Rapt though he be from us,
Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus;
Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each
Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach;
Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach;
Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home;
Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech;
Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam,
Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave,
His equal friendship crave: 
And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech
Of Athens, Florence, Weimar, Stratford, Rome.

What needs his laurel our ephemeral tears,
To save from visitation of decay? 
Not in this temporal sunlight, now, that bay
Blooms, nor to perishable mundane ears
Sings he with lips of transitory clay;
For he hath joined the chorus of his peers
In habitations of the perfect day: 
His earthly notes a heavenly audience hears,
And more melodious are henceforth the spheres,
Enriched with music stol’n from earth away.

He hath returned to regions whence he came. 
Him doth the spirit divine
Of universal loveliness reclaim. 
All nature is his shrine. 
Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea,
In earth’s and air’s emotion or repose,
In every star’s august serenity,
And in the rapture of the flaming rose. 
There seek him if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the Whole;
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.

For lo! creation’s self is one great choir,
And what is nature’s order but the rhyme
Whereto the worlds keep time,
And all things move with all things from their prime? 
Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre? 
In far retreats of elemental mind
Obscurely comes and goes
The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows. 
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might: 
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself, she knows. 
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped;
Ev’n as the linnet sings, so I, he said;—­
Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale,
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o’er
All woodland chants immortally prevail! 
And now, from our vain plaudits greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs, he trims his sail,
But far beyond our vision and our hail
Is heard for ever and is seen no more.