THE TEST. (Musa loquitur.)

I hung my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults may find. 
All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot;
These the siroc could not melt,
Fire their fiercer flaming felt,
And the meaning was more white
Than July’s meridian light. 
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know. 
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive?

SOLUTION.

I am the Muse who sung alway
By Jove, at dawn of the first day. 
Star-crowned, sole-sitting, long I wrought
To fire the stagnant earth with thought: 
On spawning slime my song prevails,
Wolves shed their fangs, and dragons scales;
Flushed in the sky the sweet May-morn,
Earth smiled with flowers, and man was born. 
Then Asia yeaned her shepherd race,
And Nile substructs her granite base,—­
Tented Tartary, columned Nile,—­
And, under vines, on rocky isle,
Or on wind-blown sea-marge bleak,
Forward stepped the perfect Greek: 
That wit and joy might find a tongue,
And earth grow civil, Homer Sung.

Flown to Italy from Greece,
I brooded long, and held my peace,
For I am wont to sing uncalled,
And in days of evil plight
Unlock doors of new delight;
And sometimes mankind I appalled
With a bitter horoscope,
With spasms of terror for balm of hope. 
Then by better thought I lead
Bards to speak what nations need;
So I folded me in fears,
And Dante searched the triple spheres,
Moulding nature at his will,
So shaped, so coloured, swift or still,
And, sculptor-like, his large design
Etched on Alp and Apennine.

Seethed in mists of Penmanmaur,
Taught by Plinlimmon’s Druid power,
England’s genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before: 
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE’s wit. 
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.

Far in the North, where polar night
Holds in check the frolic light,
In trance upborne past mortal goal
The Swede Emanuel leads the soul. 
Through snows above, mines underground,
The inks of Erebus he found;
Rehearsed to men the damned wails
On which the seraph music sails,
In spirit-worlds he trod alone,
But walked the earth unmarked, unknown. 
The near by-stander caught no sound,—­
Yet they who listened far aloof
Heard rendings of the skyey roof,
And felt, beneath, the quaking ground;
And his air-sown, unheeded words,
In the next age, are flaming swords.