A honey dew, and throve on what it shed. All things I loved; but song I loved in chief. Imagination is the air of mind;
Judgment its earth and memory its main; Passion its fire. I was at home in heaven. Swift-like, I lived above; once touching earth, The meanest thing might master me: long wings But baffled. Still and still I harped on song. Oh! to create within the mind is bliss; And, shaping forth the lofty thought, or lovely, We seek not, need not heaven: and when the thought,
Cloudy and shapeless, first forms on the mind, Slow darkening into some gigantic make, How the heart shakes with pride and fear, as heaven
Quakes under its own thunder; or as might, Of old, the mortal mother of a god, When first she saw him lessening up the skies. And I began the toil divine of verse, Which, like a burning bush, doth guest a god. But this was only wing-flapping - not flight; The pawing of a courser ere he win;
And fragments of the undeemed tongues of heaven; Men who walk up to fame as to a friend,
Or their own house, which from the wrongful heir They have wrested, from the world's hard hand and gripe;
Men who, like death, all bone but all unarmed, Have ta'en the giant world by the throat, and thrown him;
And made him swear to maintain their name and fame 70
At peril of his life; who shed great thoughts As easily as an oak looseneth its golden leaves In a kindly largesse to the soil it grew on; Whose names are ever on the world's broad tongue Like sound upon the falling of a force; Whose words, if wingèd are with angels' wings; Who play upon the heart as on a harp, And make our eyes bright as we speak of them; Whose hearts have a look southward, and are open To the whole noon of nature; these I have waked, And wept o'er night by night; oft pondering thus:
At dead of night their sails were filled, And onward each rejoicing steered - Ah, neither blame, for neither willed, 15 Or wist, what first with dawn appeared! To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too, Through winds and tides one compass guides
To that, and your own selves, be true. 20
But O blithe breeze; and O great seas, Though ne'er, that earliest parting past, On your wide plain they join again, Together lead them home at last.
One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where'er they fare, O bounding breeze, O rushing seas! At last, at last, unite them there!
WITH WHOM IS NO VARIABLENESS, NEITHER SHADOW OF TURNING
It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so: That, howsoe'er I stray and range, Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.
Through the great sinful streets of Naples as I past, With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me; till at last
My brain was lightened when my tongue had
Christ is not risen, no
He lies and moulders low;
So spread the wondrous fame; He all the same
Lay senseless, mouldering, low: He was not risen, no
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
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