day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every

sense,

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

In that continuous redbreast boding rain :

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 shuddering 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 year:

And once I learned how marvellous

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

It could transmute her darkness into pearl;

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

blush?

What the full summer to that wonder new?

But, if in nothing else, in us there is A sense fastidious hardly reconciled To the poor makeshifts of life's scenery, 'Where the same slide must double all its parts,

Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre.

I blame not in the soul this daintiness,
Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird,
In things indifferent by sense purveyed;
It argues her an immortality
And dateless incomes of experience,
This unthrift housekeeping that will not
brook

A dish warmed-over at the feast of life,
And finds Twice stale, served with what-

ever sauce.

Nor matters much how it may go with

me

Who dwell in Grub Street and am proud to drudge

Where men, my betters, wet their crust with tears:

Use can make sweet the peach's shady side,

That only by reflection tastes of sun.

But she, my Princess, who will sometimes deign

My garret to illumine till the walls, Narrow and dingy, scrawled with hack

neyed thought

(Poor Richard slowly elbowing Plato out),

Dilate and drape themselves with tapestries

Nausikaa might have stooped o'er, while, between,

Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, send

Her only image on through deepening deeps

With endless repercussion of delight, Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul,

That sometimes almost gives me to believe

I might have been a poet, gives at least A brain desaxonized, an ear that makes