Electric Pindar, quick as fear, With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear Slant startled eyes that seem to hear The chariot rounding the last goal, To hurtle past it in his soul. And Sappho, with that gloriole Of ebon hair on calmèd brows-- O poet-woman! none forgoes The leap, attaining the repose. Theocritus, with glittering locks Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks He watched the visionary flocks. And Aristophanes, who took The world with mirth, and laughter-struck The hollow caves of Thought and woke The infinite echoes hid in each. And Virgil: shade of Mantuan beech Did help the shade of bay to reach And knit around his forehead high: For his gods wore less majesty Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly. Lucretius, nobler than his mood, Who dropped his plummet down the broad Deep universe and said "No God--" Finding no bottom: he denied Divinely the divine, and died Chief poet on the Tiber-side By grace of God: his face is stern As one compelled, in spite of scorn, To teach a truth he would not learn. And Ossian, dimly seen or guessed; Once counted greater than the rest, When mountain-winds blew out his vest. And Spenser drooped his dreaming head (With languid sleep-smile you had said From his own verse engenderèd) On Ariosto's, till they ran Their curls in one: the Italian Shot nimbler heat of bolder man From his fine lids. And Dante stern And sweet, whose spirit was an urn For wine and milk poured out in turn. Hard-souled Alfieri; and fancy-willed Boiardo, who with laughter filled The pauses of the jostled shield. And Berni, with a hand stretched out To sleek that storm. And, not without The wreath he died in and the doubt He died by, Tasso, bard and lover, Whose visions were too thin to cover The face of a false woman over. And soft Racine; and grave Corneille, The orator of rhymes, whose wail Scarce shook his purple. And Petrarch pale, From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown A thousand thoughts beneath the sun, Each lucid with the name of One. And Camoens, with that look he had, Compelling India's Genius sad From the wave through the Lusiad,-- The murmurs of the storm-cape ocean Indrawn in vibrative emotion Along the verse. And, while devotion In his wild eyes fantastic shone Under the tonsure blown upon By airs celestial, Calderon. And bold De Vega, who breathed quick Verse after verse, till death's old trick Put pause to life and rhetoric. And Goethe, with that reaching eye His soul reached out from, far and high, And fell from inner entity. And Schiller, with heroic front Worthy of Plutarch's kiss upon 't, Too large for wreath of modern wont. And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine; That mark upon his lip is wine.