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,
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 eyas, 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

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. Eluding these, I loitered through the town,

With hope to take my minster unawares
In its grave solitude of memory.
A pretty burgh, and such as Fancy loves
For bygone grandeurs, faintly rumorous

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,

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.
He makes his life a public gallery,
Nor feels himself till what he feels comes
back

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,
The faucet to let loose a wash of words,
That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore

worse;

But, being convinced by much experi

ment

How little inventiveness there is in man,
Grave copier of copies, I give thanks
For a new relish, careless to inquire
My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please,
Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art.
The Grecian gluts me with its perfect-

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
As if a miracle could be encored.
But ah! this other, this that never ends,
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,
As full of morals half-divined as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new sur-
prise

Of hazardous caprices sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern,
Imagination's very self in stone!
With one long sigh of infinite release
From pedantries past, present, or to

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
Of men invirile and disnatured dames
That poison sucked from the Attic
bloom decayed,

Shrank with a shudder from the blueeyed race

Whose force rough-handed should renew the world,