Flower o' the thorn :: :: University of Virginia Library

A MIST hath arisen from the low-lying places;
Its haze
On gable and steeple,
On pavement and people,
On milestone and margent,
It lays:
It wanders its way through the streets and the spaces
And hangs in the hollows and sides of the city:
On rail
And roadway, on tramway and pathway its argent-
Grey scumble
Is pale.
It lies on the landscape, mysterious and holy,
With drapery of dreams, as in sorrow and pity,
Things homely concealing and casting o'er lowly
And humble
A veil.

So subtle its warp is, its weft is so fragile,
Meseems,
It might of hands folded
For spell have been moulded;
A web of such weaving
Of dreams
Morgane might have hung o'er the towers of Tintagel,
To baffle the bandits that sought to invest it
Whilere:
It is as the fairies had been with us, leaving
Their drapery

There.
It veers o'er the world like a lace-work of vision:
A breath, on it blown, so it seems, might arrest it,
A wind-waft consign back to regions Elysian
Its vapory
Air.

One cannot but fancy, when once 'tis arisen
And gone,
Some vision of wonder
Upon us from under
Its broideries airy
Will dawn:
One cannot but look for some world than our wizen
Old world, with its sordid delight and mean sorrow,
More worth,
But hope, when the woof of its fabric of Faerie
Is riven,
Some birth
Of beauty, some life more of price than our vagrant
Vain fashion of living, some glorified morrow,
Some flowerage of fancy will greet us, some fragrant
New heaven
And earth.

But yonder to Eastward awakened a breeze is:
To wrack
It buffets and follows
The mist through the hollows
And smites it in sunder.
Alack!
It leaves the air mistless; but all that one sees is
The sorry old scape of the weariness olden
Unfurled;

No Isles of the Blesséd, all radiant with wonder,
All jewel-
Impearled;
No visions of hope, such as fancy awaited,
No Paradise-plains, no Hesperides golden,
No bright Eldorados, but only the hated
And cruel
Old world.