Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/230

202 But tho' art's flower shall fade, again the seed

Onward shall speed,

Quickening the land from lake to ocean's roar.

V

Art lives, tho' Greece may never

From the ancient mold

As once of old

Exhale to heaven the inimitable bloom;

Yet from that tomb

Beauty walks forth to light the world forever!

THE VANISHING CITY

I

memory, and all ye powers of being,

To new life waken! Stamp the vision clear

On the soul's inmost substance. O, let seeing

Be more than seeing; let the entrancèd ear

Take deep these surging sounds, inweaved with light

Of unimagined radiance; let the intense

Illumined loveliness that thrills the night

Strike in the human heart some deeper sense!

So shall these domes that meet heaven's curvèd blue,

And yon long, white, imperial colonnade,

And many-columned peristyle, endue

The mind with beauty that shall never fade;

Tho' all too soon to dark oblivion wending—

Reared in one happy hour to know as swift an ending.

II

Thou shalt of all the cities of the world

Famed for their grandeur, evermore endure

Imperishably and all alone impearled

In the world's living thought, the one most sure