Classic Poem

Most fair his dreams and visions when he dwelt
His spirit's comrade. Meager was his speech
Of things celestial, save in line and mould;
But sudden cloud-rift may reveal a star
As surely as the unimpeded sky.
The deer has its deep forest of retreat:
Shall the shy spirit have none? Be, then,
The covert unprofaned wherein withdrew
The soul that 'neath his pensive ardor lay?
Find the last frontier — Man is still unknown ground.

Things true and beautiful made a heaven for him.
Childhood, the sunrise of the spirit world,
Yielded its limpid secrets to his eye.
He was in Friendship what he was in Art —
Wax to receive and metal to endure.
Looking upon his warriors facing death,
Heroes seem human, such as all might be
Yet not without the consecrating will!
Age is serener by his honoring;
And when he sought the temple's inmost fane
The angels of his Adoration lent
Old hopes new glory, and his reverent hand
Wrought like Beato at the face of Christ.

But what is this that, neither Hope nor Doom,
Waits with eternal patience at a tomb?
A brooding spirit without name or date,
Or race, or nation, or belief;
Beyond the reach of joy or grief,
Above the plane of wrong or right;
A riddle only to the sorrowless; the mate
Of all the elements in calm — still winter night,
Sea after tempest, time-scarred mountain height;
Passive as Buddha, single as the Sphinx, —
Yet neither that sweet god that seems to smile
On mortal good and guile,
Nor wide-eyed monster that into Egypt sinks
And Beast and Nature links;
But something human, with an inward sense
Profound, but nevermore intense;
And though it doth not stoop to teach,
It will with each
Attuned to beauty hold a muted speech;
In its Madonna-lidded meditation
Not more a mystery than a revelation;
Listen! It doth to Man the Universe relate.
O Sentinel before the Future's Gate!
If thou be Fate, art thou not still our Fate?

For those who fain would live, but must breathe on
Prisoners of this prosaic age —
Ah, who for them shall read that page
Since winged Shelley and wise Emerson are gone?