A curse that haunts such natures--to preclude Their finding out themselves can work no good To what they love nor make it very blest By their endeavor,--they are fain invest The lifeless thing with life from their own soul, Availing it to purpose, to control, To dwell distinct and have peculiar joy And separate interests that may employ That beauty fitly, for its proper sake. Nor rest they here; fresh births of beauty wake Fresh homage, every grade of love is past, With every mode of loveliness: then cast Inferior idols off their borrowed crown Before a coming glory. Up and down Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine To throb the secret forth; a touch divine-- And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod; Visibly through his garden walketh God. [Sidenote: What denotes such a soul's progress.] So fare they. Now revert. One character Denotes them through the progress and the stir,-- A need to blend with each external charm, Bury themselves, the whole heart wide and warm,-- In something not themselves; they would belong To what they worship--stronger and more strong Thus prodigally fed--which gathers shape And feature, soon imprisons past escape The votary framed to love and to submit Nor ask, as passionate he kneels to it, Whence grew the idol's empery. So runs A legend; light had birth ere moons and suns, Flowing through space a river and alone, Till chaos burst and blank the spheres were strown Hither and thither, foundering and blind: When into each of them rushed light--to find Itself no place, foiled of its radiant chance. Let such forego their just inheritance! For there 's a class that eagerly looks, too, On beauty, but, unlike the gentler crew, Proclaims each new revealment born a twin With a distinctest consciousness within, Referring still the quality, now first Revealed, to their own soul--its instinct nursed In silence, now remembered better, shown More thoroughly, but not the less their own; A dream come true; the special exercise [Sidenote: How poets class at length--] Of any special function that implies The being fair, or good, or wise, or strong, Dormant within their nature all along-- Whose fault? So, homage, other souls direct Without, turns inward. "How should this deject Thee, soul?" they murmur; "wherefore strength be quelled Because, its trivial accidents withheld, Organs are missed that clog the world, inert, Wanting a will, to quicken and exert, Like thine--existence cannot satiate, Cannot surprise? Laugh thou at envious fate, Who, from earth's simplest combination stampt With individuality--uncrampt By living its faint elemental life, Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,