Floated across the organ-keys, Like a pale moon o'er murmuring seas, With no touch but with influences: Then rose and fell (with swell and swound Of shapeless noises wandering round A concord which at last they found) Those mystic keys: the tones were mixed, Dim, faint, and thrilled and throbbed betwixt The incomplete and the unfixed: And therein mighty minds were heard In mighty musings, inly stirred, And struggling outward for a word: Until these surges, having run This way and that, gave out as one An Aphroditè of sweet tune, A Harmony that, finding vent, Upward in grand ascension went, Winged to a heavenly argument, Up, upward like a saint who strips The shroud back from his eyes and lips, And rises in apocalypse: A harmony sublime and plain, Which cleft (as flying swan, the rain,-- Throwing the drops off with a strain Of her white wing) those undertones Of perplext chords, and soared at once And struck out from the starry thrones Their several silver octaves as It passed to God. The music was Of divine stature; strong to pass: And those who heard it, understood Something of life in spirit and blood, Something of nature's fair and good: And while it sounded, those great souls Did thrill as racers at the goals And burn in all their aureoles; But she the lady, as vapour-bound, Stood calmly in the joy of sound, Like Nature with the showers around: And when it ceased, the blood which fell Again, alone grew audible, Tolling the silence as a bell. The sovran angel lifted high His hand, and spake out sovranly: "Tried poets, hearken and reply! "Give me true answers. If we grant That not to suffer, is to want The conscience of the jubilant,-- "If ignorance of anguish is _But_ ignorance, and mortals miss Far prospects, by a level bliss,-- "If, as two colours must be viewed In a visible image, mortals should Need good and evil, to see good,-- "If to speak nobly, comprehends To feel profoundly,--if the ends Of power and suffering, Nature blends,-- "If poets on the tripod must Writhe like the Pythian to make just Their oracles and merit trust,-- "If every vatic word that sweeps To change the world must pale their lips And leave their own souls in eclipse,-- "If to search deep the universe Must pierce the searcher with the curse, Because that bolt (in man's reverse) "Was shot to the heart o' the wood and lies Wedged deepest in the best,--if eyes That look for visions and surprise "From influent angels, must shut down Their eyelids first to sun and moon, The head asleep upon a stone,-- "If ONE who did redeem you back, By His own loss, from final wrack, Did consecrate by touch and track "Those temporal sorrows till the taste Of brackish waters of the waste Is salt with tears He dropt too fast,--