XXIII

     From dust, of him abhorred,
     He would be snatched by Grace discovering worth. 
     ’Sever me from the hollowness of Earth! 
     Me take, dear Lord!’

     XXIV

     She hears him.  Him she owes
     For half her loveliness a love well won
     By work that lights the shapeless and the dun,
     Their common foes.

     XXV

     He builds the soaring spires,
     That sing his soul in stone:  of her he draws,
     Though blind to her, by spelling at her laws,
     Her purest fires.

     XXVI

     Through him hath she exchanged,
     For the gold harvest-robes, the mural crown,
     Her haggard quarry-features and thick frown
     Where monsters ranged.

     XXVII

     And order, high discourse,
     And decency, than which is life less dear,
     She has of him:  the lyre of language clear,
     Love’s tongue and source.

     XXVIII

     She hears him, and can hear
     With glory in his gains by work achieved: 
     With grief for grief that is the unperceived
     In her so near.

     XXIX

     If he aloft for aid
     Imploring storms, her essence is the spur. 
     His cry to heaven is a cry to her
     He would evade.

     XXX

     Not elsewhere can he tend. 
     Those are her rules which bid him wash foul sins;
     Those her revulsions from the skull that grins
     To ape his end.

     XXXI

     And her desires are those
     For happiness, for lastingness, for light. 
     ’Tis she who kindles in his haunting night
     The hoped dawn-rose.

     XXXII

     Fair fountains of the dark
     Daily she waves him, that his inner dream
     May clasp amid the glooms a springing beam,
     A quivering lark: 

     XXIII

     This life and her to know
     For Spirit:  with awakenedness of glee
     To feel stern joy her origin:  not he
     The child of woe.

     XXXIV

     But that the senses still
     Usurp the station of their issue mind,
     He would have burst the chrysalis of the blind: 
     As yet he will;

     XXXV

     As yet he will, she prays,
     Yet will when his distempered devil of Self; —
     The glutton for her fruits, the wily elf
     In shifting rays; —

     XXXVI

     That captain of the scorned;
     The coveter of life in soul and shell,
     The fratricide, the thief, the infidel,
     The hoofed and horned; —

     XXXVII

     He singularly doomed
     To what he execrates and writhes to shun; —
     When fire has passed him vapour to the sun,
     And sun relumed,

     XXXVIII