Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn! 
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! 
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll! 
Leave thy low-vaulted past! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

CHAPTER V

A lyric conception—­my friend, the Poet, said—­hits me like a bullet in the forehead.  I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death.  Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, —­then a gasp and a great jump of the heart,—­then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head,—­then a long sigh,—­and the poem is written.

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,
—­I replied.

No,—­said he,—­far from it.  I said written, but I did not say copied. Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for.  The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet’s soul.  It comes to him a thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words,—­words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now.  Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it.  It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their regular sequences of association.  No wonder the ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].  Goddess,—­Muse,—­divine afflatus, —­something outside always. I never wrote any verses worth reading.  I can’t.  I am too stupid.  If I ever copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand, —­telling them what this poet told me.  The company listened rather attentively, I thought, considering the literary character of the remarks.]

The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything better than Pope’s “Essay on Man”?  Had I ever perused McFingal?  He was fond of poetry when he was a boy,—­his mother taught him to say many little pieces,—­he remembered one beautiful hymn;—­and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years,—­