In what such builder should have been, as brook One shame beyond the charge that I forsook His function! Free me from that shame, I bend A brow before, suppose new years to spend,-- Allow each chance, nor fruitlessly, recur-- Measure thee with the Minstrel, then, demur [Sidenote: He asserts the poet's rank and right,] At any crowd he claims! That I must cede Shamed now, my right to my especial meed-- Confess thee fitter help the world than I Ordained its champion from eternity, Is much: but to behold thee scorn the post I quit in thy behalf--to hear thee boast What makes my own despair!" And while he rung The changes on this theme, the roof up-sprung, The sad walls of the presence-chamber died Into the distance, or embowering vied With far-away Goito's vine-frontier; And crowds of faces--(only keeping clear The rose-light in the midst, his vantage-ground To fight their battle from)--deep clustered round Sordello, with good wishes no mere breath, Kind prayers for him no vapor, since, come death, Come life, he was fresh-sinewed every joint, Each bone new-marrowed as whom gods anoint Though mortal to their rescue. Now let sprawl The snaky volumes hither! Is Typhon all For Hercules to trample--good report From Salinguerra only to extort? "So was I" (closed he his inculcating, A poet must be earth's essential king) [Sidenote: Basing these on their proper ground,] "So was I, royal so, and if I fail, 'T is not the royalty, ye witness quail, But one deposed who, caring not exert Its proper essence, trifled malapert With accidents instead--good things assigned As heralds of a better thing behind-- And, worthy through display of these, put forth Never the inmost all-surpassing worth That constitutes him king precisely since As yet no other spirit may evince Its like: the power he took most pride to test, Whereby all forms of life had been professed At pleasure, forms already on the earth, Was but a means to power beyond, whose birth Should, in its novelty, be kingship's proof. Now, whether he came near or kept aloof The several forms he longed to imitate, Not there the kingship lay, he sees too late. Those forms, unalterable first as last, Proved him her copier, not the protoplast Of nature: what would come of being free, By action to exhibit tree for tree, Bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth bore One veritable man or woman more? Means to an end, such proofs are: what the end? Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend-- Never contract. Already you include The multitude; then let the multitude Include yourself; and the result were new: Themselves before, the multitude turn you. This were to live and move and have, in them, Your being, and secure a diadem