Asleep, yet lending half an ear
To travellers on the Portsmouth road;—­ 70
There build we thee, O guardian dear,
Mark’d with a stone, thy last abode!

Then some, who through this garden pass,
When we too, like thyself, are clay,
Shall see thy grave upon the grass, 75
And stop before the stone, and say: 

People who lived here long ago
Did by this stone, it seems, intend
To name for future times to know
The dachs-hound, Geist, their little friend. 80

EPILOGUE

TO LESSING’S LAOCOOeN deg.

One morn as through Hyde Park deg. we walk’d, deg.1
My friend and I, by chance we talk’d
Of Lessing’s famed Laocooen;
And after we awhile had gone
In Lessing’s track, and tried to see 5
What painting is, what poetry—­
Diverging to another thought,
“Ah,” cries my friend, “but who hath taught
Why music and the other arts
Oftener perform aright their parts 10
Than poetry? why she, than they,
Fewer fine successes can display?

“For ’tis so, surely!  Even in Greece,
Where best the poet framed his piece,
Even in that Phoebus-guarded ground deg. deg.15
Pausanias deg. on his travels found deg.16
Good poems, if he look’d, more rare
(Though many) than good statues were—­
For these, in truth, were everywhere. 
Of bards full many a stroke divine 20
In Dante’s, deg.  Petrarch’s, deg.  Tasso’s deg. line, deg.21
The land of Ariosto deg. show’d; deg.22
And yet, e’en there, the canvas glow’d
With triumphs, a yet ampler brood,
Of Raphael deg. and his brotherhood. deg.25
And nobly perfect, in our day
Of haste, half-work, and disarray,
Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong,
Hath risen Goethe’s, deg.  Wordsworth’s deg. song; deg.29
Yet even I (and none will bow 30
Deeper to these) must needs allow,
They yield us not, to soothe our pains,
Such multitude of heavenly strains
As from the kings of sound are blown,
Mozart, deg.  Beethoven, deg.  Mendelssohn. deg.” deg.35

While thus my friend discoursed, we pass
Out of the path, and take the grass. 
The grass had still the green of May,
And still the unblackan’d elms were gay;
The kine were resting in the shade, 40
The flies a summer-murmur made. 
Bright was the morn and south deg. the air;