Doth Art, enshrined in artificial forms, Sit like a queen, and scatter round her charms ; Around our earthly atmosphere it moves.— While stifled grief makes utterance, choked and hoarse; The loved one's footsteps at the garden gates; Where, still pursuing as the phantom flies, Childhood hunts pleasure through its paradise ; Where blind desire, born in the sweet abstract, In every struggle for the truth it strives; In every brave heroic deed it lives; In every joy it singeth like a bird; In every grief its secret sob is heard. To give a voice to every varying hue; All passion unto Beauty to subdue ; To make eternal by a touch of power The chance-grown product of the fleeting hour; Prismatic lights, and evanescent gleams; All forms, all tints, all lines of loveliness, Ye are deceived who dream his perfect powers Untrained, unguided, blossom forth like flowers; Who deem his life is but a gay parade, By joys escorted through a rosy glade ; No! he hath never won who never fought; By toil and will alone is greatness wrought, - The wing onging Earn tamer supply. The dogging thought, that mainly sees me sy, The laboring hours success hath never biest, The anxiong doubt, that gaws the care-worn breast, The secret fear, that jars the unnerved mind, As wane fine lyre is riven by the wind. — These are the panga, that rack the nice-strung sense; But Genius is its own great recompense, And though a wildfire burn within its veins, For other joys it would not change its pains. She breathes in music as he wanders by; She bids the world be picture for his eye; While he within her meanest shape perceives Is as a shell, in whose fine labyrinths sound The murmurs of a dim and distant sea, The secret promise of futurity. Still the fair promise towers above the fact, And Hope's great vision dwarfs the accomplished act. The perfect semblance of the unbodied thought; It shone more bright unfashioned in the breast; The sweet mirage, through which its image loomed, Left by a sunken sun to haunt the air. With the sure feet of fate pursue his way, Thus struggling on, the artist seeks to find Knit thus together by a secret bond, The spirit unto Nature must respond, For some strange spell unites them at our birth, And shapes us half from heaven, and half from earth. Though Custom blur the sense, and dim the eye, And blot out beauty from the common sky, |