University of Virginia Library

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart
The magian East: thus the child eyes
Spelled out the wizard message by the light
Of the sober, workaday hours
They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass
In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind
In ancient Severn's arm,
Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,
Whose floating populace of ships—
Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,
Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters—brought
To her very doorsteps and geraniums
The scents of the World's End; the calls
That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride
Like fire on some high errand of the race;
The irresistible appeals
For comradeship that sound
Steadily from the irresistible sea.
Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,
Telling itself anew
In terms of living, labouring life,
Took on the colours, busked it in the wear
Of life that lived and laboured; and Romance,
The Angel-Playmate, raining down
His golden influences
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,
Walked with me arm in arm,
Or left me, as one bediademed with straws
And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart
Who had the gift to seek and feel and find
His fiery-hearted presence everywhere.
Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,
Sends the same silver dews
Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies
On some poor collier-hamlet—(mound on mound
Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk
Sullenly smoking over a row
Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air
A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings
Of hurtling, tipping trams)—
As on the amorous nightingales
And roses of Shíraz, or the walls and towers
Of Samarcand—the Ineffable—whence you espy
The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears,
Like listed lightnings.

Samarcand!
That name of names! That star-vaned belvedere
Builded against the Chambers of the South!
That outpost on the Infinite!

And behold!
Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide
Might overtake you: for one fringe
One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but one
Floats founded vague
In lubberlands delectable—isles of palm
And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,
The promise of wistful hills—
The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.