Something unsubstantial, ghostly,
    Seems this Theurgist,
In deep meditation mostly
    Wrapped, as in a mist. 
Vague, phantasmal, and unreal
    To our thought he seems,
Walking in a world ideal,
    In a land of dreams.

Was he one, or many, merging
    Name and fame in one,
Like a stream, to which, converging
    Many streamlets run? 
Till, with gathered power proceeding,
    Ampler sweep it takes,
Downward the sweet waters leading
    From unnumbered lakes.

By the Nile I see him wandering,
    Pausing now and then,
On the mystic union pondering
    Between gods and men;
Half believing, wholly feeling,
    With supreme delight,
How the gods, themselves concealing,
    Lift men to their height.

Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,
    In the thoroughfare
Breathing, as if consecrated,
    A diviner air;
And amid discordant noises,
    In the jostling throng,
Hearing far, celestial voices
    Of Olympian song.

Who shall call his dreams fallacious? 
    Who has searched or sought
All the unexplored and spacious
    Universe of thought? 
Who, in his own skill confiding,
   Shall with rule and line
Mark the border-land dividing
    Human and divine?

Trismegistus! three times greatest! 
    How thy name sublime
Has descended to this latest
    Progeny of time! 
Happy they whose written pages
    Perish with their lives,
If amid the crumbling ages
    Still their name survives!

Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately
    Found I in the vast,
Weed-encumbered sombre, stately,
    Grave-yard of the Past;
And a presence moved before me
    On that gloomy shore,
As a waft of wind, that o’er me
    Breathed, and was no more.

TO THE AVON

Flow on, sweet river! like his verse
Who lies beneath this sculptured hearse
Nor wait beside the churchyard wall
For him who cannot hear thy call.

Thy playmate once; I see him now
A boy with sunshine on his brow,
And hear in Stratford’s quiet street
The patter of his little feet.

I see him by thy shallow edge
Wading knee-deep amid the sedge;
And lost in thought, as if thy stream
Were the swift river of a dream.

He wonders whitherward it flows;
And fain would follow where it goes,
To the wide world, that shall erelong
Be filled with his melodious song.

Flow on, fair stream!  That dream is o’er;
He stands upon another shore;
A vaster river near him flows,
And still he follows where it goes.

PRESIDENT GARFIELD

“E venni dal martirio a questa pace.”