“There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway The heart of man: and teach him to attain By shadowing forth the Unattainable; And step by step to scale that mighty stair Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds Of glory of Heaven.[1] With earliest Light of Spring, And in the glow of sallow Summertide, And in red Autumn when the winds are wild With gambols, and when full-voiced Winter roofs The headland with inviolate white snow, I play about his heart a thousand ways, Visit his eyes with visions, and his ears With harmonies of wind and wave and wood— Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters Betraying the close kisses of the wind— And win him unto me: and few there be So gross of heart who have not felt and known A higher than they see: They with dim eyes Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee To understand my presence, and to feel My fullness; I have fill’d thy lips with power. I have rais’d thee nigher to the Spheres of Heaven, Man’s first, last home: and thou with ravish’d sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from Th’illimitable years. I am the Spirit, The permeating life which courseth through All th’ intricate and labyrinthine veins Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare, Reacheth to every corner under Heaven, Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth: So that men’s hopes and fears take refuge in The fragrance of its complicated glooms And cool impleached twilights. Child of Man, See’st thou yon river, whose translucent wave, Forth issuing from darkness, windeth through The argent streets o’ the City, imaging The soft inversion of her tremulous Domes. Her gardens frequent with the stately Palm, Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells. Her obelisks of ranged Chrysolite, Minarets and towers? Lo! how he passeth by, And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring To carry through the world those waves, which bore The reflex of my City in their depths. Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais’d To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come When I must render up this glorious home To keen _Discovery_: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand; Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-wall’d, Barbarian settlement, How chang’d from this fair City!” Thus far the Spirit: Then parted Heavenward on the wing: and I Was left alone on Calpe, and the Moon Had fallen from the night, and all was dark! [1] Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect. Bibliography of the _Poems_ of 1842 1830 _Poems, chiefly Lyrical_, by Alfred Tennyson. London: Effingham Wilson, 1830. 1832 _Poems_ by Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, 1833 (published at the end of 1832). 1837 In the _Keepsake_, an Annual, appears the poem “St. Agnes’ Eve,” afterwards republished in the Poems of 1842, as “St. Agnes”.