THE CATHEDRAL. FAR through the memory shines a happy | Can overtake the rapture of the sense, day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every 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 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, No falcon ever felt delight of wings 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 It could transmute her darkness into | Music where none is, and a keener pang Of exquisite surmise outleaping thought, pearl; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden 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 The flies and I its only customers. Eluding these, I loitered through the town, With hope to take my minster unawares now Upon the mind's horizon, as of storm Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof, That mingle with our mood, but not disturb. Its once grim bulwarks, tamed to lovers' walks, Look down unwatchful on the sliding Eure, Whose listless leisure suits the quiet place, Lisping among his shallows homelike sounds At Concord and by Bankside heard before. Chance led me to a public pleasureground, Where I grew kindly with the merry groups, And blessed the Frenchman for his sim- [I seem to have heard it said by learnëd ple art Of being domestic in the light of day. His language has no word, we growl, for Home; But he can find a fireside in the sun, Play with his child, make love, and shriek his mind, By throngs of strangers undisprivacied. In manifold reflection from without; While we, each pore alert with consciousness, Hide our best selves as we had stolen them, And each bystander a detective were, Keen-eyed for every chink of undisguise. So, musing o'er the problem which was best, A life wide-windowed, shining all abroad, Or curtains drawn to shield from sight profane The rites we pay to the mysterious I, 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, folk Who drench you with æsthetics till you feel As if all beauty were a ghastly bore, worse; But, being convinced by much experi ment How little inventiveness there is in man, ness, Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, The one thing finished in this hasty world, Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout Of hazardous caprices sure to please, come, I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth. Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream, Builders of aspiration incomplete, So more consummate, souls self-confident, Who felt your own thought worthy of record In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, After long exile, to the mother-tongue. Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome Shrank with a shudder from the blueeyed race Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, |