To thrust between ourselves and what we feel,

Have something in them secretly divine. Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain,

With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose;

For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl.

Our own breath dims the mirror of the

sense,

Looking too long and closely at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out,

And that first passion beggars all behind,

Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. Who, seeing once, has truly seen again The gray vague of unsympathizing sea That dragged his Fancy from her moorings back

To shores inhospitable of eldest time, Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered powers,

Pitiless seignories in the elements, Omnipotences blind that darkling smite, Misgave him, and repaganized the world?

Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred,

Perplex the eye with pictures from with

in.

This hath made poets dream of lives foregone

In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing halfrevealed.

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell

Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song:

One summer hour abides, what time I perched,

Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,

And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof

An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,

Denouncing me an alien and a thief: One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest,

When in the lane I watched the ashleaves fall,

Balancing softly earthward without wind,

Or twirling with directer impulse down On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost,

While I grew pensive with the pensive year:

And once I learned how marvellous

Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. So when our Fancy seeks analogies, Though she have hidden what she after

finds,

She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise.

I find my own complexion everywhere:
No rose,
I doubt, was ever, like the
first,
A marvel to the bush it dawned upon,
The rapture of its life made visible,
The mystery of its yearning realized,
As the first babe to the first woman
born;

No falcon ever felt delight of wings
As when, an evas, from the stolid cliff
Loosing himself, he followed his high
heart

To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind;

And I believe the brown earth takes delight

In the new snowdrop looking back at her,

To think that by some vernal alchemy

pearl;

What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden

blush?

What the full summer to that wonder new?

But, if in nothing else, in us there is A sense fastidious hardly reconciled To the poor makeshifts of life's scenery, Where the same slide must double all its parts,

Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre.

I blame not in the soul this daintiness, Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird, In things indifferent by sense purveyed; It argues her an immortality

And dateless incomes of experience, This unthrift housekeeping that will not brook

A dish warmed-over at the feast of life, And finds Twice stale, served with what

ever sauce.

Nor matters much how it may go with

me

Who dwell in Grub Street and am proud to drudge

Where men, my betters, wet their crust with tears:

Use can make sweet the peach's shady side,

That only by reflection tastes of sun.

But she, my Princess, who will sometimes deign

My garret to illumine till the walls, Narrow and dingy, scrawled with hackneyed thought

(Poor Richard slowly elbowing Plato out),

Dilate and drape themselves with tapestries

Nausikaa might have stooped o'er, while, between,

Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, send

Her only image on through deepening deeps

Her will I pamper in her luxury: No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choice

Shall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams,

Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall be

The invitiate firstlings of experience, Vibrations felt but once and felt lifelong:

O, more than half-way turn that Grecian front

Upon me, while with self-rebuke I spell, On the plain fillet that confines thy hair In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint,

The Naught in overplus, thy race's badge!

One feast for her I secretly designed
In that Old World so strangely beautiful
To us the disinherited of eld,
A day at Chartres, with no soul beside
To roil with pedant prate my joy serene
And make the minster shy of confidence.
I went, and, with the Saxon's pious care,
First ordered dinner at the pea-green
inn,

The flies and I its only customers,
Till by and by there came two English-

men,

Who made me feel, in their engaging way,

I was a poacher on their self-preserve, Intent constructively on lese-anglicism. To them (in those old razor-ridden days) My beard translated me to hostile French;

So they, desiring guidance in the town, Half condescended to my baser sphere, And, clubbing in one mess their lack of phrase,

Set their best man to grapple with the Gaul.

"Esker vous ate a nabitang?" he asked; "I never ate one; are they good?” asked I;

Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends,

The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed,

Abolished in the truce of common speech And mutual comfort of the mothertongue.

With outward senses furloughed and head bowed

I followed some fine instinct in my feet, Till, to unbend me from the loom of thought,

Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes

Confronted with the minster's vast repose.

Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat,

That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs,

Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell,

Spume-sliding down the baffled decumau, It rose before me, patiently remote From the great tides of life it breasted