In poured such tributes ere he had arranged Ethereal ways to take them, sorted, changed, Digested. Courted thus at unawares, In spite of his pretensions and his cares, He caught himself shamefully hankering After the obvious petty joys that spring From true life, fain relinquish pedestal [Sidenote: He succeeds a little, but fails more;] And condescend with pleasures--one and all To be renounced, no doubt; for, thus to chain Himself to single joys and so refrain From tasting their quintessence, frustrates, sure, His prime design; each joy must he abjure Even for love of it. He laughed: what sage But perishes if from his magic page He look because, at the first line, a proof 'T was heard salutes him from the cavern roof? "On! Give yourself, excluding aught beside, To the day's task; compel your slave provide Its utmost at the soonest; turn the leaf Thoroughly conned. These lays of yours, in brief-- Cannot men hear, now, something better?--fly A pitch beyond this unreal pageantry Of essences? the period sure has ceased For such: present us with ourselves, at least, Not portions of ourselves, mere loves and hates Made flesh: wait not!" [Sidenote: Tries again, is no better satisfied,] Awhile the poet waits However. The first trial was enough: He left imagining, to try the stuff That held the imaged thing, and, let it writhe Never so fiercely, scarce allowed a tithe To reach the light--his Language. How he sought The cause, conceived a cure, and slow re-wrought That Language,--welding words into the crude Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude Armor was hammered out, in time to be Approved beyond the Roman panoply Melted to make it,--boots not. This obtained With some ado, no obstacle remained To using it; accordingly he took An action with its actors, quite forsook Himself to live in each, returned anon With the result--a creature, and, by one And one, proceeded leisurely to equip Its limbs in harness of his workmanship. "Accomplished! Listen, Mantuans!" Fond essay! Piece after piece that armor broke away, Because perceptions whole, like that he sought To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought As language: thought may take perception's place But hardly co-exist in any case, Being its mere presentment--of the whole By parts, the simultaneous and the sole By the successive and the many. Lacks The crowd perception? painfully it tacks Thought to thought, which Sordello, needing such, Has rent perception into: it 's to clutch And reconstruct--his office to diffuse, Destroy: as hard, then, to obtain a Muse As to become Apollo. "For the rest, E'en if some wondrous vehicle expressed The whole dream, what impertinence in me