Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/469



Remember how thy ardor's magic sense

Made poor things rich to thee and small things great;

How hearth and garden, field and bushy fence,

Were thy own eager love incorporate;

And how the solemn, splendid Past

O'er thy early widened earth

Made grandeur, as on sunset cast

Dark elms near take mighty girth.

Hands and feet were tiny still

When we knew the historic thrill,

Breathed deep breath in heroes dead,

Tasted the immortals' bread.

Seeing what I might have been

Reproved the thing I was,

Smoke on heaven's clearest sheen,

The speck within the rose.

By revered ones' frailties stung

Reverence was with anguish wrung.

But all thy anguish and thy discontent

Was growth of mine, the elemental strife

Toward feeling manifold with vision blent

To wider thought: I was no vulgar life

That, like the water-mirrored ape.

Not discerns the thing it sees,

Nor knows its own in others' shape,

Railing, scorning, at its ease.