But, if in nothing else, in us there is A sense fastidious hardly reconciled To the poor makeshifts of life’s scenery, Where the same slide must double all its parts, Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre. I blame not in the soul this daintiness, Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird, In things indifferent by sense purveyed; It argues her an immortality And dateless incomes of experience, This unthrift housekeeping that will not brook A dish warmed-over at the feast of life, And finds Twice stale, served with whatever sauce. Nor matters much how it may go with me Who dwell in Grub Street and am proud to drudge Where men, my betters, wet their crust with tears: Use can make sweet the peach’s shady side, That only by reflection tastes of sun. But she, my Princess, who will sometimes deign My garret to illumine till the walls, Narrow and dingy, scrawled with hackneyed thought (Poor Richard slowly elbowing Plato out), Dilate and drape themselves with tapestries Nausikaa might have stooped o’er, while, between, Mirrors, effaced in their own clearness, send Her only image on through deepening deeps With endless repercussion of delight,-- Bringer of life, witching each sense to soul, That sometimes almost gives me to believe I might have been a poet, gives at least A brain desaxonized, an ear that makes Music where none is, and a keener pang Of exquisite surmise outleaping thought,-- Her will I pamper in her luxury: No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choice Shall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams, Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall be The invitiate firstlings of experience, Vibrations felt but once and felt lifelong: O, more than half-way turn that Grecian front Upon me, while with self-rebuke I spell, On the plain fillet that confines thy hair In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, The _Naught in overplus_, thy race’s badge!