I cannot live away from thee. How can
A flower live without its root?

I, too,
Must love or die.

But I must have. Attend!
I am to say and do just as I please;
I may command thee, may I? that I will.

I love to be enslaved. Oh! I would rather
Obey thee, beauty! than rule men by millions.

Near, as afar, I will have love the same⁠—
With a bright sameness, like this diamond,
Which, wherever the light be, shines like bright.
And thou shalt say all sorts of pretty things
To me; mind, to me only: write love-songs
About me, and I will sing them to myself;
Perhaps to thee, sometime, as it were now,
If I should happen to be very kind.

Sing now!

No!

Tyrant! I will banish thee.

Nay, if to sing and play would please thee, I
Would die to music. It was very wrong
To say I would deny thee anything;
But be not angry with me: for though God
Forgave me, I could ne’er forgive myself,
If I brought sorrow to thee, could I love?

As thou art empress of my bosom, No!

Nought fear I but an unkind word from thee.
Dark death may frighten children, Hell the wretch
Who feels that he deserves it; but for me,
I know I cannot do nor say aught worthy
Of the pure pain a frown of thine can cause,
Or a cold, careless look. No! never frown.
If I do wrong, forgive me, or I die;
And thou wilt then be wretcheder than I;⁠—
The unforgiving than the unforgiven.

I do absolve thee, beauty, of all faults,
Past, present, or to come.

Well, that will do.
What was I saying? I love this instrument,
It speaks, it thinks⁠—nay, I could kiss it: look!
There are three things I love half killingly;⁠—
Thee lastly, and this next, and myself first.

Thou art a silly, tiresome thing, and yet
I never weary of thee; but could gaze,
Sick with excess and not satiety,
Upon thy countenance, with the serious joy
With which we eye and eye the unbounded space
Which is the visible attribute of God,
Who makes all things within Himself; and thus
It is the Heaven we hope for, and can find
No point from which to take its altitude;
For the Infinite, is upwards, and above
The highest thing created⁠—upwards aye:
So I could, thinking on thy face, believe
An infinite expression, heightening still
The longer that I thought, and leaving thee,
Coming to thee, or being with thee⁠—love!

I am so happy when with thee.

And I.
They tell us virtue lies in self-denial.
My virtue is indulgence. I was born
To gratify myself unboundedly,
So that I wronged none else. These arms were given me
To clasp the beautiful, and cleave the wave;
These limbs to leap and wander where I will;
These eyes to look on every thing without
Effort; these ears to list my loved one’s voice;
These lips to be divinised by her kiss:
And every sense, pulse, passion, power, to be
Swoln into sunny ripeness.

Virtue is one
With nature, or ’tis nothing: it is love.

I come fresh from thee every time we meet,
Steeped in the still sweet dew of thy soft beauty,
Like earth at day-dawn, lifting up her head
Out of her sleep, star-watched, to face the sun⁠—
So I, to front the world, on leaving thee.
Oh! there is inspiration in thy look;
Poesie, prophecy. Come hither, love;
The evening air is sweet.

It comes on us
Fresher and clearer through these dewy vine-leaves,
Fit for the forehead of the young wine-god.

A large, red egg, of light the moon lies like
On the dark moor-hill and now, rising slow,
Beams on the clear flood, smilingly intent,
Like a fair face, which loves to look on itself,
Saying;⁠—“There is no wonder that men love me,
For I am beautiful!”⁠—as I heard thee.

It was not right to overhear me that.

’Twas very wrong to do what I could not help;
But vanity speaks out.

Well, I don’t mind;
I never knew that I was as I am
Till others told me.

Now were soon enough.

Ah, nothing comes to us too soon but sorrow.

For all were happiness, if all might live
Long, or die soon, enough: for even us.

Dost not remember, when, the other eve,
Thy friend the student called, there was a tale
Upon thy tongue he interrupted?

Was there?⁠—

A tale out of the poets, about love,
And happiness and sorrow, and such things.

But I forget such things when thou art by.
Besides, I asked him here again, to-night,
Here, at this hour; and he is punctual.

In truth, then, I despair of hearing it.
He keeps his word relentlessly. With not
More pride an Indian shows his foeman’s scalp
Than he his watch for punctuality.

But tales of love are far more readily
Made than remembered.

Tell-tale, make one, then.

Love is the art of hearts and heart of arts.
Conjunctive looks and interjectional sighs
Are its vocabulary’s greater half.
Well then, my story says, there was a pair
Of Lovers, once⁠—

Once! nay, how singular!

But where they lived indeed I quite forget;⁠—
Say anywhere⁠—say here: their names were⁠—I
Forget those, too; say any one’s, say ours.

Most probable, most pertinent, so far!

The lady was, of course, most beautiful,
And made her lover do just as she pleased;
And consequently, he did very wrong.
They met, sang, walked, talked folly, just as all
Such couples do, adored each other; thought,
Spoke, wrote, dreamed of and for nought on earth
Except themselves; and so on.

Pray proceed!⁠—

That’s all;

Oh, no!

Well, thus the tale ends; stay!
No, I cannot remember nor invent.

Do think!

I can’t.

Oh then, I don’t like that:
’Tis not in earnest.

Well, in earnest, then.
She did but look upon him, and his blood
Blushed deeper even from his inmost heart;
For at each glance of those sweet eyes a soul
Looked forth as from the azure gates of Heaven;
She laid her finger on him, and he felt
As might a formless mass of marble feel
While feature after feature of a god
Were being wrought from out of it. She spake,
And his love-wildered and idolatrous soul
Clung to the airy music of her words,
Like a bird on a bough, high swaying in the wind.
He looked upon her beauty and forgot,
As in a sense of drowning, all things else;
And right and wrong seemed one, seemed nothing she
Was beauty, and that beauty everything.
He looked upon her as the sun on earth:
Until, like him, he gazed himself away
From Heaven so doing till he even wept⁠—
Wept on her bosom as a storm-charged cloud
Weeps itself out upon a hill, and cried⁠—
I, too, could look on thee until I wept⁠—
Blind me with kisses! let me look no longer;
Or change the action of thy loveliness,
Lest long same-seemingness should send me mad!⁠—
Blind me with kisses; I would ruin sight
To give its virtue to thy lips, whereon
I would die now, or ever live; and she,
Soft as a feather-footed cloud on Heaven,
While her sad face grew bright like night with stars,
Would turn her brow to his and both be happy;⁠—
Numbered among the constellations they!⁠—
Then as tired wanderer, snow-blinded, sinks
And swoons upon the swelling drift, and dies,
So on her dazzling bosom would he lay
His famished lips, and end their travels there.
Oh, happy they! not he would go to Heaven,
Not, though he might that moment.

Nor I now.

Helen, my love!

Yes, I am here.

It has
Been such a day as that, thou knowest, when first
I said t loved thee; that long, sunny day
We passed upon the waters⁠—heeding nought,
Seeing nought but each other.

I remember.
The only wise thing that I ever did⁠—
The only good, was to love thee, and therefore
I would have no one else as wise as I,
Didst thou not say that student would be here?

I think I hear him every minute come.

It is not kind. We should be more alone.
There was a time thou wouldst have no one else.

Am I not with thee all day?

Yes, I know;
But often and often thou art thinking not
Of me.

My good child!⁠—

Well, I know thou lovest me;
And so I cannot bear thee to think, speak,
Or be with any but me.

Then I will not.

Oh, thou wouldst promise me the clock round. Now,
Promise me this⁠—that I shall never die,
And I’ll believe thee when I am dead⁠—not till.
But let it pass. I am at peace with thee;
And pardon thee, and give thee leave to live.

Magnanimous!

