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If fancies, varying as the shapes that lie

       Stained on the windows of the sunset sky;

       If hopes, that beckon with delusive gleams,

       Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;

       If passions, following with the winds that urge

       Earth's wildest wanderer to her farthest verge;—

       If these on all some transient hours bestow

       Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow,

       Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled

       Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told,

       Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave

       Would wail its requiem o'er a poet's grave!

      If to embody in a breathing word

       Tones that the spirit trembled when it heard;

       To fix the image all unveiled and warm,

       And carve in language its ethereal form,

       So pure, so perfect, that the lines express

       No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;

       To feel that art, in living truth, has taught

       Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought;—

       If this alone bestow the right to claim

       The deathless garland and the sacred name,

       Then none are poets save the saints on high,

       Whose harps can murmur all that words deny!

      But though to none is granted to reveal

       In perfect semblance all that each may feel,

       As withered flowers recall forgotten love,

       So, warmed to life, our faded passions move

       In every line, where kindling fancy throws

       The gleam of pleasures or the shade of woes.

      When, schooled by time, the stately queen of art

       Had smoothed the pathways leading to the heart,

       Assumed her measured tread, her solemn tone,

       And round her courts the clouds of fable thrown,

       The wreaths of heaven descended on her shrine,

       And wondering earth proclaimed the Muse divine.

       Yet if her votaries had but dared profane

       The mystic symbols of her sacred reign,

       How had they smiled beneath the veil to find

       What slender threads can chain the mighty mind!

      Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,

       And verse bestows the varnish and the frame;

       Our grating English, whose Teutonic jar

       Shakes the racked axle of Art's rattling car,

       Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird

       Fast in its place each many-angled word;

       From Saxon lips Anacreon's numbers glide,

       As once they melted on the Teian tide,

       And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again

       From Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plain

       The proud heroic, with, its pulse-like beat,

       Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet;

       The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,

       Sweeps gently onward to its dying close,

       Where waves on waves in long succession pour,

       Till the ninth billow melts along the shore;

       The lonely spirit of the mournful lay,

       Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray,

       In sable plumage slowly drifts along,

       On eagle pinion, through the air of song;

       The glittering lyric bounds elastic by,

       With flashing ringlets and exulting eye,

       While every image, in her airy whirl,

       Gleams like a diamond on a dancing girl!

      Born with mankind, with man's expanded range

       And varying fates the poet's numbers change;

       Thus in his history may we hope to find

       Some clearer epochs of the poet's mind,

       As from the cradle of its birth we trace,

       Slow wandering forth, the patriarchal race.

I.

       Table of Contents

      When the green earth, beneath the zephyr's wing,

       Wears on her breast the varnished buds of Spring;

       When the loosed current, as its folds uncoil,

       Slides in the channels of the mellowed soil;

       When the young hyacinth returns to seek

       The air and sunshine with her emerald beak;

       When the light snowdrops, starting from their cells,

       Hang each pagoda with its silver bells;

       When the frail willow twines her trailing bow

       With pallid leaves that sweep the soil below;

       When the broad elm, sole empress of the plain,

       Whose circling shadow speaks a century's reign,

       Wreathes in the clouds her regal diadem—

       A forest waving on a single stem;—

       Then mark the poet; though to him unknown

       The quaint-mouthed titles, such as scholars own,

       See how his eye in ecstasy pursues

       The steps of Nature tracked in radiant hues;

       Nay, in thyself, whate'er may be thy fate,

       Pallid with toil or surfeited with state,

       Mark how thy fancies, with the vernal rose,

       Awake, all sweetness, from their long repose;

       Then turn to ponder o'er the classic page,

       Traced with the idyls of a greener age,

       And learn the instinct which arose to warm

       Art's earliest essay and her simplest form.

      To themes like these her narrow path confined

       The first-born impulse moving in the mind;

       In vales unshaken by the trumpet's sound,

       Where peaceful Labor tills his fertile ground,

       The silent changes of the rolling years,

       Marked on the soil or dialled on the spheres,

       The crested forests and the colored flowers,

       The dewy grottos and the blushing bowers—

       These, and their guardians, who, with liquid names,

       Strephons and Chloes, melt in mutual flames,

       Woo the young Muses from their mountain shade,

       To make Arcadias in the lonely glade.

      Nor think they visit only with their smiles

       The fabled valleys and Elysian isles;

       He who is wearied of his village plain

       May

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