In the pure white light that he could see,
Inspired to incarnate a soul in each plan,
The life of a picture as well as of man.
The wants of the present, one never can gauge
By the heathenish tastes of a heathenish age.
The mummy lived once, and spoke as it ought.
We moderns, forgetting its life and its thought,
For lost art sighing, too oft re-array
What is only a corpse, and ought to decay.
E’en if it were living, long centuries fraught