I know not when this hope enthralled me first, But from my boyhood up I loved to hear The tall pine-forests of the Apennine Murmur their hoary legends of the sea, Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld The sudden dark of tropic night shut down 170 O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes, The while a pair of herons trailingly Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred, By any but the Northwind's hurrying keels. And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds To my world-seeking heart paid fealty, And catered for it as the Cretan bees Brought honey to the baby Jupiter, Who in his soft hand crushed a violet, 181 Godlike foremusing the rough thunder's gripe; Then did I entertain the poet's song, My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell, I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains Whose adamantine links, his manacles, The western main shook growling, and still gnawed. I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale. Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's keel 190 Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore: I listened, musing, to the prophecy Of Nero's tutor-victim; lo, the birds Sing darkling, conscious of the climbing dawn. And I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity. Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude In caves and desert places of the earth, 200 Where their own heart-beat was the only stir Of living thing that comforted the year; But the bald pillar-top of Simeon, In midnight's blankest waste, were populous, Matched with the isolation drear and deep Of him who pines among the swarm of men, At once a new thought's king and prisoner, Feeling the truer life within his life, The fountain of his spirit's prophecy, Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop, 210 In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears. He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell Widens beyond the circles of the stars, And all the sceptred spirits of the past Come thronging in to greet him as their peer; But in the market-place's glare and throng He sits apart, an exile, and his brow Aches with the mocking memory of its crown.