Dead myths, to whom such dreams belong!
O beautiful philosophies
Of Nature! crystallized in song
And marble, peopling lost seas,
Lost forests and the star-lost vast,
Grant me the childlike faith that clung.—
Through loveliness that could not last,—
To Heaven in the pagan past,
Calling for God with infant tongue!
III
Idea, god of Plato! one
With beauty, justice, truth and love:
Who, type by type, the world begun
From an ideal world above!
Reason, who into Nature wrought
Your real entities,—which are
Ideas,—giving to our star
Their beauty through reflected thought;
The reminiscences that flame,
Momental, through the mind of man,
Of things his memory can not name,
Lost things his knowledge can not scan,—
Hints of past periods are not these,
His soul hath lived since it had birth
In God?—Yea! who shall say that Earth
More ancient is than he who sees?
IV
Beside us, and yet far above,
She leads us to no base renown—
The Ideal, with her sun-white crown,
And starry raiment of her love:
She leads us by ascending ways
Of Nature to her purposed ends,
Who in the difficult, dark days
Of trial with her smile defends.
Beyond the years, that blindly grope,
To climb with her, from year to year,
To some exalted atmosphere,
Were more than earthly joy or hope!
Though in that atmosphere we find
Not her—her influence, pointing to
New elevations of the mind
By some superior avenue.
V
The climbing-cricket in the dusk
Moves wings of moony gossamer;
Its vague, vibrating note I hear
Among the boughs of dew and musk,
Whence, rustling with a mellow thud,
The ripe quince falls. Low, deep and clear,
The west is bound with burning blood.
The slanting bats beneath the moon,—
A dark disk edge with glittering white,—
Spin loops of intertangled night:
An owl wakes, hooting over soon,
Within the forest far away:
And now the heav’n fills, light by light,
And all the blood-red west grows gray.