When earth, and Heaven, and all
Things seem so bright and lovely for our sakes,
It is a sin not to be happy. See,
The moon is up, it is the dawn of night.
Stands by her side one bold, bright, steady star⁠—
Star of her heart, and heir to all her light,
Whereon she looks so proudly mild and calm,
As though she were the mother of that star,
And knew he was a chief sun in his sphere,
But by her side, in the great strife of lights
To shine to God, he had filially failed,
And hid his arrows and his bow of beams.
Mother of stars! the Heavens look up to thee.
They shine the brighter but to hide thy waning;
They wait and wane for thee to enlarge thy beauty;
They give thee all their glory night by night;
Their number makes not less thy loneliness
Nor loveliness.

Heaven’s beauty grows on us;
And when the elder worlds have ta’en their seats,
Come the divine ones, gathering one by one,
And family by family, with still
And holy air, into the house of God⁠—
The house of light He hath builded for Himself,
And worship Him in silence and in sadness,
Immortal and immovable. And there,
Night after night, they meet to worship God.
For us this witness of the worlds is given,
That we may add ourselves to their great glory,
And worship with them. They are there for lights
To light us on our way through Heaven to God;
And we, too, have the power of light in us.
Ye stars, how bright ye shine, to night; mayhap
Ye are the resurrection of the worlds⁠—
Glorified globes of light! Shall ours be like ye?
Nay, but it is! this wild, dark earth of ours,
Whose face is furrowed like a losing gamester’s,
Is shining round, and bright, and smooth in air,
Millions of miles off. Not a single path
Of thought I tread, but that it leads to God.
And when her time is out, and earth again
Hath travailed with the divine dust of man,
Then the world’s womb shall open, and her sons
Be born again, all glorified immortals.
And she, their mother, purified by fire,
Shall sit her down in Heaven, a bride of God,
And handmaid of the Everbeing One.
Our earth is learning all accomplishments
To fit her for her bridehood.

He is here.

Welcome.

I thought the night was beautiful,
But find the in-door scene still lovelier.

Ah! all is beautiful where beauty is.

Night hath made many bards; she is so lovely.
For it is beauty maketh poesie,
As from the dancing eye comes tears of light.
Night bath made many bards; she is so lovely.
And they have praised her to her starry face
So long, that she hath blushed and left them, often.
When first and last we met, we talked on studies;
Poetry only I confess is mine,
And is the only thing I think or read of:⁠—
Feeding my soul upon the soft, and sweet,
And delicate imaginings of song;
For as nightingales do upon glow-worms feed,
So poets live upon the living light
Of nature and of beauty; they love light.

Bat poetry is not confined to books.
For the creative spirit which thou seekest
Is in thee, and about thee; yea, it hath
God’s everywhereness.

Truly. It was for this
I sought to know thy thoughts, and hear the course
Thou wouldst lay out for one who longs to win
A name among the nations.

First of all,
Care not about the name, but bind thyself,
Body and soul, to nature, hiddenly.
Lo, the great march of stars from earth to earth,
Through Heaven. The earth speaks inwardly alone.
Let no man know thy business, save some friend⁠—
A man of mind, above the run of men;
For it is with, all men and with all things.
The bard must have a kind, courageous heart,
And natural chivalry to aid the weak.
He must believe the best of everything;
Love all below, and worship all above.
All animals are living hieroglyphs.
The dashing dog, and stealthy-stepping cat,
Hawk, bull, and all that breathe, mean something more
To the true eye than their shapes show; for all
Were made in love, and made to be beloved.
Thus must he think as to earth’s lower life,
Who seeks to win the world to thought and love,
As doth the bard, whose habit is all kindness
To every thing.

I love to hear of such.
Could we but think with the intensity
We love with, we might do great things, I think.

Kindness is wisdom. There is none in life
But needs it and may learn; eye-reasoning man,
And spirit unassisted, unobscured.

Go on, I pray. I came to be informed.
Thou knowest my ambition, and I joy
To feel thou feedest it with purest food.

I cannot tell thee all I feel; and know
But little save myself, and am not ashamed
To say, that I have studied my own life,
And know it is like to a tear-blistered letter,
Which holdeth fruit and proof of deeper feeling
Than the poor pen can utter, or the eye
Discover; and that often my heart’s thoughts
Will rise and shake my breast as madmen shake
The stanchions of their dungeons, and howl out.

But thou wast telling us of poesie,
And the kind nature-hearted bards.

I was.
I knew one once⁠—he was a friend of mine;
I knew him well; his mind, habits, and works,
Taste, temper, temperament, and every thing;
Yet with as kind a heart as ever beat,
He was no sooner made than marred. Though young,
He wrote amid the ruins of his heart;
They were his throne and theme;⁠—like some lone king,
Who tells the story of the land he lost,
And how he lost it.

Tell us more of him.

Nay, but it saddens thee.

’Tis like enough;
We slip away like shadows into shade;
We end, and make no mark we had begun;
We come to nothing, like a pure intent.
When we have hoped, sought, striven, and lost our aim,
Then the truth fronts us, beaming out of darkness,
Like a white brow, through its overshadowing hair⁠—
As though the day were overcast, my Helen!
But I was speaking of my friend. He was
Quick, generous, simple, obstinate in end,
High-hearted from his youth; his spirit rose
In many a glittering fold and gleamy crest,
Hydra-like to its hindrance; mastering all,
Save one thing⁠—love, and that out-hearted him.
Nor did he think enough, till it was over,
How bright a thing he was breaking, or he would
Surely have shunned it, nor have let his life
Be pulled to pieces like a rose by a child;
And his heart’s passions made him oft do that
Which made him writhe to think on what he had done,
And thin his blood by weeping at a night.
If madness wrought the sin, the sin wrought madness,
And made a round of ruin. It is sad
To see the light of beauty wane away,
Know eyes are dimming, bosom shrivelling, feet
Losing their spring, and limbs their lily roundness;
But it is worse to feel our heart-spring gone,
To lose hope, care not for the coming thing,
And feel all things go to decay with us,
As ’twere our life’s eleventh month: and yet
All this he went through young.

Poor soul! I should
Have loved him for his sorrows.

It is not love
Brings sorrow, but love’s objects.

Then he loved.

I said so. I have seen him when he hath had
A letter from his lady dear, he blessed
The paper that her hand had travelled over,
And her eye looked on, and would think he saw
Gleams of that light she lavished from her eyes
Wandering amid the words of love there traced
Like glow-worms among beds of flowers. He seemed
To bear with being but because she loved him,
She was the sheath wherein his soul had rest,
As hath a sword from war: and he at night
Would solemnly and singularly curse
Each minute that he had not thought of her.

Now that was like a lover! and she loved
Him, and him only.

Well, perhaps it was so.
But he could not restrain his heart, but loved
In that voluptuous purity of taste
Which dwells on beauty coldly, and yet kindly,
As night-dew, whensoe’er he met with beauty.

It was a pity, that inconstancy⁠—
If she he loved were but as good and fair
As he was worthy of.

It was his way.

There is a dark and bright to every thing;
To every thing but beauty such as thine,
And that is all bright. If a fault in him,
’Twas one which made him do the sweetest wrongs
Man ever did. And yet a whisper went
That he did wrong: and if that whisper had
Echo in him or not, it mattered little;
Or right or wrong, he were alike unhappy.
Ah me! ah me! that there should be so much
To call up love, so little to delight!
The best enjoyment is half disappointment
To that we mean or would have in this world.
And there were many strange and sudden lights
Beckoned him towards them; they were wreckers’ lights:
But he shunned these, and righted when she rose,
Moon of his life, that ebbed and flowed with her.
A sea of sorrow struck him, but he held
On; dashed all sorrow from him as a bark
Spray from her bow bounding; he lifted up
His head, and the deep ate his shadow merely.

A poet not in love is out at sea;
He must have a lay-flgure.

