So highest poets, painters, owe to Thee Their being and disciples; none were there, Hadst Thou not been; Thou art the centre where The Truth did find an infinite form; and she Left not the earth again, but made it be One of her robing rooms, where she doth wear All forms of revelation. Artists bear Tapers in acolyte humility. O Poet! Painter! soul of all! thy art Went forth in making artists. Pictures? No; But painters, who in love should ever show To earnest men glad secrets from God's heart. So, in the desert, grass and wild flowers start, When through the sand the living waters go. XIII. So, as Thou wert the seed and not the flower, Having no form or comeliness, in chief Sharing thy thoughts with thine acquaintance Grief; Thou wert despised, rejected in thine hour Of loneliness and God-triumphant power. Oh, not three days alone, glad slumber brief, That from thy travail brought Thee sweet relief, Lay'st Thou, outworn, beneath thy stony bower; But three and thirty years, a living seed, Thy body lay as in a grave indeed; A heavenly germ dropt in a desert wide; Buried in fallow soil of grief and need; 'Mid earthquake-storms of fiercest hate and pride, By woman's tears bedewed and glorified. XIV. All divine artists, humble, filial, Turn therefore unto Thee, the poet's sun; First-born of God's creation, only done When from Thee, centre-form, the veil did fall, And Thou, symbol of all, heart, coronal, The highest Life with noblest Form made one, To do thy Father's bidding hadst begun; The living germ in this strange planet-ball, Even as thy form in mind of striving saint. So, as the one Ideal, beyond taint, Thy radiance unto all some shade doth yield, In every splendour shadowy revealed: But when, by word or hand, Thee one would paint, Power falls down straightway, speechless, dim-eyed, faint. XV. Men may pursue the Beautiful, while they Love not the Good, the life of all the Fair; Keen-eyed for beauty, they will find it where The darkness of their eyes hath power to slay The vision of the good in beauty's ray, Though fruits the same life-giving branches bear. So in a statue they will see the rare Beauty of thought moulded of dull crude clay, While loving joys nor prayer their souls expand. So Thou didst mould thy thoughts in Life not Art; Teaching with human voice, and eye, and hand, That none the beauty from the truth might part: Their oneness in thy flesh we joyous hail-- The Holy of Holies' cloud-illumined veil! XVI.