What! thou, the poet!—thou, whose mission ’tis
To send vibration down the chord of time,
Until its junction with eternity—
Thou, who hast dared and pondered and endured,
Gathering by piecemeal all the noble thoughts
And fierce sensations of the mind—as one
Who in a garden culls the wholesome rose,
And binds it with the deadly nightshade up;
Flowers not akin, and yet, by contrast kind—
Thou, for a touch of what these mundane fools