I meant not
To screen, but to describe this friend of mine.

Describe the lady, too; of course she was
Above all praise and all comparison.

Why, true. Her heart was all humanity,
Her soul all God’s; in spirit and in form,
Like fair. Her cheek had the pale pearly pink
Of seashells, the world’s sweetest tint, as though
She lived, one half might deem, on roses sopped
In silver dew; she spake as with the voice
Of spheral harmony which greets the soul
When at the hour of death the saved one knows
His sister angels near; her eye was as
The golden pane the setting sun doth just
Imblaze; which shows, till Heaven comes down again,
All other lights but grades of gloom; her dark,
Long rolling locks were as a stream the slave
Might search for gold, and searching find.

Enough!⁠—
I have her picture perfect;⁠—quite enough.

What were his griefs?

He who hath most of heart
Knows most of sorrow; not a thing he saw
Nor did, but was to him, at times, a woe;
At times indifferent, at times a joy.
Folly and sin and memory make a curse
Wherewith the future fires may vie in vain.
The sorrows of the soul are graver still.

Where and when did he study? Did he mix
Much with the world, or was he a recluse?

He had no times of study, and no place;
All places and all times to him were one.
His soul was like the wind-harp, which he loved,
And sounded only when the spirit blew.
Sometime in feasts and follies, for he went
Life-like through all things; and his thoughts then rose
Like sparkles in the bright wine, brighter still.
Sometimes in dreams, and then the shining words
Would wake him in the dark before his face.
All things talked thoughts to him. The sea went mad,
And the wind whined as ’twere in pain, to show
Each one his meaning; and the awful sun
Thundered his thoughts into him; and at night
The stars would whisper theirs, the moon sigh hers.
The spirit speaks all tongues and understands;
Both God’s and angel’s, man’s and all dumb things,
Down to an insect’s inarticulate hum
And an inaudible organ. And it was
The spirit spake to him of everything;
And with the moony eyes like those we see,
Thousands on thousands, crowding air in dreams,
Looked into him its mighty meanings, till
He felt the power fulfil him, as a cloud
In every fibre feels the forming wind.
He spake the world’s one tongue; in earth and Heaven
There is but one, it is the word of truth.
To him the eye let out its hidden meaning;
And young and old made their hearts over to him;
And thoughts were told to him as unto none
Save one who heareth said and unsaid, all.
And his heart held these as a grate its gleeds,
Where others warm them.

I would I had known him.

All things were inspiration unto him;
Wood, wold, hill, field, sea, city, solitude,
And crowds and streets, and man where’er he was;
And the blue eye of God which is above us;
Brook-bounded pine spinnies where spirits flit:
And haunted pits the rustic hurries by,
Where cold wet ghosts sit ringing jingling bells;
Old orchards’ leaf-roofed aisles, and red cheeked load;
And the blood-coloured tears which yew trees weep
O’er churchyard graves, like murderers remorseful.
The dark green rings where fairies sit and sup,
Crushing the violet dew in the acorn cup:
Where by his new-made bride the bride-groom sips,
The white moon shimmering on their longing lips;
The large o’erloaded wealthy-looking wains
Quietly swaggering home through leafy lanes,
Leaving on all low branches as they come,
Straws for the birds, ears of the harvest home.
Summer’s warm soil or winter’s cruel sky,
Clear, cold and icy-blue like a sea-eagle’s eye;
All things to Him bare thoughts of minstrelsy,
He drew his light from that he was amidst,
As doth a lamp from air which hath itself
Matter of light although it show it not. His
Was but the power to light what might be lit.
He met a muse in every lovely maid;
And learned a song from every lip he loved.
But his heart ripened most ’neath southern eyes,
Which sunned their sweets into him all day long:
For fortune called him southwards, towards the sun.

Did he love music?

The only music he
Or learned or listened to was from the lips
Of her he loved, and that he learned by heart.
Albeit, she would try to teach him tunes,
And put his fingers on the keys; but he
Could only see her eyes, and hear her voice,
And feel her touch.

Why, he was much like thee.

We had some points in common.

Was he proud?

Lowliness is the base of every virtue:
And he who goes the lowest, builds the safest.
My God keeps all his pity for the proud.

Was he world-wise?

The only wonder is
He knew so much, leading the life he did.

Yet it may seem less strange when we think back,
That we, in the dark chamber of the heart,
Sitting alone, see the world tabled to us;
And the world wonders how recluses know
So much, and most of all, how we know them.
It is they who paint themselves upon our hearts
In their own lights and darknesses, not we.
One stream of light is to us from above,
And that is that we see by, light of God.

We do not make our thoughts; they grow in us
Like grain in wood: the growth is of the skies,
Which are of nature, nature is of God.
The world is full of glorious liknesses.
The poet’s power is to sort these out,
And to make music from the common strings
With which the world is strung; to make the dumb
Earth utter heavenly harmony, and draw
Life clear and sweet and harmless as spring water,
Welling its way through flowers. Without faith,
Illimitable faith, strong as a state’s
In its own might, in God, no bard can be.
All things are signs of other and of nature.
It is at night we see heaven moveth, and
A darkness thick with suns. The thoughts we think
Subsist, the same in God as stars in Heaven.
And as these specks of light will prove great worlds
When we approach them sometime free from flesh,
So too our thoughts will become magnified
To mind-like things immortal. And as space
Is but a property of God, wherein
Is laid all matter, other attributes
May be the infinite homes of mind and soul.
And thoughts rise from our souls, as from the sea
The clouds sublimed in Heaven. The cloud is cold,
Although ablaze with lightning⁠—though it shine
At all points like a constellation; so
We live not to ourselves, our work is life;
In bright end ceaseless labor as a star
Which shineth unto all worlds, but itself.

And were this friend and bard of whom thou speakest,
And she whom he did love, happy together?

True love is ever tragic, grievous, grave.
Bards and their beauties are like double stars,
One in their bright effect.

Whose light is love.

Or is it poesie thou meanest?

Both:
For love is poesie⁠—it doth create;
From fading features, dim soul, doubtful heart,
And this world’s wretched happiness, a life
Which is as near to Heaven as are the stars.
They parted; and she named Heaven’s judgment-seat
As their next place of meeting: and ’twas kept
By her, at least, so far that no where else
Could it be made until the day of doom.

So soon men’s passion passes! yea, it sinks
Like foam into the troubled wave which bore it.
Merciful God! let me entreat Thy mercy!
I have seen all the woes of men⁠—pain, death,
Remorse, and worldy ruin; they are little
Weighed with the woe of woman when forsaken
By him she loved and trusted. Hear, too, thou!
Lady of Heaven, Mother of God and man,
Who made the world His brother, one with God⁠—
Maid-mother! mould of God, who wrought in thee
By model as He doth in the world’s womb,
So that the universe is great with God⁠—
Thou in whom God did deify Himself,
Betaking him into mortality,
As in Thy Son He took it into Him,
And from the temporal and eternal made
Of the soul-world one same and ever God!
Oh, for the sake of thine own womanhood,
Pray away aught of evil from her soul,
And take her out of anguish unto thee,
Always, as thou didst this one!

Who doth not
Believe that lat he loveth cannot die?
There is no mote of death in thine eye’s beams
To hint of dust, or darkness, or decay;
Eclipse upon eclipse, and death on death;
No! immortality sits mirrored there
Like a fair face long looking on itself;
Yet thou shalt lie in death’s angelic garb
As in a dream of dress, my beautiful!
The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And fatten him on that men pined to death for;
Yea, have a further knowledge of thy beauties
Than ever did thy best-loved lover dream of.

It is unkind to think of me in this wise.
Surely the stars must feel that they are bright,
In beauty, number, nature infinite;
And the strong sense we have of God in us
Makes me believe my soul can never cease.
The temples perish, but the God still lives.

