The mental world is beautiful, and deck’d in beauty rare,
Whate’er we see, whate’er we dream, we find it imaged there,—
A halo circles all that is, the sprightly and the tame,
‘And gives to airy nothings too a dwelling and a name.’
And beauty, such as only breathes upon a seraph’s lyre,
Is in this world, and comes to us, and gives us souls of fire;
We love, and we forget the ills that to the earth belong,
And Life becomes one holy dream of rapture and of song.
And he who scribbles verses knows (and no one knows but him)
That this is but a picture here—a picture dull and dim,—