Blest Being from some happier sphere O bend thy luminous footsteps near Were Heaven’s gates ajar, When down a moonlit path you came With dazzling smile and wings of flame Fair as the morning star? Imagination, radiant sprite With crescent crown and stars bedight, And seraph’s eyes; O guide us up that filmy stair By ladders raised on buoyant air To vaulting skies! Imagination is the singing rhyme In life’s dull prose. She blooms among the cruel thorns of time A beauteous rose. No Circe’s spell is hers, the poppy’s lure From present pain In drug engendered dreams; but calm and pure Is her sweet reign. Her finger traces in the storm cloud gray The rainbow’s arc; She sees within the gnarled volcanic clay The diamond’s spark; Forecasts the harvests in the sodded rows The plough shares fling; When all the world is buried neath the snows She dreams of spring. The cave man followed up the savage road The torch she bore, She marks within life’s rock encumbered lode The glinting ore. Imagination melts in purple mist The jagged peaks; And petty things yield to this alchemist The gold she seeks. No priestess of illusions, vague, unreal And not of earth, She rather helps us know and see and feel A thing’s true worth. Along the wistful trail of yesterdays Backward sad Memory directs her gaze And points her withered hand. “Tomorrow” is the magic word that cheers Imagination onward through the years Where lies her promised land. Imagination only can explain Those jewelled etchings on our window pane By fairies of the frost; From icy peaks and breaker fretted seas To elven glens beneath snow laden trees So cunningly embossed. Calm reason tells us there is nothing there But mists congealing in the frosted air; ’Tis false, calm reason lies. For in that witching square the eye beholds A glittering world of wonder that unfolds Its luminious mysteries. Imagination plumbs the deeps of space To roam among the stars, She gilds the workshop, lights the market place, And sunders prison bars. Her inspiration made Da Vinci thrill And o’er his canvas shone, And Michelangelo’s god like visions still Endure in living stone. Beyond the sunset’s molten lava flood Lie mysteries yet untold - Imagination sails those seas of blood And mounts those walls of gold. Her finger laid on blind old Milton’s eyes Kindled no earthly glow - And deaf Beethoven thrilled to melodies No mortal ear may know.