flow,
Bound in winter’s icy sleep,
Ocean wave and forest hoar
To the blast responsive roar.
Drive the tempest from your door,
Blaze on blaze your hearthstone piling,
And unmeasured goblets pour
Brimful, high with nectar smiling.
Then, beneath your poet’s head
Be a downy pillow spread.
— Translated by John Herman Merivale (1779–1844).
UNDISTURBED the pool reposes,
And the moon with silver sheen
Weaves upon it pallid roses
In the sedges’ wreath of green.
Stags, upon the hillside erring,
Upward in the darkness glance,
Wildfowl in the sedge are stirring,
Now and then, as in a trance.
Down I gaze, my tears are flowing;
Through my soul’s depth unaware
Tender thoughts of thee are going,
Like a silent evening prayer.
AT length arose, in the person of the last Sir Ferdinand Armine, one of those extraordinary and rarely gifted beings who require only an opportunity to influence the fortunes of their nation, and to figure as a Cæsar or an Alcibiades. Beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious, the young and restless Armine quitted, in his eighteenth year, the house of his fathers, and his stepdame of a country, and entered the Imperial service. His blood and creed gained him a flattering reception; his skill and valour soon made him distinguished. The world rang with stories of his romantic bravery, his gallantries, his eccentric manners, and his political intrigues, for he nearly contrived to be elected King of Poland.
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in 1835, when he was sixty years old. Schelling influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was fluent in German. Biographia Literaria has some straight lifts from Schelling, not always with acknowledged source.
Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, the Bavarian court painter, in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.
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