Page:The Unconquered Air, Coates, 1912.djvu/36

 ROBERT BROWNING

"Never say of me that I am dead!"

son of the Titan mother, Earth,

Fed at her breast,

He builded upward from the solid ground,

While listening ever for the heavenly sound

Of higher voices, to his soul addressed.

The elemental mother, lending might

With vital breath,

Made him, with her instinctive courage, brave;

And the immortals to his spirit gave

Their deeper knowledge and their scorn of death.

So evermore with energy and joy,

He followed Truth:

Still for the message and the vision sought,

Still to the temple of her worship brought

The imagination of unaging youth,

And in its largeness ever viewing life,

Perceived its goal

To be beyond the bounds of space or time.

He strove to picture it in powerful rhyme;

But what he painted ever—was the soul!

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