Idyls and Songs :: :: University of Virginia Library

In happy days—long past, you recollect them,
We held discourse, dear Friend, on art and verse:
What style, what metre, fitting as a robe
The naked thought beneath, endraping it
In thousand-fold expression—adding grace
Where it received it—best might suit the modes
And giddy-paced invention of our age:
While talk of summer days, and Wales, and all
The flashing glories of her torrent-depths
Mingled its freshness.

And one while 'twas said,
That ‘deepest streams run clearest:’ and, again,
Both voting that deep matter and deep thought
Wedded in verse, for studious readers call'd,
And dutiful attention—'twas agreed
‘Transparent rills are shallow:’ till, between
These seeming discrepancies, Truth, who sits
'Twixt poles of endless severance, yet the same,
(You told us), found her station.

And we said,
‘Thoughts differ in degree, no less than kind.
There is no one Procrustean bed for all:
Things hang not in the heavy dock-yard scales,
But most hair-balanced: 'tis the difficult mean,
Their evanescent meeting-point, we aim at.
Some thoughts, like characters, themselves unfold,
Themselves their own interpreters: of such
The mass of verse is fashion'd.’

‘Some,’ you said.
(And push'd the smouldering brands that fronted us
Together to one cone of whiter heat,
Your meditative habit)—‘Some, as erst
That Eleusinian Temple, where within
The mysteries of earth were shadow'd forth,
With pictured porch and outwork was fenced round,—
For Prologue, by the reader's self set forth,
In studious preparation—or built up
By him that frames the story, call aloud:—
Then most, if e'er the records of past time
Are summon'd forth their essence to give up,
Rich concentration:—So the stream of thought
In deep and equable lucidity
Flows undisturb'd, in bright allurement strong
To tempt th' onlooker, who within its depths
Sees his own features glass'd, with headlong plunge
To entrust him to those waters, and so float
Bathed in the currents of the murmurous song’.
—And I—(for Art, that in the present fades,
Had once a splendour and an empery
To sway the hearts of men)—would here set forth
Her birth, and first derival; not from aught
That yet survives in sculptured majesty,
Or glows in picture,—from the principles
And canons of the beautiful, deduced;—
But from the course of her own lordly tale
And history develop'd: how by need
Of all-inventing man, and fond requirement,
She sprang to light—then faded: as the rose
On morning clouds, that first the sun calls forth,
And then effaces.

So I launch the song,
That asks forbearance, and the serious gaze
Of bending studiousness.

And if from thee,
O thee alone, such favour I should win,
I count my aim accomplish'd—the reward
That o'er-rewards the task—O, who would wish
Whate'er the toil, the purpose of the race,
More than th' award of justice, when her throne
Is shared with Love and Wisdom—co-assessors?