What promises hast thou for Poets’ eyes,
  A-weary of the turmoil and the wrong! 
To all their hopes what overjoyed replies! 
  What undreamed ecstasies for blissful song! 
Thy happy plains no war-trump’s brawling clangor
  Disturbs, and fools the poor to hate the poor; 40
The humble glares not on the high with anger;
  Love leaves no grudge at less, no greed for more;
In vain strives Self the godlike sense to smother;
    From the soul’s deeps
    It throbs and leaps;
The noble ’neath foul rags beholds his long-lost brother.

To thee the Martyr looketh, and his fires
  Unlock their fangs and leave his spirit free;
To thee the Poet mid his toil aspires,
  And grief and hunger climb about his knee, 50
Welcome as children; thou upholdest
  The lone Inventor by his demon haunted;
The Prophet cries to thee when hearts are coldest,
    And gazing o’er the midnight’s bleak abyss,
    Sees the drowsed soul awaken at thy kiss,
And stretch its happy arms and leap up disenchanted.

Thou bringest vengeance, but so loving-kindly
  The guilty thinks it pity; taught by thee,
Fierce tyrants drop the scourges wherewith blindly
  Their own souls they were scarring; conquerors see 60
With horror in their hands the accursed spear
  That tore the meek One’s side on Calvary,
And from their trophies shrink with ghastly fear;
    Thou, too, art the Forgiver,
  The beauty of man’s soul to man revealing;
    The arrows from thy quiver
Pierce Error’s guilty heart, but only pierce for healing.

Oh, whither, whither, glory-winged dreams,
  From out Life’s, sweat and turmoil would ye bear me? 
Shut, gates of Fancy, on your golden gleams,—­ 70
  This agony of hopeless contrast spare me! 
Fade, cheating glow, and leave me to my night! 
    He is a coward, who would borrow
    A charm against the present sorrow
From the vague Future’s promise of delight: 
  As life’s alarums nearer roll,
    The ancestral buckler calls,
    Self-clanging from the walls
  In the high temple of the soul;
Where are most sorrows, there the poet’s sphere is, 80
    To feed the soul with patience,
    To heal its desolations
With words of unshorn truth, with love that never wearies.

HEBE

  I saw the twinkle of white feet,
I saw the flush of robes descending;
  Before her ran an influence fleet,
That bowed my heart like barley bending.

  As, in bare fields, the searching bees
Pilot to blooms beyond our finding,
It led me on, by sweet degrees
Joy’s simple honey-cells unbinding.

  Those Graces were that seemed grim Fates;
With nearer love the sky leaned o’er me;
  The long-sought Secret’s golden gates
On musical hinges swung before me.