University of Virginia Library

Gazing far up into the expressive blue,
Steeping my feverish soul enchantingly
Under its keenest coolest deeps, there come
Sweet prophecies that tell me of a dawn
Of happy thought just brightening to emerge
Within me. Oh, I knew it would be so;
We are not brutes or senseless surfaces
Of wind-rockt woods, to look on things like these
Without a secret sympathy—a half
Intelligent and half unconscious love,
Absorbing, passionate, intense, and yet
Craving to understand—importunate
To know the meaning of its own delight—
To read the deep mysterious loveliness
With intellectual eyes, and not alone
Reap joy, but strength and wisdom infinite
By gazing; Therefore, O expected thought—
Formless, profound, lying so dark and dumb
Somewhere in these lone caverns, far below
The bidding of the will, and only stirr'd
Thence by some wayward impulse of thine own—
Arise! Roll upward like the morning mist
From sombre clefts and valleys of the mind
Up the wet hills, and settle into shape
Along the clear bold Alps of intellect!
O half-created music, brighten out
Upon the maker's soul, and frame thyself
To some sweet symphony, whose clinging tides
Eddy and whirl for fondness all about
A little song of passion or of grief
Half smother'd in the midst,—or some great psalm,
Whose serried chords move royally, and crush
All other voices of the echoing heart
Into their own! O dewy water-drops,
From this moist roof o' the heart drip stilly down
Into the cavernous mind, and thence again
Freeze beautifully upward, till you touch
And prop your elder home—a crystal cool
Stalactite, in whose calm transparency
The filtering moonlight finds no flaw nor aught
That came not from above!

Thus do I seem
To liken thee, O sweet interpreter
Of what I see. Be not beyond my reach,
As now, nor like fantastic shapes and quaint
Of sedge and blossoming reed, in the dark heart
Of running waters bedded, that dip down
And rise again, and glimmer and grow dark,
And flickering swerve thro' many an elfin guise
To hide their own, till the strain'd aching sight
Forgets to follow. O, slide perfectly
Into the due constraint of human speech,
That so in phrase of this dear mother-tongue
I may embosom thee, and go to rest
With the warm glow under my throbbing lids
Of some delicious fancy—some new truth
Cull'd to my little hoard from that immense
And fallow Eden of uncropt delights
And wisdoms infinite, where through all time
Pastor and bard and sage their stalwart arms
Immerse, and pluck rich fragrant armfulls home
Unto their panting bosoms of wet leaves
Luxuriant, and bold brilliant meadow-flowers
And shy full-dropping tufts of vagrant corn—
And shed them o'er the people in sweet showers
Imperishable, startling back to them
A breath of glory; while for such as me,
Gazing full sadly betwixt closed bars,
Some stray and seldom wind may chance to enrich
Into a bloom of twinkling tints awhile
The broad and dull savannah, or may blow
Against the wicket-rails some sorry flowers
For me to gather and be gone—in grief
How soon some stronger spirit shall burst in,
And revel at his ease.

O envious thought!
The food is garner'd, and the eater's lips
Have tasted and are thankful: now who cares
What reaper in the folds of his broad breast
Did store it at the first? He hath small claim
To be a Poet, who in the great field
Thinks scorn to bear the burden of the day,
And labour for his kind—who dares to pluck
All day, and wreathe, pet flowers for his delight
Like a fond child; nor searches evermore
From that rich boundless prairie of his thought
To grasp and harvest for his brother's heart
The holiest and the loveliest and the best.

Come then—come now! Or only let me feel
The shadow of thy coming—feel that thou
In the deep quiet shalt be born and make
This dumb distracting pleasure grow serene
And most intelligent, worthy the ken
Of thinking man. For ofttimes the full flood
Of passionate feeling, by whatever name
It do approve itself to the searching sense
Inquisitive of names, being drawn off,
Encrusts the vapid hollow of the heart
With rich rank lees,—opaque and scummy dregs
Of what was lucid as the wet rose-hues
Gushing thro' some high oriel, whose clear panes
In light of eve are blazon'd to the full;
Acrid and harsh of taste—the coarse remains
Of an evanish'd flavour; and yet fraught
In grosser substance with the very same
Transparent spiritual thing, that sank
And shed this slough in sinking.

Such is verse—
A range of lovely faces darkling out
Of dwarfish mirrors—the scant aftermath
Of some full crop new-mown from the ripe heart
Into memorial-garners. Be thou born
Within such sphere, O rising thought—slide out
On this sweet stainless sluice to light: or float
On weediest pools prosaic—only come!
Hush!

'Twas some soft susurrus of those strange
Close-curtain'd sounds, apart from hearing, which
Do make a presence for themselves i' the heart
At this still hour: and now there is no hope!
That large ‘dumb swell’ of spirit, heaving up
To burst in creamy floods of fresh clear foam,
Brilliant, and speechful with a gradual stir
Of small innumerous whispers seething out
Of a wide undistinguish'd murmur—this
Dies idly down upon the level sea;
The level sea, but shuddering thro' itself
Eternally, while in its secret heart
Old dreamy deaths, and shapes whose better half
Is clean oblivion, toss and plunge and die.

And now, that blank bare passionless moon, and those
Small shrinking stars, that should be something more
Than a rime-frost upon the lawny blue,
If we had eyes to read them,—that intense
Exuberant blue itself, cradle and home
Of all sweet iris-colours—viewless now
And quite absorbed, but soon with touch of morn,
Or inspirations of most witching eve,
To blush into full vivid life—which now
Is vacant utterly, disrobed and pure
Of its own wild creations, like a soul
Slid down thro' thought and feeling into calm
More beautiful than either,—these delights,
And all the weird mysterious earth, by gaze
And neighbourhood of heaven grown spiritual,
Soothed into feminine beauty more divine
Than her strong sunborn splendours—these, and all
Fair bournes beside, wherein scorch'd fever'd eyes
Do rest at midnight, having quite benumb'd
My spirit to a laxer gaze, grow faint,
Uncertain, tremulous; and, cloak'd and cowl'd
Like those lean Northern witches, silently
Shut up their secrets and their loveliness,
And with smart strain and shock, as of a growth
Of little heart-strings breaking, pass away:
And sleep and silence darken into me.