Come hither, child of meditation, upon whose high fair forehead Glittereth the star of mind in its unearthly lustre: Hast thou nought to tell us of thine airy joys,-- When, borne on sinewy pinions, strong as the western condor, The soul, after soaring for a while round the cloud-capped Andes of reflection, Glad in its conscious immortality, leaveth a world behind, To dare at one bold flight the broad Atlantic to another? Hast thou no secret pangs to whisper common men, No dread of thine own energies, still active day and night, Lest too ecstatic heat sublime thyself away, Or vivid horrors, sharp and clear, madden thy tense fibres? In half-shaped visions of sleep hast thou not feared thy flittings, Lest reason, like a raking hawk, return not to thy call: Nor waked to work-day life with throbbing head and heart, Nor welcomed early dawn to save thee from unrest? For the wearied spirit lieth as a fainting maiden, Captive and borne away on the warrior's foam-covered steed, And sinketh down wounded, as a gladiator on the sand, While the keen faulchion of Intellect is cutting through the scabbard of the brain. Imagination, like a shadowy giant looming on the twilight of the Hartz, Shall overwhelm judgment with affright, and scare him from his throne: In a dream thou mayst be mad, and feel the fire within thee; In a dream thou mayst travel out of self, and see thee with the eyes of another; Or sleep in thine own corpse: or wake as in many bodies; Or swell, as expanded to infinity; or shrink, as imprisoned to a point; Or among moss-grown ruins mayst wander with the sullen disembodied, And gaze upon their glassy eyes until thy heart-blood freeze.