That juts far out into the upper sea;

To this one hope my heart hath clung for years,
As would a foundling to the talisman

Hung round his neck by hands he knew not whose,
A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside,

Yet he therein can feel a virtue left

By the sad pressure of a mother's hand,
And unto him it still is tremulous

With palpitating haste and wet with tears,
The key to him of hope and humanness,
The coarse shell of life's pearl, Expectancy.
This hope hath been to me for love and fame,
Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth,
Building me up as in a thick-ribbed tower,
Wherewith enwalled my watching spirit burned,
Conquering its little island from the Dark,

Sole as a scholar's lamp, and heard men's steps,
In the far hurry of the outward world,

Pass dimly forth and back, sounds heard in dream.

As Ganymede by the eagle was snatched up

From the gross sod to be Jove's cupbearer,

So was I lifted by my great design:

And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye
Fades not that broader outlook of the gods;

His life's low valleys overbrow earth's clouds,
And that Olympian spectre of the past

Looms towering up in sovereign memory,

Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of doom.
Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird,
Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me
A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede,

Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low ends;
Great days have ever such a morning-red,

On such a base great futures are built up,
And aspiration, though not put in act,
Comes back to ask its plighted troth again,
Still watches round its grave the unlaid ghost
Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes,
Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak
As shadows of bare trees upon the snow,
Bound freezing there by the unpitying moon.

While other youths perplexed their mandolins,
Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine

In the loose glories of her lover's hair,
And wile another kiss to keep back day,

I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade
Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoön,
Did of my hope a dryad mistress make,
Whom I would woo to meet me privily,

Or underneath the stars, or when the moon
Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls.
O days whose memory tames to fawning down
The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck!

I know not when this hope enthralled me first,
But from my boyhood up I loved to hear
The tall pine-forests of the Apennine
Murmur their hoary legends of the sea,
Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld

The sudden dark of tropic night shut down

O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes,

The while a pair of herons trailingly

Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled

The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms

Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred

By any but the Northwind's hurrying keels.

And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds

To my world-seeking heart paid fealty,

And catered for it as the Cretan bees

Brought honey to the baby Jupiter,

Who in his soft hand crushed a violet,
Godlike foremusing the rough thunder's gripe;
Then did I entertain the poet's song,

My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er

That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains

Whose adamantine links, his manacles,

The western main shook growling, and still gnawed;

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale

Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore :

For I believed the poets; it is they

Who utter wisdom from the central deep,
And, listening to the inner flow of things,
Speak to the age out of eternity.

Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude

In caves and desert places of the earth,

Where their own heart-beat was the only stir
Of living thing that comforted the year;
But the bald pillar-top of Simeon,

In midnight's blankest waste, were populous,
Matched with the isolation drear and deep
Of him who pines among the swarm of men,
At once a new thought's king and prisoner,
Feeling the truer life within his life,

The fountain of his spirit's prophecy,
Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop,
In the ungrateful sands of skeptic ears.
He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods
Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell
Widens beyond the circles of the stars,
And all the sceptred spirits of the past

Come thronging in to greet him as their peer,
While, like an heir new-crowned, his heart o'erleaps

The blazing steps of his ancestral throne;
But in the market-place's glare and throng
He sits apart, an exile, and his brow

Aches with the mocking memory of its crown.