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 within.

This hath made poets dream of lives fore

gone

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

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell

The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm ;

But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard

Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill

That threads my undivided life and steals

A pathos from the years and graves be

tween.

I know not how it is with other men, Whom I but guess, deciphering myself; For me, once felt is so felt nevermore. The fleeting relish at sensation's brim Had in it the best ferment of the wine. One spring I knew as never any since: All night the surges of the warm south

west

Boomed intermittent through the wallowing elms,

And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift,

Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm

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

strange

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