Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/537

1850-60.] Will any one say what daily paths

That spirit went or came—

Whether it rested in beds of flowers,

Or shrunk upon beds of flame?

Can any one tell, upon stormy nights,

When the body was safely at home,

Where, amid darkness, terror, and gloom.

Its friend was wont to roam?

Where, upon hills beneath the blue skies.

It rested soft and still,

Flying straight out of its half-closed eyes.

That friend went wandering at will?

High as the bliss of the highest heaven.

Low as the lowest hell.

With hope and fear it winged its way

On journeys none may tell.

It lay on the rose's fragrant breast,

It bathed in the ocean deep,

It sailed in a ship of sunset cloud.

And it heard the rain-cloud weep.

It laughed with naiads in murmurous caves.

It was struck by the lightning's flash.

It drank from the moonlit lily-cup.

It heard the iceberg's crash.

It haunted places of old renown.

It basked in thickets of flowers;

It fled on the wings of the stormy wind.

It dreamed through the star-lit hours,

Alas! a soul's strange history

Never was written or known,

Though the name and age of its earthly part

Be graven upon the stone!

It hated, and overcame its hate—

It loved to youth's excess—

It was mad with anguish, wild with joy.

It had visions to grieve and to bless;

It drank of the honey-dew of dreams,

For it was a poet true;

Secrets of nature and secrets of mind,

Mysteriously it knew.

Should mortals question its history.

They would ask if it had gold—

If it bathed and floated in deeps of wealth—

If it traded, and bought, and sold.

They would prize its worth by the outward dress

By which its body was known:

As if a soul must eat and sleep.

And live on money alone!

It had no need to purchase lands.

For it owned the whole broad earth;

'Twas of royal rank, for all the past

Was its by right of birth.

All beauty in the world below

Was its by right of love.

And it had a great inheritance

In the nameless realms above.

It has gone! the soul so little known—

Its body has lived and died—

Gone from the world so vexing, small:

But the Universe is wide!

The wine of Parnassus is mingled with fire;

It is drunken with pleasure and pain:

Who quaffs of it once must forever desire

Its ethereal fumes in his brain.

It is drugged with a sadness immortally deep,

That low down in the beaker doth swim;

While the silvery bubbles of joy overleap,

Or in splendor subside on the brim.

And the grapes, ah! the grapes that were torn from the breast

Of the clinging and passionate vine—