Friend, in whose friendship I am twice well-starred,
  A debt not time may cancel is your due;
  For was it not your praise that earliest drew,
On me obscure, that chivalrous regard,
Ev’n his, who, knowing fame’s first steep how hard,
  With generous lips no faltering clarion blew,
  Bidding men hearken to a lyre by few
Heeded, nor grudge the bay to one more bard? 
Bitter the task, year by inglorious year,
Of suitor at the world’s reluctant ear. 
  One cannot sing for ever, like a bird,
For sole delight of singing!  Him his mate
Suffices, listening with a heart elate;
  Nor more his joy, if all the rapt heav’n heard.

TO EDWARD DOWDEN

ON RECEIVING FROM HIM A COPY OF “THE LIFE OF SHELLEY”

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,