Thundering and bursting In torrents, in waves, Carolling and shouting Over tombs, amid graves, See! on the cumbered plain Clearing a stage, Scattering the past about, Comes the new age. Bards make new poems, Thinkers new schools, Statesmen new systems, Critics new rules. All things begin again; Life is their prize; Earth with their deeds they fill, Fill with their cries. Poet, what ails thee, then? Say, why so mute? Forth with thy praising voice! Forth with thy flute! Loiterer! why sittest thou Sunk in thy dream? Tempts not the bright new age? Shines not its stream? Look, ah! what genius, Art, science, wit! Soldiers like Cæsar, Statesmen like Pitt! Sculptors like Phidias, Raphaels in shoals, Poets like Shakspeare,-- Beautiful souls! See, on their glowing cheeks Heavenly the flush! --_Ah! so the silence was! So was the hush!_ The world but feels the present’s spell: The poet feels the past as well; Whatever men have done, might do, Whatever thought, might think it too. _EPILOGUE TO LESSING’S LAOCOÖN._ One morn as through Hyde Park we walked, My friend and I, by chance we talked Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön; And after we a while had gone In Lessing’s track, and tried to see What painting is, what poetry,-- Diverging to another thought, “Ah!” cries my friend, “but who hath taught Why music and the other arts Oftener perform aright their parts Than poetry? why she, than they, Fewer fine successes can display? “For ’tis so, surely! Even in Greece, Where best the poet framed his piece, Even in that Phœbus-guarded ground Pausanias on his travels found Good poems, if he looked, more rare (Though many) than good statues were-- For these, in truth, were everywhere. Of bards full many a stroke divine In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line, The land of Ariosto showed; And yet, e’en there, the canvas glowed With triumphs, a yet ampler brood, Of Raphael and his brotherhood. And nobly perfect, in our day Of haste, half-work, and disarray, Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, Hath risen Goethe’s, Wordsworth’s song; Yet even I (and none will bow Deeper to these) must needs allow, They yield us not, to soothe our pains, Such multitude of heavenly strains As from the kings of sound are blown,-- Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.”