day,

Cloudless of care, down-shod to every

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; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing halfrevealed.

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell

pearl;

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

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 hackneyed 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

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 beautiful
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 confidence.
I went, and, with the Saxon's pious care,
First ordered dinner at the pea-green
inn,

The flies and I its only customers. Eluding these, I loitered through the town,

With hope to take my minster unawares
In its grave solitude of memory.
A pretty burgh, and such as Fancy loves
For bygone grandeurs, faintly rumorous

now

Upon the mind's horizon, as of storm Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof, That mingle with our mood, but not disturb.

Its once grim bulwarks, tamed to lovers' walks,

Look down unwatchful on the sliding Eure,

Whose listless leisure suits the quiet place,

Lisping among his shallows homelike sounds

At Concord and by Bankside heard before.

Chance led me to a public pleasureground,

Where I grew kindly with the merry groups,