If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy (Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit); If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness,- Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the
Which into words no virtue can digest.
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aërial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see what things they be; But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality!
ARDS of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new? Yes, and those of heaven commune With the spheres of sun and moon; With the noise of fountains wond'rous, And the parle of voices thund'rous; With the whisper of heaven's trees And one another, in soft ease Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;
1 Spoken by a "spirit" in Prometheus Unbound.
Underneath large blue-bells tented, Where the daisies are rose-scented, And the rose herself has got Perfume which on earth is not; Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries.
Thus ye live on high, and then
On the earth ye live again;
And the souls ye left behind you Teach us, here, the way to find you, Where your other souls are joying, Never slumbered, never cloying. Here, your earth-born souls still speak To mortals, of their little week; Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim. Thus ye teach us, every day, Wisdom, though fled far away.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new!
And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown: And three with a new song's measure Can trample a kingdom down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.
Arthur W. E. O'Shaughnessy
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