Rabbi, beyond the high groins, rose and gray,
Dimmed by the Minster's adumbrated day,
How, browed in silence, broods my centenary,
In silence, bred of dust

And the dank charnel's must,

That wraps these bones! Yes, he is passed away
Forever more; nor London's warping mist,

Nor Italy's keen amethyst,

Shall cast his shadow among men; and soon

No lingering friend to care, nor old contemporary.

He, I mean, whom once they pointed at

In Rome and Florence: poet-putterer

Among old pictures,

Uncouth utterer

Of obscure strictures,

Styleless stutterer

(Quoth his critics,

Itching with their own enclitics),

Paracelsus!-how he sat

In chilblain halls, Del Sarto-dippy,
Robbia-mad, or Lippo Lippi-,
Like some mage of alchemy,

Grinding, in his cracked brain-crucible,
Tortuous rhymes from radiant Titians
Delving for the thence-deducible

Dialogue-soliloquy :

Not to mention those musicians!
Through the dilettantes' drawl

At the Countess' musicale,

What surmise you, English ogler,

Of visions dreamed by old Abt Vogler,
When you stare (nor note his frowning,
Conscious of your own silk gowning)
And pour at tea for Mr. Browning?
Dust to dust: the large, the little,
Ashes both! Who cares a tittle,
At the teas of Goethe, Horace,
Who wore satin, or who wore lace?

With widening discs of light. No sparrow falls

But gray-stoled choirs revive his matinals

With incense fresh of dawn.-You, Rabbi, friend,

Soul-fellow, busy with me to the end,

Crunching with poet-pestles and rhyme-mortars
Conundrums for the mind to apprehend,

Bear witness with me to this

What's permanent must pass.
Numbness and pain, arise
Conceiving otherwise.

parodox:

All spirit-shocks,

For Beauty is the flowing of the soul
Without impediment, the effect being joy;
So with a ripple may reveal her whole
Eternal ocean. But the child says: "See!
My earth is stable; sun and stars spin wild."
Not so the man: "Our earth spins dizzily

Round the fixed sun." The poet (man and child)
Peers in the sun, imagining he sees-

Beyond his face-the shadowy vortices,

Vast suctions and compulsions of the soul.

"Beyond the sun," he sings, "beyond-our goal

Is God!" Last pries the seer: "Him whom so far

Ye seek, yourselves consider what you are

And find Him: stars aspiring to be,

Life from itself evolving soul-such He!