Classic Poem

Whence this impatience fluttering in my breast!
This boiling blood as it would burst the veins?
This leaping heart? These glowings? Gushing eyes?
Sight how confused! how lost! or how transformed,
Matter refining into thought! Thus you
Blind Thamyris! and blind Maeonides!
Nor last on fame's interminable course,
Bold Milton thou, Virtue's sweet child sublime!
On Fancy's wing who lately o'er th' immense
Of nature's beauty, rangest now in heaven
On thought intu'tive: thus too you, entranced
In the celestial, lost your mortal sight.
These forms how springing from material things,
As rose from chaos that wide solar sphere!
In thick procession the ideal train
Substantial, fair, divine, eternal, clear,
Fill beatific each distended power.
So rapt the soul in visionary bliss
Deigned the Aonian Choir; and lower still
Sweeping from south to north a round career
All over glowing fanned me as they flew.
Not the parched, weary pilgrim, faint, alone,
Despairing, if his feeble eye dismayed,
Wand'ring along the vast Arabian sands,
Light on some fount, so cheers the vital draught;
As that cool breeze your sacred wings, ye Nine!
Wafted and sprung aloft. My eye pursued
Ah! your too rapid glory: list'ning ear
Your wondrous harmony: soon fixed in vain:
Ear first, then eye, to grovelling earth confined,
My infirmity upbraided. Pensive long
Sat I lamenting: why so transient glance
Flashed the kind Nine? Down sunk my weary powers.
But soon from sleep's dark troubled chaos waked.
For lo! descending Pindus' queen alights,
And with mild air that stilled my blushing fears:
" Whom virtue and prime nature's forms inspire,
Our smiles desert not. Their aspiring strains,
O'er earth wide-floating through the fragrant air,
To Pluto's realm spread silence, awe, self-hate:
And list'ning we our chorus oft suspend;
Or catch your feebler notes, and swell aloft
Echoing, while central Phoebus smiling views
Glad vigour quick'ning his remotest spheres.
This cordial take." I drank. Urania flew.