Page:The Poems of Oscar Wilde.pdf/65

 Which Painters hold, and such the heritage

This gentle solemn Spirit doth possess,

Being a better mirror of his age

In all his pity, love, and weariness,

Than those who can but copy common things,

And leave the Soul unpainted with its mighty questionings.

But they are few, and all romance has flown,

And men can prophesy about the sun,

And lecture on his arrows—how, alone,

Through a waste void the soulless atoms run,

How from each tree its weeping nymph has fled,

And that no more 'mid English reeds a Naïad shows her head.

Methinks these new Actæons boast too soon

That they have spied on beauty; what if we

Have analysed the rainbow, robbed the moon

Of her most ancient, chastest mystery,

Shall I, the last Endymion, lose all hope

Because rude eyes peer at my mistress through a telescope!

What profit if this scientific age

Burst through our gates with all its retinue

Of modern miracles! Can it assuage

One lover's breaking heart? what can it do 51