It is therefore that I love thee; for that when
The fiery perfection of the world,
The sun, shall be a shadow and burnt out,
There is an impulse to eternity
Raised by this moment’s love.

I pray it may!
Time is the crescent shape to bounded eye
Of what is ever perfect unto God.
The bosom heaves to Heaven and to the stars;
Our very hearts throb upwards, our eyes look;
Our aspirations always are divine:
Yet is it in the gloom of soul we see
Most of the God about us, as at night.
For then the soul, like the mother-maid of Christ,
Is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit;
And in Creative darkness doth conceive
Its humanized Divinity of life.

Think then God shows his face to us no less
In spiritual darkness than in light.

But of thy friend? I would hear more of him.
Perhaps much happiness in friendship made
Amends for his love’s sorrows.

Ask me not.

But loved he never after? Came there none
To roll the stone from his sepulchral heart,
And sit in it an angel?

Ah, my life!
My more than life, my immortality!
Both man and kind belie their nature
When they are not kind: and thy words are kind,
And beautiful, and loving like thyself;
Thine eye and thy tongue’s tone, and all that speak
Thy soul, are like it. There’s a something in
The shape of harps as though they had been made
By music: beauty’s the effect of soul,
And he of whom thou askest loved again.
Could’st thou have loved one who was unlike men?
Whose heart was wrinkled long before his brow?
Who would have cursed himself if he had dared
Tempt God to ratify his curse in fire:
And yet with whom to look on beauty was
A need, a thirst, a passion?

Yes, I think
I could have loved him: but, no⁠—not unless
He was like thee; unless he had been thee.
Tell me, what was it rendered him so wretched
At heart?

I will not tell thee.

But tell me
How and on what he wrote, this friend of thine?

Love, mirth, woe, pleasure, was in tum his theme,
And the great good which beauty does the soul;
And the God-made necessity of things.
And like that noble knight in olden tale,
Who changed his armour’s hue at each fresh charge
By virtue of his lady-love’s strange ring,
So that none knew him save his private page
And she who cried, God save him, every time
He brake spears with the brave till he quelled all⁠—
So he applied him to all themes that came;
Loving the most to breast the rapid deeps
Where others had been drowned, and heeding nought
Where danger might not fill the place of fame.
And ’mid the magic circle of those sounds,
His lyre rayed out, spell-bound himself he stood,
Like a stilled storm. It is no task for suns
To shine. He knew himself a bard ordained,
More than inspired, of God, inspirited:⁠—
Making himself like an electric rod
A lure for lightning feelings; and his words
Felt like the things that fall in thunder, which
The mind, when in a dark, hot, cloudful state,
Doth make metallic, meteoric, ball like.
He spake to spirits with a spirit tongue,
Who came compelled by wizard word of truth,
And rayed them round him from the ends of Heaven.
For as be all bards he was born of beauty,
And with a natural fitness to draw down
All tones and shades of beauty to his soul,
Even as the rainbow-tinted shell, which lies
Miles deep at bottom of the sea, hath all
Colours of skies and flowers, and gems, and plumes,
And all by Nature which doth reproduce
Like loveliness in seeming opposites.
Our life is like the wizard’s charmed ring:
Death’s heads, and loathsome things fill up the ground;
But spirits wing about, and wait on us,
While yet the hour of enchantment is.
And while we keep in, we are safe, and can
Force them to do our bidding. And he raised
The rebel in himself, and in his mind
Walked with him through the world.

He wrote of this?

He wrote a poem.

What was said of it?

Oh, much was said⁠—much more than understood;
One said that he was mad; another, wise;
Another, wisely mad. The book is there.
Judge thou among them.

Well, but, who said what?

Some said that he blasphemed; and these men lied
To all eternity, unless such men
Be saved, when God shall rase that lie from life,
And from His own eternal memory:
But still the word is lied; though it were writ
In honeydew upon a lily leaf,
With quill of nightingale, like love letters
From Oberon sent to the bright Titania,
Fairest of all the fays⁠—for that he used
The name of God as spirits use it, barely,
Yet surely more sublime in nakedness,
Statuelike, than in a whole tongue of dress.
Thou knowest, God! that to the full of worship
All things are worship-full; and Thy great name,
In all its awful brevity, hath nought
Unholy breeding in it, but doth bless
Rather the tongue that utters it; for me,
I ask no higher office than to fling
My spirit at Thy feet, and cry Thy name
God! through eternity. The man who sees
Irreverence in that name, must have been used
To take that name in vain, and the same man
Would see obscenity in pure white statues.
Call all things by their names. Hell, call thou hell;
Archangel, call archangel; and God, God.

And what said he of such?

He held his peace
A season, as a tree its sap till spring,
Preparing to unfold itself, and let
All rigor do its worst, which only served
To harden him, though nothing nesh at first.
And then he said at last, what, at the first,
He deemed would have been seen by other men,
By men, at least, above low-water mark,
Who take it, they lead others; that it is they
Who set their shoulders to the stalled world’s wheel,
And give it a hitch forwards.

There were some
Encouraged him with goodwill, surely?

Many.
The kind, the noble, and the able cheered him;
The lovely, likewise: others knew he nought of.
And yet he loved not praise, nor sighed for fame.
Men’s praise begets an awe of one’s own self
Within us, till we fear our heart, lest it,
Magician-like, show more than we can bear.
Nor was he fameless; but obscurity
Hath many a sacred use. The clouds which hide
The mental mountains rising nighest Heaven,
Are full of finest lightning, and a breath
Can give those gathered shadows fearful life,
And launch their light in thunder o’er the world.

And thought he well of that he wrote?

Perchance.
Perchance we suffer, and perchance succeed.
Perchance he would his tongue had perished ere
It uttered half he said, from childhood up
To manhood, and so on; for much I heard
From him required expiation, much
Soul sacrifice and penance for heart-deeds
Which passion had accomplished; yea, perchance,
He wished, how vain! that fruitful heart and breast
Had withered like a witch’s ere he had trained
The parasites of feeling that he did
About it; and perchance, for all I know,
He would his brain had died ere it conceived
One half the thought-seeds that took life in it,
And in his soul’s dark sanctuary dwelt.
Yet his blue eye’s dark ball grew greater with
Delight, and darker, as he viewed the things
He made; not monsters outside of the fane,
Grinning and howling, but seraphic forms⁠—
Embodied thoughts of worship, wisdom, love,
Joining their fire-tipped wings across the shrine
Where his heart’s relics lay, and where were wrought
Immortal miracles upon men’s minds.

Take up the book, and, if thou understandest,
Unfold it to me.

What I can, I will.
Well I remember me of thee, poor book!
But there is consolation e’en for thee.
Fair hand have turned thee over, and bright eyes
Sprinkled their sparkles o’er thee with their prayers.
The poet’s pen is the true divining rod
Which trembles upwards the inner founts of feeling;
Bringing to light and use, else hid from all,
The many sweet clear sources which we have
Of good and beauty in our own deep bosoms;
And marks the variations of all mind
As does the needle an air-investing storm’s.

How does the book begin, go on and end?

It has a plan, but no plot. Life hath none.

Tell us, love; we will listen and not speak.
I wish I understood it, for I know
You would rather hear me than yourselves talk.

Surely.
I’d give up half the organs in my head,
Besides all undiscovered faculties,
To list to such a lecturer; and then
Have quite enough, perhaps, to comprehend.

’Twere needless that, to one half-witted now.

