The city swims in verdure, beautiful As Venice on the waters, the sea-swan. What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts, As plums in ladies’ laps, who start and laugh: What miles of streets that run on after trees, Still carrying the necessary shops, Those open caskets, with the jewels seen! And trade is art, and art’s philosophy, In Paris. There’s a silk, for instance, there, As worth an artist’s study for the folds, As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults; Art’s here too artful,—conscious as a maid, Who leans to mark her shadow on the wall Until she lose a ’vantage in her step. Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk: The artists also, are idealists, Too absolute for nature, logical To austerity in the application of The special theory: not a soul content To paint a crooked pollard and an ass, As the English will, because they find it so, And like it somehow.—Ah, the old Tuileries Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes, Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed By the apparition of a new fair face In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate, Within the gardens, what a heap of babes, Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees, From every street and alley of the town, By the ghosts perhaps, that blow too bleak this way A-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes; I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play out Before the next change comes.—And, farther on, What statues, poised upon their columns fine, As if to stand a moment were a feat, Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-room For a nation that runs fast,—ay, runs against The dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows, Which grin at progress in an epigram. I walked the day out, listening to the chink Of the first Napoleon’s dry bones, as they lay In his second grave beneath the golden dome That caps all Paris like a bubble. ‘Shall These dry bones live,’ thought Louis Philippe once, And lived to know. Herein is argument For kings and politicians, but still more For poets, who bear buckets to the well, Of ampler draught. These crowds are very good For meditation, (when we are very strong) Though love of beauty makes us timorous, And draws us backward from the coarse town-sights To count the daisies upon dappled fields, And hear the streams bleat on among the hills In innocent and indolent repose; While still with silken elegiac thoughts We wind out from us the distracting world, And die into the chrysalis of a man, And leave the best that may, to come of us, In some brown moth. Be, rather, bold, and bear To look into the swarthiest face of things, For God’s sake who has made them.