And thou hast lived before; hast known
The depth of every mystery,
Has dwelt in Nature, hid, alone
And winged the blue ætherial sea;
Hast looked upon the ends of space;
Hast visited each rolling star,—
Before Time measured forth his pace,
Scythe-armed, on a terrestrial war.
HOMER.
(EARLY LINES.)
Time, with his constant touch, has half erased
The memory, but he cannot dim the fame
Of one who best of all has paraphrased
The tale of waters with a tale of flame,
Yet left us but his accents and his name.
Upon that life, the sun of history
Shines not, but Legend, like a moon in mist,
Sheds over it a weird uncertainty,
In which all figures wave and actions twist,
So that a man may read them as he list.
We know not if he trod some Theban street,
And sought compassion on his aged woe,
We know not if on Chian sand his feet
Left footprints once; but only this we know,
How the high ways of fame those footprints show.
Along the border of the restless sea,
The lonely thinker must have loved to roam,
We feel his soul wrapt in its majesty,
And he can speak in words that drip with foam,
As though himself a deep, and depths his home.
Hark! under all and through and over all,
Runs on the cadence of the changeful sea;
Now pleasantly the graceful surges fall,
And now they mutter in an angry key
Ever, throughout their changes, grand and free.
How sternly sang he of Achilles' might,
How sweetly of the sweet Andromache,
How low his lyre when Ajax prays for light;
(Well might he bend that lyre in sympathy
For also great, and also blind was he.)