I

The inner spirit of our conscious life,
Prescient of things to come as of the past,
Its kindredship and recognition owns
With the great forms of Nature, rocks o'ercast
With cloud, the desert and the mountain thrones;
But mostly shapes with human memories rife,
With monuments of ruin and decay,
Marking where man has ruled and passed away.
In-dwelling thought reposes on the state
Of grandeur that it loves to contemplate.
Even thus descend to us the mighty dead,
Forth bodied by the imaginative eye:
Sages or heroes from their mansions fled;
The rents and flaws of their great Spirits seen,
Softened by time and truth, and by the green
Hallowed of venerating memory,
And beauty that around the ruin steals,
Enriching the decadence it conceals.

II

We gaze upon the wrecks of human will;
We stand before the altar-place of power,
The broken toys of children of the hour;
Where the pervading mind inspires the tone
Of strength and moral grandeur that has flown.
We see embodied mutability
Throned mid the immutable; and time's rich hues
Tinge the bald forehead of antiquity
With a sedate and softened grace, until
Religion of the place the heart subdues;
For the expression that to us appeals
In its bewildered desolation, is
From the soul's fountain drawn, until it feels
Resignment and complacent joy that makes
In its devotional love its happiness.

So mused the pilgrim seated at the base
Of that grey Posidonian altar-place,
Confronting heaven with its majestic face.

Basked in the sun the lizards fiery-eyed;
The breeze that wandered through the columns sighed,
Human-like, to faint echoes that replied.

The rent-browed Titans rising round him there
Were as a part of Nature; with the air
And sea incorporate, and mountains bare.

The Spirits of thrice a thousand years passed by;
The mind that shaped forth forms that could not die
Bequeathed to man their immortality.

Then, from the intuitive vision slowly wrought,
Cementing memory and forming thought,
That city grew around; air-tissue caught

By the imaginative eye, and held;
The hum of living myriads round him swelled,
Onward through streets and crowded ways impelled.

Round the great Temples surged upheaving life;
Barks rode the deep, the strand re-echoed strife,
The helmed warrior passed with Trojan memories rife.

The Sybarite there his hours one revel made;
The roses on his brow bloomed undecayed;
The wine-cup ever filled, the banquet ever stayed.

Even those he heeded not, his spirit flew
From crowds to single life, for fruits that grew
From the same tree of Nature which he knew.

He watched idolatrous love its knee incline
To Woman, until passion made divine
Beauty that ruled him from her human shrine.

He gazed on woman in her loveliness;
He heard the loved one still the tale confess
Of immortality in his happiness.

He turned to where the musing P OET stood,
Among the multitudes in solitude,
Contemplating life's strife in thoughtful mood;

Or wandering on that shore apart to rest;
Pouring forth there to Nature his full breast,
The passion and the love in haunts of men repressed;

Or mid the ilex-woods that crowned the stream,
While on its mirror slept the sun's last gleam;
Haunt of deep solitude and peace supreme;

Or by the Tyrrhene steeped in twilight's hue,
There while Alburnea's mount its glory drew,
And mellower lustre o'er the city threw.

The Pilgrim gazed till his great phantasies
Like twilight's pageants faded, till his eyes
Opened on life and time's realities.

Happy, thrice happy, to have stood alone
Mid forms thaThe had gazed on, till the tone
Of their grand harmonies became his own;

The same blessed air respired, and trod the earth,
Hallowed by souls immortal that gave birth
To all that makes this breathing life of worth:

To feel the sunbeams interpenetrate
His being re-created, till the elate
Spirit gains gleams of its immortal state;

Become as one with them; until apart,
Idolater amid the halls of Art,
Her godlike Statues entered in his heart;

Until he felt that song of deeper thought
Grew from them, holier emanations caught;
Passion and life with their expression wrought.

No marble forms, no cold abstractions, they
Of lifeless phantasy; within them lay
The moral and the truth that passes not away;

Agonised fortitude that pangs repelled;
Sun-radiating Poesy thaTheld
Power in his arm, the prostrate evil quelled.

The ideal love, the vision of the soul;
Beauty, subjecting life to her control;
The worship of all ages as they roll:

Inspiring faiths that filled him while he knelt;
Untouched the answering chords until he felt
The interpreter within his utterance dwelt.

For life to him had been nor blank nor curse,
Nor drugged satiety; he dared rehearse
Himself in his unimitative verse.

He panted not for idle fame; he threw
His offering on the altar, and withdrew
Into the solitude he loved; he knew

That Life and Time, great angels, were the just;
That lays of truth, aside by mischance thrust,
Bore an undying life within their dust.

Too mighty were the Poet's happiness
Crowned upon earth; he doth but there confess
His heart amid a life companionless.

His verse was love toward his brother men;
The thought that soared, the fancy from their ken
Awhile withdrawn, returned to them again,

As birds from wandering back to the loved nest
Of their humanities, received and blest;
Their words the echoes of each heart confessed.

So grows his human immortality,
One with his fellow men ordained to be;
Echo of all they thought and felt as he.