Your courts and carven porticos excel,
You've set the busts and bound the books of fame,
You've taught me many a date and many a name
Of Heaven and Earth and seven pits of Hell;
And, planning once for long with you to dwell,
I bought me purple robes and tried the same,
But ever on the midnight rose a flame—
O friends of austere memory, farewell!
No, no! persuade not: “Thou shalt trust the day,
The marble order, the preciser creed,
Thou shalt acknowledge law and bate the fire”;
For I must answer: “There is one only way—
The night revealed it—though I fall and bleed,
God help me, I will trust the heart's desire.”