‘But,’ says my friend, ‘what was this thing and where?’
  It was a pleasure-place within my soul;
An earthly paradise supremely fair
  That lured me from the goal.

The first part was a tissue of hugged lies;
  The second was its ruin fraught with pain:  10
Why raise the fair delusion to the skies
  But to be dashed again?

My castle stood of white transparent glass
  Glittering and frail with many a fretted spire,
But when the summer sunset came to pass
  It kindled into fire.

My pleasaunce was an undulating green,
  Stately with trees whose shadows slept below,
With glimpses of smooth garden-beds between
  Like flame or sky or snow. 20

Swift squirrels on the pastures took their ease,
  With leaping lambs safe from the unfeared knife;
All singing-birds rejoicing in those trees
  Fulfilled their careless life.

Woodpigeons cooed there, stockdoves nestled there;
  My trees were full of songs and flowers and fruit,
Their branches spread a city to the air
  And mice lodged in their root.

My heath lay farther off, where lizards lived
  In strange metallic mail, just spied and gone; 30
Like darted lightnings here and there perceived
  But nowhere dwelt upon.

Frogs and fat toads were there to hop or plod
  And propagate in peace, an uncouth crew,
Where velvet-headed rushes rustling nod
  And spill the morning dew.

All caterpillars throve beneath my rule,
  With snails and slugs in corners out of sight;
I never marred the curious sudden stool
  That perfects in a night. 40

Safe in his excavated gallery
  The burrowing mole groped on from year to year;
No harmless hedgehog curled because of me
  His prickly back for fear.

Oft times one like an angel walked with me,
  With spirit-discerning eyes like flames of fire,
But deep as the unfathomed endless sea,
  Fulfilling my desire: 

And sometimes like a snowdrift he was fair,
  And sometimes like a sunset glorious red, 50
And sometimes he had wings to scale the air
  With aureole round his head.

We sang our songs together by the way,
  Calls and recalls and echoes of delight;
So communed we together all the day,
  And so in dreams by night.

I have no words to tell what way we walked. 
  What unforgotten path now closed and sealed;
I have no words to tell all things we talked,
  All things that he revealed:  60

This only can I tell:  that hour by hour
  I waxed more feastful, lifted up and glad;
I felt no thorn-prick when I plucked a flower,
  Felt not my friend was sad.

‘To-morrow,’ once I said to him with smiles: 
  ‘To-night,’ he answered gravely and was dumb,
But pointed out the stones that numbered miles
  And miles to come.