What throbbing verse can fitly render 60
That face so pure, so trembling-tender? 
  Sensation glimmers through its rest,
It speaks unmanacled by words,
  As full of motion as a nest
That palpitates with unfledged birds;
  ’Tis likest to Bethesda’s stream,
Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,
  White with the angel’s coming gleam,
And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans, 70
And larger destinies seem man’s;
You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans
  The gulf wherein so many fall,
  ’Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,
Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth with all its spots. 80

Himself unshaken as the sky,
His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high
  Systems and creeds pellmell together;
’Tis strange as to a deaf man’s eye,
While trees uprooted splinter by,
  The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;
  Less of iconoclast than shaper,
His spirit, safe behind the reach
Of the tornado of his speech,
  Burns calmly as a glowworm’s taper. 90

So great in speech, but, ah! in act
  So overrun with vermin troubles,
The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact
  Of life collapses all his bubbles: 
Had he but lived in Plato’s day,
  He might, unless my fancy errs,
Have shared that golden voice’s sway
  O’er barefooted philosophers. 
Our nipping climate hardly suits
The ripening of ideal fruits:  100
His theories vanquish us all summer,
But winter makes him dumb and dumber;
To see him mid life’s needful things
  Is something painfully bewildering;
He seems an angel with clipt wings
  Tied to a mortal wife and children,
And by a brother seraph taken
In the act of eating eggs and bacon. 
Like a clear fountain, his desire
  Exults and leaps toward the light, 110
In every drop it says ‘Aspire!’
  Striving for more ideal height;
And as the fountain, falling thence,
  Crawls baffled through the common gutter,
So, from his speech’s eminence,
He shrinks into the present tense,
  Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.

Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds
  Not all of life that’s brave and wise is;
He strews an ampler future’s seeds, 120
  ’Tis your fault if no harvest rises;
Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught
  That all he is and has is Beauty’s? 
By soul the soul’s gains must be wrought,
The Actual claims our coarser thought,
  The Ideal hath its higher duties.

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO

Can this be thou who, lean and pale,
  With such immitigable eye
Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale,
  And note each vengeance, and pass by
Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance
Cast backward one forbidden glance,
  And saw Francesca, with child’s glee,
  Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee
And with proud hands control its fiery prance?