pearl ;

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

What the full summer to that wonder new?

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

And blessed the Frenchman for his simple 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.
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.

I seem to have heard it said by learned 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 consuinmate, 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,

And shared decorous in the ancient rite
My sterner fathers held idolatrous.
The service over, I was tranced in
thought:

Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me,

Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint,

Or brick mock-pious with a marble front;

Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved,

Through which the organ blew a dream of storm,

Though not more potent to sublime with awe

And shut the heart up in tranquillity, Than aisles to me familiar that o'erarch

The conscious silences of brooding woods,

Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk :
Yet here was sense of undefined regret,
Irreparable loss, uncertain what :
Was all this grandeur but anachro-
nism,

A shell divorced of its informing life, Where the priest housed him like a hermit-crab,

An alien to that faith of elder days That gathered round it this fair shape of stone?

Is old Religion but a spectre now, Haunting the solitude of darkened minds,

Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day?

Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt,

Since Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite

And stretched electric threads from mind to mind?

Nay, did Faith build this wonder? or did Fear,

That makes a fetish and misnames it God

(Blockish or metaphysic, matters not), Contrive this coop to shut its tyrant in, Appeased with playthings, that he might not harm?

I turned and saw a beldame on her knees; With eyes astray, she told mechanic beads

Before some shrine of saintly womanhood,

Bribed intercessor with the far-off Judge: Such my first thought, by kindlier soon rebuked,

Pleading for whatsoever touches life With upward impulse: be He nowhere else,

God is in all that liberates and lifts, In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles:

Blessed the natures shored on every side With landmarks of hereditary thought! Thrice happy they that wander not lifelong

Beyond near succor of the household faith,

The guarded fold that shelters, not confines !

Their steps find patience in familiar paths,

Printed with hope by loved feet gone before

Of parent, child, or lover, glorified
By simple magic of dividing Time.
My lids were moistened as the woman
knelt,

And- was it will, or some vibration faint

Of sacred Nature, deeper than the will?

My heart occultly felt itself in hers, Through mutual intercession gently leagued.

Or was it not mere sympathy of brain?
A sweetness intellectually conceived
In simpler creeds to me impossible?
A juggle of that pity for ourselves
In others, which puts on such pretty
masks

And snares self-love with bait of charity?
Something of all it might be, or of none:
Yet for a moment I was snatched away
And had the evidence of things not seen;
For one rapt moment; then it all came
back,

This age that blots out life with questionmarks,

This nineteenth century with its knife and glass

That make thought physical, and thrust far off

The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old,

To voids sparse-sown with alienated

stars.

Nor didst Thou reck what image man

might make

Of his own shadow on the flowing world; The climbing instinct was enough for Thee.

Or wast Thou, then, an ebbing tide that left

Strewn with dead miracle those eldest shores,

For men to dry, and dryly lecture on,
Thyself thenceforth incapable of flood?
Idle who hopes with prophets to be
snatched

By virtue in their mantles left below;
Shall the soul live on other men's report,
Herself a pleasing fable of herself?
Man cannot be God's outlaw if he would,
Nor so abscond him in the caves of

Words that have drawn transcendent meanings up

From the best passion of all bygone time,

Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse,

Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed in martyr-fires,

Can they, so consecrate and so inspired, By repetition wane to vexing wind? Alas! we cannot draw habitual breath In the thin air of life's supremer heights, We cannot make each meal a sacrament, Nor with our tailors be disbodied souls, We men, too conscious of earth's comedy, Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate,

And only for great stakes can be sublime!

Let us be thankful when, as I do here,