There is a porch, wherefrom is something seen
Of the main dome beyond. Though shadows cross
Each other’s path, yet let us go through it.
And lo! an opening scene in Heaven, Wherein
The foredoom of all things, spirit and matter,
Is shown, and the permission of temptation;
The angelic worship of the Trinity,
By God’s name uttered thrice; the joys and powers
Of souls o’erblest, and the sweet offices
Of warden-angel told; and the complete
Well-fixed necessity and end of all things.
From Heaven we come to earth, and so do souls.
For next succeeds a soft and sunset scene,
Wherein is shown the collapsed, empty state
In which all worldly pleasures leave us; youth’s
Though natural, fitful, unavailing, struggle
Against a great temptation come unlocked for:
And that to sin is to curse God in deed.
The soul long used to truth still keeps its strength,
Though plunged upon a sudden mid the false;
As hands, thrust into a dark room, retain
Their sunlent light a season. So with this.
The lines have under meanings, and the scene
Of self-forgetfulness and indecision
Breaks off, not ends. A starry, stirless night
Follows, which shadows out youth’s barren longings
For goodness, greatness, marvels, mysteries.
Whence comes this dream of immortality,
And the resurgent essence? Let us think!
What mean we by the dead? The dead have life,
The changed; and, if they come, it is to show
Their change is for the better. The bait takes.
Man and his foe shake hands upon their bargain.
The youth sets out for joy, and ’neath the care
Of his good enemy, begins his course.
The next scene seems to promise fair; for sure
If that there be one scene in life, wherefrom
Evil is absent, it is pure early love.

Alas! when beauty pleads the cause of virtue
The chief temptation to embrace it’s wanting.

A man in love sees wonders. But not love
Makes the soul happy: so the youth gets hopeless.
To this comes on a stem and stormy quarrel
’Tween the two foe friends⁠—Youth demanding what
Cannot be; and the other withholding safe
And easy grants. They part and meet, as though
Nothing had happened, in the next scene: none
Know how we reconcile ourselves to evil.
But there they are, together, aiding each
The other, and abusing others.

I
Was waiting for an eloquential pause
In this mysterious, allegorical,
Mythical, theological, odd story.
So now, then, I shall ask myself to sing;
And granting I agree to my request,
I think you ought to thank me.

That we will.
But not just now.

Oh! yes, now; yes, this moment
I’m in the humour.

We are not.

Yes, let her!

What shall I sing?

Sing something merry, love.

I won’t: I’ll sing the dullest thing I know;
One of thine own songs.

What a compliment!

Sing what thou lik’st, then.

No; what thou lik’st.

Well,
Something about lore, and it can’t be wrong.

For love the sunny world supplies
With laughing lips and happy eyes.

And ’twill be sooner over.

And so better.

Like an island in a river,
Art thou, my love, to me;
And I journey by thee ever
With a gentle ecstasie.
I arise to fall before thee;
I come to kiss thy feet;
To adorn thee and adore thee,
Mine only one! my sweet!
And thy love hath power upon me,
Like a dream upon a brain;
For the loveliness which won me,
With the love, too, doth remain.
And my life it beautifieth,
Though love be but a shade,
Known of only ere it dieth,
By the darkness it hath made.

Was that addressed to me?

Well, now resume.

Trial alone of ill and folly gives
Gear proofs of the world’s vanities; but little
Good comes of sermons, prophecies, or warnings.
Though from the steps of an old grey market-cross,
The Devil is holding forth to the faithless. There
A social prayer is offered up, too. This
Is followed by a bird’s-eye view of earth,
A stirring-up of the dust of all the nations.
Then comes a village feast; a kind of home
Unto the traveller⁠—where, with the world,
We mix in private, talking divers things;
A country merry-making, where all speak
According to their sorts, and the occasion.
Deeper than ever leadline went, behold
We search the rayless central sun within.
We penetrate all mysteries, but are
Unfitted long to dwell in the recess
Of our own nature, and we long for light.
True aspiration riseth from research.
Next, by the o’erthrown altar of a fane,
Foundation-shattered, like the ripened heart,
We find ourselves in worship. Let us hope
The spirit, form, and offering, grateful all.
In one of Earth’s head cities, after this,
We tower-like rise, and with an eminent eye
Glance round society, insatiate;⁠—
The high unknown as yet unrealized.
In less time than the twinkling of a star,
Insphered in air, the arch-fiend and the youth,
Like twilight and midnight, discourse and rise.
Thence to another planet, for the book,
Stream-like doth steal the images of stars,
And trembles at its boldness, where we meet
The spirit of the first night of temptation;
And mix with many of those lofty musings
Which sow in us the seeds of higher kind
And brighter being. Heavenly poesie,
Which shines among the powers of our mind,
As that bright star she dwells in, mid the worlds
Which make the system of the sun, is there too.
But these high things are lost, and drowned, and dimmed,
Like a blue eye in tears, that trickle from it
Like angels leaving Heaven on their errands
Of love, behind them, in the scene succeeding;⁠—
A scene of song, and dance, and mirth, and wine,
And damsels, in whose lily skin the blue
Veins branch themselves in hidden luxury,
Hues of the heaven they seem to have vanished from.

Moonlight and music, and kisses, and wine,
And beauty, which must be, for rhyme-sake, divine.

Mere joys; but saddened and sublimed at close
By sweet remembrance of immortal ones
Once loved, aye hallowed. Still, in scenes like this,
Youth lingers longest, drawing out his time
As a gold-beater does his wire, until
’Twould reach round the earth.

And be of no use then.

Blame not the bard for showing this, but mind
He wrote of youth as passionate genius,
Its flights and follies⁠—both its sensual ends
And common places. To behold an eagle
Batting the sunny ceiling of the world
With his dark wings, one well might deem his heart
On heaven; but, no! it is fixed on flesh and blood,
And soon his talons tell it. Pass we on!
A brief and solemn parley o’er a grave
Follows, in which youth vows to trust in God,
Be the end what it may. A prescient view
Of what is true repentance to the soul,
Spirit-informed, expands; and over all
The spiritual harmonies of Heaven
By the raised soul are heard, and God’s great rule
To creatures justified. And next we find
Ourselves in Heaven. Even man’s deadly life
Can be there, by God’s leave. Once brought to God,
The soul’s foredoom is set before it brightly,
And Heaven’s designs are seen to be brought to bear.
A lightning revelation of the Heavens,
And what is in them. Let it not be said
He sought his God in the self-slayer’s way,
Whose highest aim was but to worship in
All humbleness; for he was called thereto,
To show the holy God, in three scenes, first
And last in Threelihood, and midst in One:
Although less hard to shape the wide-winged wind
O’er the bright heights of air. He will forgive:
For we, this moment, and all living souls⁠—
All matter, are as much within his presence,
And known through, like a glass film in the sun,
As we can ever be. Through sundry worlds
The mortal wends, returning, and relates
To her he loves⁠—and joyously, they greet,
As boat by breeze and billow backed by tide⁠—
His bright experience of celestial homes;
Where spiritual natures, kind and high,
Light-born, which can divine immortal things,
Abide embosomed in Eternity.
Something he tells, too, of the friendly fiend,
Something of ancient ages, infant Earth.
To this succeeds a scene explaining much,
Of retrospective and prospective cast,
Between the bard his beauty and his friend.
Our story ties us here to earth again,
And sea all aged. Evil is in love;
And ever those who are unhappiest have
Their hearts desire the oftenest, but in dreams.
Dreams are mind-clouds, high, and unshapen beauties,
Or but God-shaped, like mountains, which contain
Much and rich matter; often not for us,
But for another. Dreams are rudiments
Of the great state to come. We dream what is
About to happen to us.

What may be
The dream in this case?

It is one of death.

