THE CATHEDRAL. FAR through the memory shines a happy | Can overtake the rapture of the sense, day, Cloudless of care, down-shod to every To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl. Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, And that first passion beggars all behind, Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. Who, seeing once, has truly seen again The gray vague of unsympathizing sea That dragged his Fancy from her moorings back To shores inhospitable of eldest time, Till blank foreboding of earth-gendered powers, Pitiless seignories in the elements, Omnipotences blind that darkling smite, Misgave him, and repaganized the world? Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, Perplex the eye with pictures from within. This hath made poets dream of lives foregone In worlds fantastical, more fair than ours; So Memory cheats us, glimpsing halfrevealed. Even as I write she tries her wonted spell In that continuous redbreast boding rain : The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm; But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard Is vocal in my mind, renewed by him, Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill That threads my undivided life and steals A pathos from the years and graves be tween. I know not how it is with other men, west Boomed intermittent through the shuddering elins, And brought a morning from the Gulf adrift, Omnipotent with sunshine, whose quick charm Startled with crocuses the sullen turf And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song: That made familiar fields seem far and strange As those stark wastes that whiten end- In ghastly solitude about the pole, sun: Instant the candid chambers of my brain Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me And paradise was paradise the more, What we call Nature, all outside our- Is but our own conceit of what we see, Feeling with us, or making due pretence; To make all things our thought's confederates, One summer hour abides, what time I And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled, Denouncing me an alien and a thief: One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest, When in the lane I watched the ashleaves fall, Balancing softly earthward without wind, Or twirling with directer impulse down On those fallen yesterday, now barbed with frost, While I grew pensive with the pensive year: And once I learned how marvellous Conniving with us in whate'er we dream. when our Fancy seeks analogies, Though she have hidden what she after finds, She loves to cheat herself with feigned surprise. I find my own complexion everywhere: A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, No falcon ever felt delight of wings To swim on sunshine, masterless as And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could transmute her darkness into | Music where none is, and a keener pang Of exquisite surmise outleaping thought, pearl; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden Her will I pamper in her luxury: No crumpled rose-leaf of too careless choice Shall bring a northern nightmare to her dreams, Vexing with sense of exile; hers shall be The invitiate firstlings of experience, Vibrations felt but once and felt lifelong: O, more than half-way turn that Grecian front Upon me, while with self-rebuke I spell, On the plain fillet that confines thy hair In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, The Naught in overplus, thy race's badge! I was a poacher on their self-preserve, Intent constructively on lese-anglicism. To them (in those old razor-ridden days) My beard translated me to hostile French; So they, desiring guidance in the town, Half condescended to my baser sphere, And, clubbing in one mess their lack of phrase, Set their best man to grapple with the Gaul. "Esker vous ate a nabitang?" he asked; "I never ate one; are they good?" asked I; Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends, The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed, Abolished in the truce of common speech And mutual comfort of the mothertongue. Chance led me to a public pleasureground, Where I grew kindly with the merry groups, And blessed the Frenchman for his simple art Of being domestic in the light of day. His language has no word, we growl, for Home; But he can find a fireside in the sun, Play with his child, make love, and shriek his mind, By throngs of strangers undisprivacied. In manifold reflection from without; While we, each pore alert with consciousness, Hide our best selves as we had stolen them, And each bystander a detective were, Keen-eyed for every chink of undisguise. So, musing o'er the problem which was best, A life wide-windowed, shining all abroad, Or curtains drawn to shield from sight profane The rites we pay to the mysterious I, With outward senses furloughed and head bowed I followed some fine instinct in my feet, Till, to unbend me from the loom of thought, Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes Confronted with the minster's vast repose. Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat, That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs, Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new sur- | Across this bound-mark where their I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth. Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream, Builders of aspiration incomplete, So more consummate, souls self-confident, Who felt your own thought worthy of record In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, After long exile, to the mother-tongue. Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome Shrank with a shudder from the blueeyed race Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, And from the dregs of Romulus express Such wine as Dante poured, or he who blew Roland's vain blast, or sang the Campeador In verse that clanks like armor in the charge, Homeric juice, if brimmed in Odin's horn. And they could build, if not the columned fane That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, Something more friendly with their ruder skies: The gray spire, molten now in driving mist, Now lulled with the incommunicable blue; The carvings touched to meanings new with snow, Or commented with fleeting grace of shade; The statues, motley as man's memory, Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, History and legend meeting with a kiss realms confine; The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow, Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer, Meet symbol of the senses and the soul, And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thought Of life and death, and doom, life's equal fee, These were before me and I gazed abashed, Child of an age that lectures, not creates, Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, And twittering round the work of larger men, As we had builded what we but deface. Far up the great bells wallowed in delight, Tossing their clangors o'er the heedless town, To call the worshippers who never came, Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes. I entered, reverent of whatever shrine And shared decorous in the ancient rite Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me, Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint, Or brick mock-pious with a marble front; Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, Through which the organ blew a dream of storm, Though not more potent to sublime with awe And shut the heart up in tranquillity, Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk : | A shell divorced of its informing life, |