But still with you remains the craving For some more solid substance, having Surface to touch, colour to see, And form compact in symmetry. You are not satisfied with these Vague throbbings, utterless ecstasies, Void finds your spirit of delight This great indefinite white light, Not with such sickles can you reap; If a dense earth you cannot keep You want a dense heaven as substitute With trees of plump celestial fruit, Red apples, golden pomegranates, And a river flowing by tall gates Of topaz and of chrysolite And walls of twenty cubits height. Frank, you cry out against the age! Nor you nor I can disengage Ourselves from that in which we live Nor seize on things God does not give. Thirsty as you, perhaps, I long For courtyards of eternal song, Even as yours my feet would stray In a city where 'tis always day And a green spontaneous leafy garden With God in the middle for a warden; But though I trust with strengthening faith I'll taste when I have traversed death The unimaginable sweetness Of certitude of such concreteness, How should I draw the hue and scope Of substances I only hope Or blaze upon a mortal screen The evidence of things not seen? This art of ours but grows and stirs Experience when it registers, And you know well as I know well This autumn of time in which we dwell Is not an age of revelations Solid as once, but intimations That touch us with warm misty fingers Leaving a nameless sense that lingers That sight is blind and Time's a snare And earth less solid than the air And deep below all seeming things There sits a steady king of kings A radiant ageless permanence, A quenchless fount of virtue whence We draw our life; a sense that makes A staunch conviction nothing shakes Of our own immortality. And though, being man, with certain glee I eat and drink, though I suffer pain, And love and hate and love again Well or in mode contemptible, Thus shackled by the body's spell I see through pupils of the beast Though it be faint and blurred with mist A Star that travels in the East.