Of death! is that all? Well, I too have had,
What every one hath once, at least, in life⁠—
A vision of the region of the dead;
It was the land of shadows: yea, the land
Itself was but a shadow, and the race
Which seemed therein were voices, forms of forms,
And echoes of themselves. And there was nought,
Of substance seemed, save one thing in the midst,
A great red sepulchre⁠—a granite grave;
And at the bottom lay a skeleton,
From whose decaying jaws the shades were born;
Making its only sign of life, its dying
Continually. Some were bright, some dark.
Those that were bright, went upwards heavenly.
They which were dark, grew darker and remained.
A land of change, yet did the half things nothing
That I could see; but passed stilly on,
Taking no note of other, mate or child;
For all had lost their love when they put off
The beauty of the body. And as I
Looked on, the grave before me backed away;
And I began to dream it was a dream;
And I rushed after it: when the earth quaked,
Opened and shut, like the eye of one in fits;
It shut to with a shout. The grave was gone.
And in the stead there stood a gleedlike throne,
Which all the shadows shook to see, and swooned;
For fiends were standing, loaded with long chains,
The links whereof were fire, waiting the word
To bind and cast the shadows into hell;
For Death the second sat upon that throne,
Which set on fire the air not to be breathed.
And as he lifted up his arm to speak,
Fear preyed upon all souls, like fire on paper,
And mine among the rest, and I awoke.

By Hades, ’twas most awful.

And when love
Merges in creature-worship, let us mind:
We know not what it is we love: perhaps
It is incarnate evil. In the time
It takes to turn a leaf, we are in Heaven;
Making our way among the wheeling worlds,
Millions of suns, half infinite each, and space
For ever shone into, for ever dark,
As God is, to and by created mind,
Upheld by the companion spirit. There
The nature of the all in one, and whence
Evil; the fixed impossibility
Of creatures’ perfectness, until made one
With God; and the necessity of ill
As yet, are things all touched upon and proven.
The next scene shows us hell, in the mad mock
Of mortal revelry⁠—the quelling truth
That all life’s sinful follies run to hell;
That lies, debauches, murders never die,
But live in hell forever; make, are hell.
And truth is there too. Hell is its own moral.
Perdition certain to the unrepentant;
Redemption on a like scale with creation;
And all creation needing it and having.
What follows is of earth, and setteth forth
God’s mercy, and the mystery of sin;
And a great gathering of the worlds round God,
Told by the youth to his truthful, trustful, love;
Who, light and lowly as a little glow-worm,
Sheddeth her beauty round her like a rose
Sweet smelling dew upon the ground it grows on.
And then a rest in light, as though ’tween earth
And Heaven there were a mediate spirit point,
A bright effect original of God,
Enlightening all ways, inwardly and round.
Then comes a scene of passion, brought about
By the bad spirit’s means for his own ends,
Whom we know not when come, so dark we grow;
Making it but a blind for the next scene,
Laid by the lonely seashore, as before,
Where the great waves come in frothed, like a horse
Put to his heart-burst speed, sobbing up hill,
Wherein he works his victim’s death, to clear
His way, and keep his name of murderer;
As he in other parts makes good his titles,
Deceiver, liar, tempter, and accuser;
Hater of man, and, most of all, of God.
In the next scene we picture back our life,
Contrasting the pure joys of earlier years,
With the unsatedness of current sin;
And the sad feel that love’s own heart turns sick
Like a bad pearl; but that the feeling still
Is adamantine, though the splendid thing
Whereon it writes its record, is of all
Frailest; and though earth shows to good and bad,
The same blind kindness, beautiful to see,
Wherewith our lovely mother loveth us,
The world in vain unbosometh her beauty,
We have no lust to live; for things may be
Corrupted into beauty; and that love,
Where all the passions blend, as hues in white,
Tires at the last, as day would, if all day
And no night. So despair of heart increases.
The last lure⁠—power⁠—is proffered, taken. All
Hangs on the last desire, whatever it be.
A scene of prescient solitude and soul
Commune with heaven, repentance, prayer, faith,
Which are all things inspired alone of God,
Who signifies salvation, follows this.
In the next scene, we feel the end draw nigh.
A change is wrought on earth as great as that
In its first ages, when the elements
Less gross and palpable than air, were changed
To mountainous and adamantine mass,
Now ’neath the feet of nations;⁠—figuring forth
The fateful mind which is to govern all,
Controlling the great evil; for it is mind
Which shall rule and be ruled, and not the body,
In the last age of human sway on earth;⁠—
Ambition ruined by its own success;
Aims lost, power useless: love, pure love, the last
Of mortal things that nestles in the heart.
There is a love which acts to death, and through death,
And may come white, and bright and pure, like paper,
From refuse, or from clearest things at first;
It is beyond the accidents of life.
For things we make no compt of, have in them
The seeds of life, use, beauty, like the cores
Of apples that we fling away;⁠—nought now
Is left but trust in God, who tries the heart
And saves it, at the last, from its own ruin⁠—
The parting spirit fluttering like a flag,
Half from its earthy staff. The death-change comes.
Death is another life. We bow our heads
At going out, we think, and enter straight
Another golden chamber of the king’s,
Larger than this we leave, and lovelier.
And then in shadowy glimpses, disconnect,
The story, flower like, closes thus its leaves.
The will of God is all in all. He makes,
Destroys, remakes, for His own pleasure, all.
After inferior nature is subdued,
The evil is confined. All elements
Conglobe themselves from chaos, purified.
The rebegotten world is born again.
The body and the soul cease; spirit lives:
And gloriously falsified are all
Earth’s caverned prophecies of bodyhood.
Spirits rise up and rule and link with Heaven;⁠—
The soul state is searched into; dormant Death,
Evil, and all the dark gods of the heart,
And the idolatrous passions, ruined, chained,
And worshipless, are seen; and there, the Word,
Heard and obeyed;⁠—next comes the truth divine,
Redintergrative; Evil’s last and worst,
Endeavour, vanquished⁠—by Almighty good.
The last scene shows the final doom of earth,
Soul’s judgment, and salvation of the youth,
As was fore-fixed on from and in the first:
The universe expurgated of evil,
And hell for aye abolished; all create,
Redeemed, their God all love, themselves all bliss.
We may say that the sun is dead and gone
For ever; and may swear he will rise no more;
The skies may put on mourning for their God,
And earth heap ashes on her head: but who
Shall keep the sun back, when he thinks to rise?
Where is the chain shall bind him? Where the cell
Shall hold him? Hell, he would burn down to embers;
And would lift up the world with a lever of light
Out of his way: yet, know ye, ’twere thrice less
To do thrice this, than keep the soul from God.
O’er earth, and cloud, and sky, and star, and Heaven,
It dwells with God uprisen as a prayer.
The spirit speaks of God in Heaven’s own tongue,
No mystery to those who love, but learned,
As is our mother tongue, om Him, the parent;
By whom created, fashioned, flesh and spirit,
All forms and feelings of all kinds of beauty
Are burned into our heart-clay, pattern like.
Much too is writ, elsewhere and here, not yet,
Made clear, nor can be till earth come of age;
Like the unfinished rudiments of light
Which gather time by time into a star.
Thus have I shown the meaning of the book,
And the most truthful likeness of a mind,
Which hath as yet been limned; the mind of youth
In strengths and failings, in its overcomings,
And in its short comings; the kingly ends,
The universalizing heart of youth;
Its love of power, heed not how had, although
With surety of self-ruin at the end.
Every thing urged against it proves its truth
And faithfulness to nature. Some cried out
’Twas inconsistent; so ’twas meant to be.
Such is the very stamp of youth and nature;
And the continual losing sight of its aims,
And the desertion of its most expressed
And dearest rules and objects, this is youth.

I look on life as keeping me from God,
Stars, Heaven, and angels’ bosoms. I lay ill;
And the dark hot blood, throbbing through and through me;
They bled me and I swooned; and as I died,
Or seemed to die, a soft, sweet sadness fell
With a voluptuous weakness, on my soul,
That made me feel all happy. But my heart
Would live, and rose, and wrestled with the soul,
Which stretched its wings and strained its strength in vain,
Twining around it as a snake an eagle.
My eyes unclosed again, and I looked up,
And saw the sweet blue twilight, and one star,
One only star, in Heaven; and then I wished
That I had died and gone to it; and straight
Was glad I lived again, lo love once more.
And so our souls turn round upon themselves
Like orbs upon their axles: what was night
Is day; what day, night. God will guide us on,
Body and soul, through life and death, to judgment.

Earth hath her deserts mixed with fruitful plains;
The word of God is barren in some parts;
A rose is not all flower, but hath much
Which is of lower beauty, yet like needful;
And he who in great makings doth like these,
Doth only that which is most natural.
Like life too it is boundlessly unequal,
Now soaring, and now grovelling: at one time
All harmony, and then again all harshness,
With an ever-changing style of thought and speech.
The work is still consistent with itself:
As one part often bears upon another,
Lifting it to the light, where most it needs.
The thoughts we have of men are bold as men;
Our thoughts of God are thin and fleet as ghosts;
But it was not his meaning to draw men,
Such as he heard they were in the old world
And sometimes mixed with; he blessed God he knew
But little of the world, that little good;
While some sighed out that little was its all.
So for the persons and the scenes he drew,
Oft in a dim and dreamy imagery
Shapen, half-shapen, mis-shapen, unshapen,
They are the shadowy creatures which youth dreams
Live in the world embodied, but are not,
Save in the mind’s, which is the mightier one.
They are the names of things which we believe in,
Ideas not embodied, alas, not!
And the sad fate which many of those meet
Whom the youth loves and quits, means nought so ill
As the betrayer’s sin, salvationless
Almost: it is but desertion, not betrayal;
And forced on him according to a promise,
Made at the first unto him, and to be
Wrought out in brief time; and the same fair souls
Saved, stand for our desires made pure in Heaven.
Let us work out our natures; we can do
No wrong in them, they are divine, eterne:
I follow my attraction, and obey
Nature, as earth does, circling round her source
Of life and light, and keeping true in Heaven,
Though not perfect in round, which nothing is.
’Twas the heart-book of love, well nigh all grief.
For the heart leaves its likeness best in that
Overwhelming sorrow which burns up and buries,
Like to the eloquent impression left
In lava, of Pompeian maiden’s bosom.
All passions, and all pleasures, and all powers
Of man’s heart, are brought in, and mind and frame.
He made this work the business of his life;
It was his mission; and was laid on him.
He was a labourer on the ways of God,
And had his hire in peace and power to work.
He wrote it not in the contempt of rule,
And not in hate; but in the self made rule
That there was none to him, but to himself
He was his sole rule, and had right to be.
The faults are faults of nature, and prove art
Man’s nature, that a thing of art, like it,
Should be so pure in kind.

I do believe
The world is a forged thing, and hath not got
The die of God upon it. It will not pass
In Heaven, I tell ye.

How shouldst thou know aught
Of Heaven, unless by contrast?

Pray now cease;
Ye two are jarring ever, though as with
The bickering beauty of two swords, whose strife,
Though deadly, maketh music, I could listen,
Did not each stab, whichever way, pain me.

Oh, I could stand and rend myself with rage
To think I am so weak, that all are so;
Mere minims in the music made from us⁠—
While I would be a hand to sweep from end
To end, from infinite to infinite,
The world’s great chord. The beautiful of old
Had but to say some god had been with them,
And their worst fault was hallowed to their best deed.
That was to live. Could we uproot the past,
Which grows and throws its chilling shade o’er us,
Lengthening every hour and darkening it;
Or could we plant the future where we would,
And make it flourish, that, too, were to live.
But it is not more true that what is, is,
Than that what is not, is not. It is enough
To bear the ever present, as we do.
The city of the past is laid in ruins;
Its echo-echoing walls at a whisper fall:
The coming is not yet built; nor as yet
Its deep foundations laid; but seems, at once,
Like the air city, goodly and well watered,
Which the dry wind doth dream of on the sands
Where he dies away with his wanderings:
While we enjoy the hope thereof, and perish;
Not seeing that the desert present is
Our end.

The brightest natures oft have darkest
End, as fire smoke.

I will read the book in the hope
Of learning somewhat from it.

Thou may’st learn
A hearty thanksgiving for blessings here,
And proud prediction of a state to come,
Of love, and life, and power unlimited;
And uttered in a sound and homely tongue,
Fit to be used by all who think while speaking.
With here and there some old, hard uncouth words
Which have withal a quaint and meaning richness,
As stones make more the power of the soil.
The world hath said its say for and against;
And after praise and blame cometh the truth.
Living men look on all who live askance.
Were he a cold grey ghost, he would have honour;
And though as man he must have mixed with men,
Yet the true bard doth make himself ghost-like;
He lives apart from men; he wakes and walks
By nights; he puts himself into the world
Above him; and he is what but few see.
He knows, too, to the old hid treasure, truth;
And the world wonders, shortly, how some one
Hath come so rich of soul; it little dreams
Of the poor ghost that made him. Yet he comes
To none save of his own blood, and lets pass
Many a generation till his like
Turns up; moreover, this same genius
Comes, ghost-like, to those only who are lonely
In life and in desire; never to crowds:
And it can make its way through every thing,
And is never happy till it tells its secret;
But pale and pressed down with the inward weight
Of unborn works, it sickens nigh to death,
Often; but who like happy at a birth?

Say what a poet ought to do and be.

Though it may scarce become me, knowing little,
Yet what I have thought out upon that theme,
And deem true, I will tell thee.

Now I know
You two will talk of nothing else all night;
So I will to my music. Sweet! I come.
Art thou not glad to see me? What a time
Since I have touched thine eloquent white fingers.
Hast thou forgot me? Mind, now? Know’st thou not
My greeting? Ah! I love thee. Talk away!
Never mind me; I shall not you.

Agreed!

By the sweet muse of music, I could swear
I do believe it smiles upon me; see it
Full of unuttered music, like a bird;
Rich in invisible treasures, like a bud
Of unborn sweets, and thick about the heart
With ripe and rosy beauty⁠—full to trembling.
I love it like a sister. Hark!⁠—its tones;
They melt the soul within one like a sword,
Albeit sheathed, by lightning. Talk to me,
Lovely one! Answer me, thou beauty!

Hear her!

Experience and imagination are
Mother and sire of song⁠—the harp and hand.
The bard’s aim is to give us thoughts: his art
Lieth in giving them as bright as may be.
And even when their looks are earthy, still
If opened, like geoids, they may be found
Full of all sparkling sparry loveliness.
They should be wrought, not cast; like tempered steel,
Burned and cooled, burned again, and cooled again.
A thought is like a ray of light⁠—complex
In nature, simple only in effect.
Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.
Words are like sea-shells on the shore; they show
Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been.
Let every thought, too, soldier-like, be stripped,
And roughly looked over. The dress of words,
Like to the Roman girl’s enticing garb,
Should let the play of limb be seen through it,
And the round rising form. A mist of words,
Like halos round the moon, though they enlarge
The seeming size of thoughts, make the light less
Doubly. It is the thought writ down we want,
Not its effect⁠—not likenesses of likenesses.
And such descriptions are not, more than gloves
Instead of hands to shake, enough for us.

But is the power⁠—is poesie inborn,
Or is it to be gained by art or toil?

It is underived, except from God; but where
Strongest, asks most of human care and aid.
Great bards toil much and most; but most at first,
Ere they can learn to concentrate the soul
For hours upon a thought to carry it.

Why I have sat for hours and never moved,
Saving my hands, clock-like, in writing round
Day after day of thought, and lapse of life.

