THE HIGHER SENSUALISM.

There's a church by a lake in Italy

Stands white on a hill against the sky?

And a path of immemorial cobbles

Leads up and up, where the pilgrim hobbles

Past a score or so of neat reposories,

Where you stop and breathe and tell your rosaries

To the shrined terra-cotta mannikins,

That expound with the liveliest quirks and grins

Known texts of Scripture. But no long stay

Should the pilgrim make upon his way;

But as means to the end these shrines stand here

To guide to something holier,

The church on the hilltop.

Your heaven's so,

With a path leading up to it past a row

Of votary Priapulids;

At each you pause and tell your beads

Along the quintuple strings of sense:

Then on, to face Heaven's eminence,

New stimulated, new inspired.