Nor ever blurred with mist of afterthought;

Like words made magical by poets dead, Wherein the music of all meaning is 'The sense hath garnered or the soul divined,

They mingle with our life's ethereal part,

Sweetening and gathering sweetness

These virginal cognitions, gifts of morn, Ere life grow noisy, and slower-footed thought

Can overtake the rapture of the 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 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 with

in.

This hath made poets dream of lives foregone

In worlds fantastical, more fair than

ours:

That sometimes almost gives me to believe

I might have been a poet, gives at least
A brain desaxonized, an ear that makes
Music where none is, and a keener pang
Of exquisite surmise outleaping
thought,
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 beautifu' 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 confi

dence,

So they, desiring guidance in the town, Half condescended to my baser sphere, And, clubbing in one mess their lack of phrase,

Set their best man to grapple with the Gaul.

"Esker vous ate a nabitang?" he asked; I never ate one; are they good?" asked I;

Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends,

The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed,

Abolished in the truce of common speech And mutual comfort of the mothertongue.

Like escaped convicts of Propriety, They furtively partook the joys of men, Glancing behind when buzzed some louder fly.

Eluding these, I loitered through the town,

With hope to take my minster una

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 re