Only the soul can walk the dusty track
     Where hangs our flowering under vapours black,
     And bear to see how these pervade, obscure,
     Quench recollection of a spacious pure. 
     They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve,
     Hard at each other point and gape,
     Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve,
     To reappear with one they drape
     For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name,
     Who such distorted issue did beget. 
     Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweat
     Off brow on breast, whose furnace flame
     Has eaten, and old Self consumes. 
     Out of the purification will they leap,
     Thee renovating while new light illumes
     The dusky web of evil, known as pain,
     That heavily up healthward mounts the steep;
     Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain: 
     Midway the tameless oceanic brute
     Below, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit,
     And the fair heaven reflecting inner peace
     On righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.

     Forth of such passage through black fire we win
     Clear hearing of the simple lute,
     Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays
     For them who can in quietness receive
     Her restorative airs:  a ditty thin
     As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve,
     Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays
     On a transparent sheet, where curves a glass
     To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs
     Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar. 
     Solidity and bulk and martial brass,
     Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score
     A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime,
     While present in the spirit, vital there,
     Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time;
     Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air
     Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew. 
     Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled
     Historic of the soul, and heats anew
     Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald. 
     True of the man, and of mankind ’tis true,
     Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair,
     Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred
     Against the primal beast in us, and flung;
     Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred
     Above self-pity slain:  or it was Prayer
     First taken for Life’s cleanser; or the tongue
     Spake for the world against this heart; or rings
     Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung;
     Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb
     From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob: 
     These quickening live.  But deepest at her springs,
     Most filial, is an eye to love her young. 
     And had we it, to see with it, alive
     Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive. 
     Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then
     The green-robed and