“Here shall my resolution be: The shadow of the mystery Is haply wholesomer for eyes That cheat us to be over-wise, And I am happy in my sight To love God’s darkness as His light.” Nor will he allow himself, even when contemplating what he regards as the obscuration of the Church’s light, to look upon this as the last state of organic faith. He takes that noble painting by Turner, “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth, to be broken up,” and sees science, “a black demon, belching fire and steam,” drag it away “to gather weeds in the regardless stream.” Ruskin makes the picture an unconscious expression by the painter of his own return to die by the shore of the Thames, “the cold mists gathering over his strength, and all men crying out against him, and dragging the old ‘Fighting Téméraire’ out of their way, with dim, fuliginous contumely;” but surely this is rather the passionate comment of a disciple making his master’s work prophetic. Lowell’s poem strikes a deeper than a personal note. It is a fine imaginative conception, a rare interpretation of a great work of art by another work of art, and what is noticeable in the cry of the poem is the protest which Lowell, in his instinctive faith, makes against the finality of his own interpretation. He sees in imagination the splendid history of the church, and no fighter under Nelson could have witnessed this desolate funeral of the great ship with more anguish than Lowell has thrown into his pathetic words; but as the English sailor could have righted himself with a vision of the glories of the future English navy, so Lowell closes his dirge with a triumphant prophecy:-- “Shall nevermore, engendered of thy fame, A new sea-eagle heir thy conqueror name, And with commissioned talons wrench From thy supplanter’s grimy clench His sheath of steel, his wings of smoke and flame? “This shall the pleased eyes of our children see; For this the stars of God long even as we; Earth listens for his wings; the Fates Expectant lean; Faith cross-propt waits, And the tired waves of Thought’s insurgent sea.”[102] In taking another great painting as the prompter of his verse, Titian’s so-called “Sacred and Profane Love,” Lowell again is not so much interpreting the painter’s thought as he is using the canvas for a mirror in which to read his own soul, and though in printing “Endymion” he adds the gloss “a mystical comment,” one may guess that Lowell in this twilight of his life, musing upon the ideals which had beckoned him from earliest days, still saw in the heavens that vision of beauty, of truth, and of freedom which had never been dethroned in his soul. Faithfulness to high emprise,--that at least he could declare of himself amidst all the doubt that beclouded his intellectual vision, and it was fitting that the poet should, in this veiled figure of Endymion, see the reflection of his own face and form.