By thee she found the homely faith
In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay'th,
When Death, extinguishing his torch,
Gropes for the latch-string in the porch;
The love that wanders not beyond

His earliest nest, but sits and sings
While children smooth his patient wings;
Therefore with thee I love to read

Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs
Life in the withered words! how swift recede
Time's shadows! and how glows again
Through its dead mass the incandescent verse,
As when upon the anvils of the brain
It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought
By the fast-throbbing hammers of the poet's
thought!

Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred,

The aspirations unattained,

The rhythms so rathe and delicate,

They bent and strained

And broke, beneath the sombre weight

Of any airiest mortal word.

VII.

What warm protection dost thou bend

Round curtained talk of friend with friend,
While the gray snow-storm, held aloof,

To softest outline rounds the roof,
Or the rude North with baffled strain
Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane!
Now the kind nymph to Bacchus borne
By Morpheus' daughter, she that seems
Gifted upon her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams,
Nicotia, dearer to the Muse

Than all the grapes' bewildering juice,
We worship, unforbid of thee;
And, as her incense floats and curls
In airy spires and wayward whirls,
Or poises on its tremulous stalk

A flower of frailest revery,
So winds and loiters, idly free,
The current of unguided talk,
Now laughter-rippled, and now caught

In smooth, dark pools of deeper thought.
Meanwhile thou mellowest every word,
A sweetly unobtrusive third;

For thou hast magic beyond wine,
To unlock natures each to each;

The unspoken thought thou canst divine;
Thou fillest the pauses of the speech
With whispers that to dream-land reach,
And frozen fancy-springs unchain

In Arctic outskirts of the brain;

Sun of all inmost confidences !

To thy rays doth the heart unclose

Its formal calyx of pretences,

That close against rude day's offences,

And open its shy midnight rose.

VIII.

Thou holdest not the master key

With which thy Sire sets free the mystic gates

Of Past and Future: not for common fates

Do they wide open fling,

And, with a far-heard ring,

Swing back their willing valves melodiously; Only to ceremonial days,

And great processions of imperial song

That set the world at gaze,

Doth such high privilege belong:

But thou a postern-door canst ope

To humbler chambers of the selfsame palace Where Memory lodges, and her sister Hope, Whose being is but as a crystal chalice Which, with her various mood, the elder fills Of joy or sorrow,

So coloring as she wills

With hues of yesterday the unconscious morrow.

IX.

Thou sinkest, and my fancy sinks with thee:

For thee I took the idle shell,

And struck the unused chords again,

But they are gone who listened well;

Some are in heaven, and all are far from me:
Even as I sing, it turns to pain,

And with vain tears my eyelids throb and swell:

Enough I come not of the race

That hawk their sorrows in the market-place.
Earth stops the ears I best had loved to please;
Then break, ye untuned chords, or rust in peace!
As if a white-haired actor should come back
Some midnight to the theatre void and black,
And there rehearse his youth's great part
'Mid thin applauses of the ghosts,

So seems it now: ye crowd upon my heart,
And I bow down in silence, shadowy hosts!