Pondering much on all you say in it Of mystic consciousness--divine conversion-- The sense of oneness with the infinite,-- Faith in the world, its beauty, and its purpose . . . Well, you believe one must have faith, in some sort, If one's to talk through this dark world contented. But is the world so dark? Or is it rather Our own brute minds,--in which we hurry, trembling, Through streets as yet unlighted? This, I think. You have been always, let me say, "romantic,"-- Eager for color, for beauty, soon discontented With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing: Even before the question grew to problem And drove you bickering into metaphysics, You met on lower planes the same great dragon, Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction, In strange aesthetics . . . You tried, as I remember, One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid, The cruder first, more violent sensations, Gorgeously carnal things, conceived and acted With splendid animal thirst . . . Then, by degrees,-- Savoring all more delicate gradations In all that hue and tone may play on flesh, Or thought on brain,--you passed, if I may say so, From red and scarlet through morbid greens to mauve. Let us regard ourselves, you used to say, As instruments of music, whereon our lives Will play as we desire: and let us yield These subtle bodies and subtler brains and nerves To all experience plays . . . And so you went From subtle tune to subtler, each heard once, Twice or thrice at the most, tiring of each; And closing one by one your doors, drew in Slowly, through darkening labyrinths of feeling, Towards the central chamber . . . Which now you've reached. What, then's, the secret of this ultimate chamber-- Or innermost, rather? If I see it clearly It is the last, and cunningest, resort Of one who has found this world of dust and flesh,-- This world of lamentations, death, injustice, Sickness, humiliation, slow defeat, Bareness, and ugliness, and iteration,-- Too meaningless; or, if it has a meaning, Too tiresomely insistent on one meaning: