According as his humours lead, In Art like Nature, dearest friend; So 'twere to cramp its use, if I Should hook it to some useful end. L'ENVOI. 1. You shake your head. A random string To silence from the paths of men; And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep thro' terms of mighty wars, And wake on science grown to more, On secrets of the brain, the stars, As wild as aught of fairy lore; The Poet-forms of stronger hours, The Federations and the Powers; Titanic forces taking birth In divers seasons, divers climes; For we are Ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times. II. So sleeping, so aroused from sleep Thro' sunny decads new and strange, Or gay quinquenniads would we reap The flower and quintessence of change. III. Ah, yet would I — and would I might! So much your eyes my fancy takeBe still the first to leap to light That I might kiss those eyes awake! For, am I right, or am I wrong, To choose your own you did not care; You'd have my moral from the song, And I will take my pleasure there: And, am I right or am I wrong, My fancy, ranging thro' and thro', To search a meaning for the song, Perforce will still revert to you; Nor finds a closer truth than this All-graceful head, so richly curl'd, 'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown, Coquetting with young beeches; The linden broke her ranks and rent The shock-head willows two and two Came wet-shod alder from the wave, Poussetting with a sloe-tree: Old elms came breaking from the vine, And wasn't it a sight to see, When, ere his song was ended, As dash'd about the drunken leaves Oh, nature first was fresh to men, 'Tis vain! in such a brassy age I could not move a thistle; But what is that I hear? a sound They read Botanic Treatises, And Works on Gardening thro' there, The wither'd Misses! how they prose And alleys, faded places, But these, tho' fed with careful dirt, Are neither green nor sappy; Half-conscious of the garden-squirt, The spindlings look unhappy. Better to me the meanest weed That blows upon its mountain, The vilest herb that runs to seed Beside its native fountain. And I must work thro' months of toil, To grow my own plantation. But o'er the dark a glory spreads, And gilds the driving hail. I leave the plain, I climb the height; A maiden knight-to me is given I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven I muse on joy that will not cease, Whose odours haunt my dreams; This mortal armour that I wear, This weight and size, this heart and eyes, Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air. |