2
INTRODUCTION.
1.
ND has my heart enough of song
To give these pictured lines
The poetry that must belong
To what such art designs?
The landscape, and the ruined tower,
The temple’s stately brow—
Methinks I never felt their power
As I am feeling now.
2.
For now I find in foreign scenes
What foreign scenes can be,
And truth with fancy intevenes,
To bring them home to me.
A few short miles, a few salt waves,
How strange a change there came—
Our lives as separate as our graves;
Is then our kind the same?
3.
Ah, yes; a thousand sympathies
Their general birth-place find,
And nature has a thousand links
To beautify and bind.
I deeply felt that song should make
One universal link,
Uniting, for each other’s sake,
All those who feel and think.
4.
The poet’s lovely faith creates
The beauty it believes;
The light which on his footstep waits
He from himself receives.
His lot may be a weary lot,
His thrall a heavy thrall,
And cares and griefs the crowd know not,
His heart may know them all.
5.
But still he hath a mighty dower—
The loveliness that throws
Over the common thought and hour
The colours of the rose.
A loveliness like that sweet ray
I marked this very morn,
When the first smile of early day
Amid the east was born.
6.
Fair Paris caught the crimson hue —
Well may I call it fair,
With its pure heaven of softest blue,
Its clear and sunny air—
Soft fell the morning o’er each dome
That rises mid the sky;
And, conscious of the day to come,
Demand their place on high.
