day,

Cloudless of care, down-shod to every

sense,

And simply perfect from its own resource,
As to a bee the new campanula's
Illuminate seclusion swung in air.
Such days are not the prey of setting

suns,

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 evermore,

By beauty's franchise disenthralled of time.

I can recall, nay, they are present still, Parts of myself, the perfume of my mind, Days that seem farther off than Homer's

now

Ere yet the child had loudened to the boy, And I, recluse from playmates, found perforce

Companionship in things that not denied Nor granted wholly; as is Nature's wont,

Who, safe in uncontaminate reserve, Lets us mistake our longing for her love, And mocks with various echo of ourselves.

These first sweet frauds upon our consciousness,

That blend the sensual with its imaged world,

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

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 southwest

Boomed intermittent through the shuddering elins,

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

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

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

thought,

I was a poacher on their self-preserve, Intent constructively on lese-anglicism. To them (in those old razor-ridden days) My beard translated me to hostile French;

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