TO EDWARD DOWDEN

First, ere I slake my hunger, let me thank

The giver of the feast. For feast it is,

Though of ethereal, translunary fare —

His story who pre-eminently of men

Seemed nourished upon starbeams and the stuff

Of rainbows, and the tempest, and the foam;

Who hardly brooked on his impatient soul

The fleshly trammels; whom at last the sea

Gave to the fire, from whose wild arms the winds

Took him, and shook him broadcast to the world.

In my young days of fervid poesy

He drew me to him with his strange far light,—

He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,

And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself

Moved like a phantom‘ mid the clouds and gleams.

Anon the Earth recalled me, and a voice

Murmuring of dethroned divinities

And dead times deathless upon sculptured urn —

And Philomela's long-descended pain

Flooding the night — and maidens of romance

To whom asleep St. Agnes’ love-dreams come —

Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse

And thraldom, lapping me in high content,

Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.

And then a third voice, long unheeded — held

Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame —

Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang

Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys,

Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,

And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;

And from the homely matter nigh at hand

Ascending and dilating, it disclosed

Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths

Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass

With roots that groped about eternity,

And in each drop of dew upon each blade

The mirror of the inseparable All.

The first voice, then the second, in their turns

Had sung me captive. This voice sang me free.

Therefore, above all vocal sons of men,

Since him whose sightless eyes saw hell and heaven,

To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love.

Yet dear is Keats, a lucid presence, great

With somewhat of a glorious soullessness.

And dear, and great with an excess of soul,

Shelley, the hectic flamelike rose of verse,

All colour, and all odour, and all bloom,

Steeped in the noonlight, glutted with the sun,

But somewhat lacking root in homely earth,

Lacking such human moisture as bedews

His not less starward stem of song, who, rapt

Not less in glowing vision, yet retained

His clasp of the prehensible, retained

The warm touch of the world that lies to hand,

Not in vague dreams of man forgetting men,

Nor in vast morrows losing the to-day;

Who trusted nature, trusted fate, nor found

An Ogre, sovereign on the throne of things;

Who felt the incumbence of the unknown, yet bore

Without resentment the Divine reserve;

Who suffered not his spirit to dash itself

Against the crags and wavelike break in spray,

But‘ midst the infinite tranquillities

Moved tranquil, and henceforth, by Rotha stream

And Rydal's mountain-mirror, and where flows

Yarrow thrice sung or Duddon to the sea,

And wheresoe'er man's heart is thrilled by tones

Struck from man's lyric heartstrings, shall survive.