Ah! let the sweet birds of the Lord With earth’s waters make accord; Teach how the crucifix may be Carven from the laurel-tree, Fruit of the Hesperides Burnish take on Eden-trees, The Muses’ sacred grove be wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In white Cecilia’s lap of snows! Thy childhood must have felt the stings Of too divine o’ershadowings; Its odorous heart have been a blossom That in darkness did unbosom, Those fire-flies of God to invite, Burning spirits, which by night Bear upon their laden wing To such hearts impregnating. For flowers that night-wings fertilize Mock down the stars’ unsteady eyes, And with a happy, sleepless glance Gaze the moon out of countenance. I think thy girlhood’s watchers must Have took thy folded songs on trust, And felt them, as one feels the stir Of still lightnings in the hair, When conscious hush expects the cloud To speak the golden secret loud Which tacit air is privy to; Flasked in the grape the wine they knew, Ere thy poet-mouth was able For its first young starry babble. Keep’st thou not yet that subtle grace? Yea, in this silent interspace, God sets His poems in thy face! The loom which mortal verse affords, Out of weak and mortal words, Wovest thou thy singing-weed in, To a rune of thy far Eden. Vain are all disguises! Ah, Heavenly _incognita_! Thy mien bewrayeth through that wrong The great Uranian House of Song! As the vintages of earth Taste of the sun that riped their birth, We know what never cadent Sun Thy lampèd clusters throbbed upon, What plumed feet the winepress trod; Thy wine is flavorous of God. Whatever singing-robe thou wear Has the Paradisal air; And some gold feather it has kept Shows what Floor it lately swept! III. “MANUS ANIMAM PINXIT.” LADY who hold’st on me dominion! Within your spirit’s arms I stay me fast Against the fell Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell; And claim my right in you, most hardly won, Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste: Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall (O in high escalade high companion!) Even in the breach of Heaven’s assaulted wall. Like to a wind-sown sapling grow I from The clift, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul,— Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome By all its clouds incumbent: O be true To your soul, dearest, as my life to you! For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through, Dry down and perish to the foodless root.