The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers,—
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
Sometimes; not always, thank God! Look again: there are the mountains, and above them the mournful glories of the anti-sunset; the mute and golden trumpetings of the dawn; —there is the sea, and over it the wistfulness and pomp and pageantry of the setting sun, and the gentleness of heaven at evening;—there is the whole drama of Day with its tremendous glories; and the huge mystery of Night-time: Niobe Night, silent in the heavens,
"Glittering magnificently unperturbed;"
—and there are the flowers in the garden, those Praelarissimi and Nobilisimi in the Court of God, the Pansy, the Blue Larkspur, the Purple Anemone;—and what are all these things?— Just symbols; just mirrorings of a beauty in the World of Ideas within; just places where the Spirit has touched matter, and matter, at that fiery and creative touch, has flamed up into the likeness of God, which is Beauty.—What is Vision?—It is to have luminous forms rising in the imagination, like Wordsworth had, like Shelley; it is with shut eyes to see the beauty and wonder of the Gods; it is to have no grayness or dearth or darkness within; but to have the 'bliss of solitude' crowded with beautiful squadrons of deities, trembling with the light of legions on legions of suns. For:
Not all we are here
Where this darkness oppresses us;
Not this oblivion
Of Beauty expresses us.
Gaze not on it,
To be stained with its stain;
The Lonely All-Beautiful
Calls us again.
In galleried palaces,
Turquoise blue,
With the sweetness of many suns
Filtering through,—
In the Suns's own garden,
Where galaxies flame
For lilac and daffodil,
Each on his stem,—
Where apple-bloom Capricorn
Hangs from his tree,
Glittering dim o'er
The dim blue sea,—
And billowing dim o'er
The dim blue lawns
Of heaven come the nebular
Sunsets and dawns,—