Many make books, few poems, which may do
Well for their gains, but they do nought for truth,
Nor man, true bard’s main aim. Perish the books,
But the creations live. Some steal a thought,
And clip it round the edge, and challenge him
Whose ’twas to swear to it. To serve things thus
Is as foul witches to cut up old moons
Into new stars. Some never rise above
A pretty fault, like faulty dahlias;
And of whose best things it is kindly said,
The thought is fair; but, to be perfect, wants
A little heightening, like a pretty face
With a low forehead. Do thou more than such,
Or else do nothing. And in poetry,
There is a poet-worship, one of other
Which is idolatry, and not the true
Love-service of the soul to God, which hath
Alone of His inbreathing, and is rendered
Unto Him, from the first, without man’s mean,
By those whom He makes worthy of His worship;
Who kneel at once to Him, and at no shrine,
Save in the world’s wide ear, do they confess them
Of faults which are all truths; and through which ear,
As the world says them over to itself,
He heareth and absolveth; for the bard
Speaks but what all feel more or less within
The heart’s heart, and the sin confessed is done
Away with and for ever.

What of style?

There is no style is good but nature’s style.
And the great ancients’ writings, beside ours,
Look like illuminated manuscripts
Before plain press print; all had different minds,
And followed only their own bents: for this
Nor copied that, nor that the other; each
Is finished in his writing, each is best
For his own mind, and that it was upon;
And all have lived, are living, and shall live;
But these have died, are dying, and shall die;
Yea, copyists shall die, spark out and out.
Minds which combine and make alone can tell
The bearings and the workings of all things
Li and upon each other. All the parts
Of nature meet and fit: wit, wisdom, worth,
Goodness and greatness; to sublimity
Beauty arises, like a planet world,
Labouring slowly, seemingly, up Heaven;
But with an infinite pace to some immortal eyes.
And he who means to be a great bard, most
Measure himself against pure mind, and fling
His soul into a stream of thought, as will
A swimmer hurl himself into the water.
But never swimmer on the stream, nor bird
On wind, feels half so strong, or swift, or glad,
As bard borne high on his mind above himself;
As though he should begin a lay like this,
Where spiritual element is all;
Thought chafing thought, as bough bough, till all burn,
Like the star-written prophecies of Heaven.
The shattered shadow of eternity
Upon the troubled world, even as the sun
Shows brokenly on wavy waters, time;
All time is but a second to the dead.
The smoke of the great burning of the world
Had trailed across the skies for many an age,
And was fast wearing into air away,
When a saint stood before the throne, and cried⁠—
Blessed be Thou, Lord God of all the worlds
That have been, and that are, and are to be!
For Thy destruction is like infinite
With Thy creation, just and wise in both:
Give me a world; and God said, Be it so:
And the world was: and then go on to show
How this new orb was made, and where it shone;
Who ruled, abode, worshipped and loved therein;
Their natures, duties, hopes: let it be pure,
Wise, holy, beautiful; if not to be
Without it, made so by constraint of God⁠—
Kindly forced good: we have had enough of sin
And folly here to wish for and love change.
Let him show God as going thither mildly,
Father-like, blessing all and cursing none;
And that there never will be need for them
That He shall come in glory new to Himself,
With light to which the lightning shall be shadow,
And the sun sadness; borne upon a car
With wheels of burning worlds, within whose rims
Whole hells burn, and beneath whose course the stars
Dry up like dew-drops. But of this enough;
I mean that h must weigh himself as he
Will be weighed after by posterity;
After us all are critics, to a man.
Write to the mind and heart, and let the ear
Glean after what it can. The voice of great
Or graceful thoughts is sweeter far than all
Word-music; and great thoughts, like great deeds, need
No trumpet. Never be in haste in writing.
Let that thou utterest be of nature’s flow,
Not art’s; a fountain’s, not a pump’s. But once
Begun, work thou all things into thy work;
And set thyself about it, as the sea
About earth, lashing at it day and night.
And leave the stamp of thine own soul in it
As thorough as the fossil flower in clay.
The theme shall start and struggle in thy breast,
Like to a spirit in its tomb at rising,
Bending the stones, and crying, Resurrection!

What theme remains?

Thyself, thy race, thy love,
The faithless and the full of faith in God;
Thy race’s destiny, thy sacred love.
Every believer is God’s miracle.
Nothing will stand whose staple is not love;
The love of God, or man, or lovely woman;
The first is scarely touched, the next scarce felt,
The third is desecrated; lift it up;
Redeem it, hallow it, blend the three in one
Great holy work. It shall be read in Heaven
By all the saved of sinners of all time;
Preachers shall point to it, and tell their wards
It is a handful off eternal truth;
Make ye a heartful of it: men shall will
That it be buried with them in their hands:
The young, the gay, the innocent, the brave,
The fair, with soul and body both all love,
Shall run to it with joy; and the old man,
Still hearty in decline, whose happy life
Hath blossomed downwards, like the purple bell-flower,
Closing the book, shall utter lowlily⁠—
Death, thou art infinite, it is life is little.
Believe thou art inspired, and thou art.
Look at the bard and others; never heed
The petty hints of envy. If a fault
It be in bard to deem himself inspired,
’Tis one which hath had many followers
Before him. He is wont to make, unite,
Believe; the world to part, and doubt, and narrow.
That he believes, he utters. What the world
Utters, it trusts not. But the time may come
When all, along with those who seek to raise
Men’s minds, and have enough of pain, without
Suffering from envy, may be God-inspired
To utter truth, and feel like love for men.
Poets are henceforth the world’s teachers. Still
The world is all in sects, which makes one loathe it.

The men of mind are mountains, and their heads
Are sunned long ere the rest of earth. I would
Be one such.

It is well. Burn to be great.
Pay not thy praise to lofty things alone.
The plains are everlasting as the hills.
The bard cannot have two pursuits: aught else
Comes on the mind with the like shock as though
Two worlds had gone to war and met in air.
And now that thou hast heard thus much from one
Not wont to seek, nor give, nor take advice,
Remember, whatsoe’er thou art as man,
Suffer the world, entreat it and forgive.
They who forgive most shall be most forgiven.
Dear Helen, I will tell the what I love
Next to thee⁠—poesie.

Can any thing
Be even second to me in thy love?
Doth it not distance all things?

To say sooth,
I once loved many things ere I met with thee,
My one blue break of beauty in the clouds;
Bending thyself to me as Heaven to earth.

My love is like the moon, seems now to grow,
And now to lessen; but it is only so
Because thou canst not see it all at once
It knows nor day, nor morrow, like the sun;
Unchangeable as space it shall still be
When yon bright suns, which are themselves but sands
In the great glass of Time, shall be run out.

Man is but half man without woman; and
As do idolaters their heavenless gods,
We deify the things which we adore.

Our life is comely as a whole; nay, more,
Like rich brown ringlets, with odd hairs all gold.
We women have four seasons, like the year,
Our spring is in our lightsome girlish days,
When the heart laughs within us for sheer joy;
Ere yet we know what love is or the ill
Of being loved by those whom we love not.
Summer is when we love and are beloved,
And seems short; from its very splendour seems
To pass the quickest; crowned with flowers it flies.
Autumn, when some young thing with tiny hands,
And rosy cheeks, and flossy tendrilled locks,
Is wantoning about us day and night.
And winter is when these we love have perished;
For the heart ices then. And the next spring
Is in another world, if one there be.
Some miss one season, some another; this
Shall have them early, and that late; and yet
The year wear round with all as best it may.
There is no rule for it; but in the main
It is as I have said.

My life with thee
Is like a song, and the sweet music thou,
Which doth accompany it.

Say, did thy friend
Write aught beside the work thou tell’st of?

Nothing.
After that, like the burning peak, he fell
Into himself, and was missing ever after.

If not a secret, pray who was he?

I.