As where Milan's pale Duomo lies
A stranded glacier on the plain,
Its peaks and pinnacles of ice
Melted in many a quaint device,
And sees, above the city's din,
Afar its silent Alpine kin:
I track thee over carpets deep
To wealth's and beauty's innost keep;
Across the sand of bar-room floors
Mid the stale reek of boosing boors;
Where drowse the hay-field's fragrant
heats,

Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats;
I dog thee through the market's throngs
To where the sea with myriad tongues
Laps the green edges of the pier,
And the tall ships that eastward steer,
Curtsy their farewells to the town,
O'er the curved distance lessening down;
I follow allwhere for thy sake.
Touch thy robe's hem, but ne'er o'ertake,
Find where, scarce yet unmoving, lies,
Warm from thy limbs, thy last disguise;
But thou another shape hast donned,
And lurest still just, just beyond!

But here a voice, I know not whence, Thrills clearly through my inward sense, Saying: "See where she sits at home While thou in search of her dost roam! All summer long her ancient wheel Whirls humming by the open door, Or, when the hickory's social zeal

Sets the wide chimney in a roar, Close-nestled by the tinkling hearth, It modulates the household mirth With that sweet serious undertone Of duty, music all her own; Still as of old she sits and spins Our hopes, our sorrows, and our sins; With equal care she twines the fates Of cottages and mighty states; She spins the earth, the air, the sea, The maiden's unschooled fancy free,

The boy's first love, the man's first grief,
The budding and the fall o' the leaf;
The piping west-wind's snowy care
For her their cloudy fleeces spare,
Or from the thorns of evil times
She can glean wool to twist her rhymes;
Morning and noon and eve supply
To her their fairest tints for dye,
But ever through her twirling thread
There spires one line of warmest red,
Tinged from the homestead's genial
heart,

The stamp and warrant of her art;
With this Time's sickle she outwears,
And blunts the Sisters' baffled shears.

"Harass her not: thy heat and stir
But greater coyness breed in her;
Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost,
Thy long apprenticeship not lost,
Learning at last that Stygian Fate
Unbends to him that knows to wait.
The Muse is womanish, nor deigns
Her love to him that pules and plains;
With proud, averted face she stands
To him that wooes with empty hands.
Make thyself free of Manhood's guild;
Pull down thy barns and greater build;
The wood, the mountain, and the plain
Wave breast-deep with the poet's grain;
Pluck thou the sunset's fruit of gold,
Glean from the heavens and ocean old;
From fireside lone and trampling street
Let thy life garner daily wheat;
The epic of a man rehearse,

Be something better than thy verse;
Make thyself rich, and then the Muse
Shall court thy precious interviews,
Shall take thy head upon her knee,
And such enchantment lilt to thee,
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow
From farthest stars to grass-blades low,
And find the Listener's science still
Transcends the Singer's deepest skill !”

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 fore

gone

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

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell