I shut mine eyes . . . And lo! A flickering snatch of memory that floats Upon the face of a pool of darkness five And thirty dead years deep, Antic in girlish broideries And skirts and silly shoes with straps And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks Plain in the shadow of a church (St. Michael’s: in whose brazen call To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed), Sedate for all his haste To be at home; and, nestled in his arm, Inciting still to quiet and solitude, Boarded in sober drab, With small, square, agitating cuts Let in a-top of the double-columned, close, Quakerlike print, a Book! . . . What but that blessed brief Of what is gallantest and best In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance? The Book of rocs, Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris, Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars, And ghouls, and genies—O, so huge They might have overed the tall Minster Tower Hands down, as schoolboys take a post! In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman, Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour, Cairo and Serendib and Candahar, And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk— Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms— Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles, The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights! Old friends I had a-many—kindly and grim Familiars, cronies quaint And goblin! Never a Wood but housed Some morrice of dainty dapperlings. No Brook But had his nunnery Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites, To cabin in his grots, and pace His lilied margents. Every lone Hillside Might open upon Elf-Land. Every Stalk That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs You climbed beyond the clouds, and found The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged And drowsy, from his great oak chair, Among the flitches and pewters at the fire, Called for his Faëry Harp. And in it flew, And, perching on the kitchen table, sang Jocund and jubilant, with a sound Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals The shy thrush at mid-May Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn; Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still, In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring, For Pan’s own whistle, savage and rich and lewd, And mocked him call for call!