And all the clearer ways he yearned to reach,—

The fugitive ideal, the old unrest,—

Found utterance in song, that slept in speech.

And like a minstrel in an alien land,

Who sings his native strains while men crowd round

And hearken long, but cannot understand,

He sang to us, and through the unknown sound

We caught a passing glimmer of the soul

Those foreign runes concealed, and strove to glean

From out the uninterpretable whole