The folded glory of his wings, and made
A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame
Of naked light and the sun’s noonday flame.
The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of the futility of science:
But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,
Is still umbilical to earth.
The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”: