Thou Vision, floating in the breathless air
     Between me and the fairest of the stars,
     I tell my lonely thoughts as unto thee. 
     Look not for marvels of the scholar’s pen
     In my rude measure; I can only show
     A slender-margined, unillumined page,
     And trust its meaning to the flattering eye
     That reads it in the gracious light of love. 
     Ah, wouldst thou clothe thyself in breathing shape
     And nestle at my side, my voice should lend
     Whate’er my verse may lack of tender rhythm
     To make thee listen.

                          I have stood entranced
     When, with her fingers wandering o’er the keys,
     The white enchantress with the golden hair
     Breathed all her soul through some unvalued rhyme;
     Some flower of song that long had lost its bloom;
     Lo! its dead summer kindled as she sang! 
     The sweet contralto, like the ringdove’s coo,
     Thrilled it with brooding, fond, caressing tones,
     And the pale minstrel’s passion lived again,
     Tearful and trembling as a dewy rose
     The wind has shaken till it fills the air
     With light and fragrance.  Such the wondrous charm
     A song can borrow when the bosom throbs
     That lends it breath.

                           So from the poet’s lips
     His verse sounds doubly sweet, for none like him
     Feels every cadence of its wave-like flow;
     He lives the passion over, while he reads,
     That shook him as he sang his lofty strain,
     And pours his life through each resounding line,
     As ocean, when the stormy winds are hushed,
     Still rolls and thunders through his billowy caves.

Let me retrace the record of the years
That made me what I am.  A man most wise,
But overworn with toil and bent with age,
Sought me to be his scholar,—­me, run wild
From books and teachers,—­kindled in my soul
The love of knowledge; led me to his tower,
Showed me the wonders of the midnight realm
His hollow sceptre ruled, or seemed to rule,
Taught me the mighty secrets of the spheres,
Trained me to find the glimmering specks of light
Beyond the unaided sense, and on my chart
To string them one by one, in order due,
As on a rosary a saint his beads.

     I was his only scholar; I became
     The echo to his thought; whate’er he knew
     Was mine for asking; so from year to year
     We wrought together, till there came a time
     When I, the learner, was the master half
     Of the twinned being in the dome-crowned tower.

     Minds roll in paths like planets; they revolve
     This in a larger, that a narrower ring,
     But round they come at last to that same phase,
     That self-same light and shade they showed before. 
     I learned his annual