Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match'd with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
Yet, if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear,
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground.
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
DEVOTION OF THE INCARNATE IDEAL
ODE TO THE LARK ASCENDING, BY GEORGE MEREDITH
Miracle of the Ascending Song of Earth
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,-
All intervolved and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changeingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,-
Sweet to the quick o' the ear, and dear
To Her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings;
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, Her music's mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
(A song of light,) and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discerned—
An ecstasy to music turned,
Impelled by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking-save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live.
Renewed in endless notes of glee,
(So thirsty of his voice is he,)
For all to hear and all to know
That He is joy, awake, aglow;
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filtered crystal-clear,—
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple Singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
(Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine ;)
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flushed to white with shivers wet;
And such-the water-spirit's chime
On mountain heights in morning's prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry Voice ascending spreads;
Awakening (as it waxes thin,)
The Best in us to Him akin;
And every face to watch him raised;
Puts on the light of children praised,—
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,-
Though nought be promised from the seas,
But only a soft ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.
For singing till his heaven fills,
"Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine,
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labour in the town;
He sings the sap, the quickened veins;
Uncovetous
Love of Earth
the Fount
Thereof
Its Selfless
and hence
All-inclusive
Character
The Sons of
Earth Who
Enflesh that
Spirit
Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve, and pass reward,
So touching purest, and so heard
In the brain's reflex of yon bird:
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