To shape from infinite words and big-wombed thought,
The form that mimics Nature, yet transcends;
To shower beauty, from the sunbeam caught,
On one who, lofty, walks toward lofty ends;
To live within that which themselves create,
By sufferance swelling more exalted ranks,
With such communion still to recreate
The pauses of the world, whose iron harsh clanks,
In that most sweet society, how soon
To lose all sense, all memory of the earth;
Aye, this were godlike, and the priceless boon
Which Nature grudges prompters of true birth:
Holier, she bids them worship what inspires
And guides the blast that feeds Pygmalion fires.
LXIX.
O Beauty is too holy to be handled
By the indiscriminate, rude, critic-touch!
Gently be its timorous, blushing blossoms dandled
On the fringed boughs, coy to the breezes’ clutch;
Yea the ransack’d Past’s aroma should dwell on it,
While the coronetted Future, breathing, fann’d it:
The flowers of love garden its paths and throng it,
And Fancy’s cloud-like sails on lone stars land it:
It should be the idea’s gradual unfolding,
Whose rosebud leaves astonish niggard Hope:
It should be the delicate and fleece-like moulding
That snowy clouds build on the heaven’s blue scope:
It should be,—who can say except the heart?
It should be all, nor lovelier than thou art.
LXX.
O thou glad phantom of my waking hours,
I will not clasp thee, lest the vision fail;
I only, sometimes, wander o’er the flowers
Whose perfume lingers in my summer’s vale:
Whether joy’s victorious, when I oft recount
The former kisses of indulgent Time;
Or the sad Present fathoms sorrow’s fount,
And bids my eyes assist my bosom’s chime;
I yet will fashion pleasure from each mood,
Shaming the Present with the Past’s record,
And gather strength, from memory’s darling brood,
To temper, and to wield the eventful sword:
Thy aid delightful seems, for thy dear sake,
And I shall seem to give, even what I take.
LXXI.
What is more lovely than to celebrate
That Beauty’s virtue we can never reach?
What’s heavenlier, than our pride to lowly rate
In that great Love where nought is left to teach?
To admire, to adore, to fall at Beauty’s feet,
To lose all sense of this corporeal frame,
Who’d not choose Life’s intense, perpetual heat,
Whose walk of love were blessed by Beauty’s name?
O better shows our worship falsely placed,
Than the fixed heart of an unfruitful doubt!
Happier were he, with love of Hell disgraced,
Than he whose hope of Heaven gazed coldly out.
Love’s measured by the heart, from whence it flows,
Though all be void, yet it must rest on shows.