Earlier Poems (1830-1836) | Page 9

or the wayward heart;
Who
match the little only with the less,
And gaze in rapture at its slight
excess,
Proud of a pebble, as the brightest gem
Whose light might
crown an emperor's diadem.
And, most of all, the pure ethereal fire
Which seems to radiate from
the poet's lyre
Is to the world a mystery and a charm,
An AEgis
wielded on a mortal's arm,
While Reason turns her dazzled eye away,

And bows her sceptre to her subject's sway;
And thus the poet,
clothed with godlike state,
Usurped his Maker's title--to create;
He,
whose thoughts differing not in shape, but dress,
What others feel
more fitly can express,
Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,

Peeps through the bars, and calls the world his own.
There breathes no being but has some pretence
To that fine instinct
called poetic sense
The rudest savage, roaming through the wild;

The simplest rustic, bending o'er his child;
The infant, listening to the
warbling bird;
The mother, smiling at its half-formed word;
The
boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large;
The girl, turned matron to
her babe-like charge;
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand

The vote that shakes the turret of the land;
The slave, who,
slumbering on his rusted chain,
Dreams of the palm-trees on his
burning plain;
The hot-cheeked reveller, tossing down the wine,
To
join the chorus pealing "Auld lang syne";
The gentle maid, whose
azure eye grows dim,
While Heaven is listening to her evening hymn;

The jewelled beauty, when her steps draw near
The circling dance
and dazzling chandelier;
E'en trembling age, when Spring's renewing
air

Waves the thin ringlets of his silvered hair;--
All, all are glowing
with the inward flame,
Whose wider halo wreathes the poet's name,

While, unenbalmed, the silent dreamer dies,
His memory passing
with his smiles and sighs!

If glorious visions, born for all mankind,
The bright auroras of our
twilight mind;
If fancies, varying as the shapes that lie
Stained on
the windows of the sunset sky;
If hopes, that beckon with delusive
gleams,
Till the eye dances in the void of dreams;
If passions,
following with the winds that urge
Earth's wildest wanderer to her
farthest verge;--
If these on all some transient hours bestow
Of
rapture tingling with its hectic glow,
Then all are poets; and if earth
had rolled
Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told,
Each
moaning billow of her shoreless wave
Would wail its requiem o'er a
poet's grave!
If to embody in a breathing word
Tones that the spirit trembled when
it heard;
To fix the image all unveiled and warm,
And carve in
language its ethereal form,
So pure, so perfect, that the lines express

No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;
To feel that art, in living
truth, has taught
Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought;--
If
this alone bestow the right to claim
The deathless garland and the
sacred name,
Then none are poets save the saints on high,
Whose
harps can murmur all that words deny!
But though to none is granted to reveal
In perfect semblance all that
each may feel,
As withered flowers recall forgotten love,
So,
warmed to life, our faded passions move
In every line, where
kindling fancy throws
The gleam of pleasures or the shade of woes.
When, schooled by time, the stately queen of art
Had smoothed the
pathways leading to the heart,
Assumed her measured tread, her
solemn tone,
And round her courts the clouds of fable thrown,
The
wreaths of heaven descended on her shrine,
And wondering earth
proclaimed the Muse divine.
Yet if her votaries had but dared profane

The mystic symbols of her sacred reign,
How had they smiled
beneath the veil to find

What slender threads can chain the mighty
mind!

Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,
And verse bestows the
varnish and the frame;
Our grating English, whose Teutonic jar

Shakes the racked axle of Art's rattling car,
Fits like mosaic in the
lines that gird
Fast in its place each many-angled word;
From
Saxon lips Anacreon's numbers glide,
As once they melted on the
Teian tide,
And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again
From
Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plain
The proud heroic, with, its
pulse-like beat,
Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet;
The
sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows,
Sweeps gently onward to its
dying close,
Where waves on waves in long succession pour,
Till
the ninth billow melts along the shore;
The lonely spirit of the
mournful lay,
Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray,
In sable
plumage slowly drifts along,
On eagle pinion, through the air of song;

The glittering lyric bounds elastic by,
With flashing ringlets and
exulting eye,
While every image, in her airy whirl,
Gleams like a
diamond on a dancing girl!
Born with mankind, with man's expanded range
And varying fates the
poet's numbers change;
Thus in his history may we hope to find

Some clearer epochs of the poet's mind,
As from the cradle of its
birth we trace,
Slow wandering forth, the patriarchal race.
I.
When the green earth, beneath the zephyr's wing,
Wears on her breast
the varnished buds of Spring;
When the loosed current, as its folds
uncoil,
Slides in the channels of the mellowed soil;
When the young
hyacinth returns to seek
The air and sunshine with her emerald beak;

When the light snowdrops, starting from their cells,
Hang each
pagoda with its