alive,

And gathering virtue in at every pore Till it possessed me wholly, aud thought ceased,

Or was transfused in something to which thought

Is coarse and dull of sense. Myself was lost,

Gone from me like an ache, and what remained

Became a part of the universal joy. My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree,

Danced in the leaves; or, floating in the cloud,

Saw its white double in the stream below:

Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy,
Dilated in the broad blue over all.

I was the wind that dappled the lush

Whose feet are known to all the popu lous ways,

And many men and manners he hath seen,

Not without fruit of solitary thought. He, as the habit is of lonely men,Unused to try the temper of their mind In fence with others, -positive and shy, Yet knows to put an edge upon his speech,

Pithily Saxon in unwilling talk. Him I entrap with my long-suffering knife,

And, while its poor blade hums away in sparks,

Sharpen my wit upon his gritty mind, In motion set obsequious to his wheel, And in its quality not much unlike.

The ground we meet on being primal

man

And nearer the deep bases of our lives.

But O, half heavenly, earthly half, my soul,

Canst thou from those late ecstasies descend,

Thy lips still wet with the miraculous wine

That transubstantiates all thy baser

stuff

To such divinity that soul and sense, Once more commingled in their source, are lost,

Canst thou descend to quench a vulgar thirst

With the mere dregs and rinsings of the world?

Well, if my nature find her pleasure so,
I am content, nor need to blush; I take
My little gift of being clean from God,
Not haggling for a better, holding it
Good as was ever any in the world,
My days as good and full of miracle.
I pluck my nutriment from any bush,
Finding out poison as the first men did
By tasting and then suffering, if I must.
Sometimes my bush burns, and some-
times it is

A leafless wilding shivering by the wall;
But I have known when winterbarberries
Pricked the effeminate palate with sur-
prise

Of savor whose mere harshness seemed divine.

O, benediction of the higher mood And human-kindness of the lower! for

both

I will be grateful while I live, nor question

The wisdom that hath made us what

we are,

With such large range as from the alehouse bench

Can reach the stars and be with both at home.

They tell us we have fallen on prosy days,

Condemned to glean the leavings of earth's feast

Where gods and heroes took delight of old;