Forth of such passage through black fire we win Clear hearing of the simple lute, Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays For them who can in quietness receive Her restorative airs: a ditty thin As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve, Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays On a transparent sheet, where curves a glass To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar. Solidity and bulk and martial brass, Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime, While present in the spirit, vital there, Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time; Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew. Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled Historic of the soul, and heats anew Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald. True of the man, and of mankind ’tis true, Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair, Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred Against the primal beast in us, and flung; Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred Above self-pity slain: or it was Prayer First taken for Life’s cleanser; or the tongue Spake for the world against this heart; or rings Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung; Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob: These quickening live. But deepest at her springs, Most filial, is an eye to love her young. And had we it, to see with it, alive Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive. Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then The green-robed and grey-crested sons of men: She tributary to her aged restores The living in the dead; she will inspire Faith homelier than on the Yonder shores, Abhorring these as mire, Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes, With mortal tremours pricking hopes, And, by the final Bacchic of the lusts Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts: A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants; Not utterly misled, though blindly led, Led round fermenting eddies. Faith she plants In her own firmness as our midway road: Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read; Her essence reading in her toothsome goad; Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants. But love we well the young, her road midway The darknesses runs consecrated clay. Despite our feeble hold on this green home, And the vast outer strangeness void of dome, Shall we be with them, of them, taught to feel, Up to the moment of our prostrate fall, The life they deem voluptuously real Is more than empty echo of a call, Or shadow of a shade, or swing of tides; As brooding upon age, when veins congeal, Grey palsy nods to think. With us for guides, Another step above the animal, To views in Alpine thought are they helped on. Good if so far we live in them when gone!