White with the angel's coming gleam,

And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans,
And larger destinies seem man's;

You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans
The gulf wherein so many fall,
'Twixt possible and actual;

His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,

Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth with all its spots.

Himself unshaken as the sky,

His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high Systems and creeds pellmell together;

"T is strange as to a deaf man's eye,

While trees uprooted splinter by,

The dumb turmoil of stormy weather;

Less of iconoclast than shaper,

His spirit, safe behind the reach
Of the tornado of his speech,

Burns calmly as a glowworm's taper.

So great in speech, but, ah! in act
So overrun with vermin troubles,
The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly fact
Of life collapses all his bubbles:
Had he but lived in Plato's day,

He might, unless my fancy errs,
Have shared that golden voice's sway
O'er barefooted philosophers.

Our nipping climate hardly suits

The ripening of ideal fruits;

His theories vanquish us all summer,

But winter makes him dumb and dumber;

To see him 'mid life's needful things

Is something painfully bewildering;

He seems an angel with clipt wings

Tied to a mortal wife and children,
And by a brother seraph taken
In the act of eating eggs and bacon.

Like a clear fountain, his desire

Exults and leaps toward the light, In every drop it says "Aspire!" Striving for more ideal height;

And as the fountain, falling thence,

Crawls baffled through the common gutter,

So, from his speech's eminence,

He shrinks into the present tense,

Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.

Yet smile not, worldling, for in deeds

Not all of life that 's brave and wise is;

He strews an ampler future's seeds,
'Tis your fault if no harvest rises;
Smooth back the sneer; for is it naught
That all he is and has is Beauty's?

By soul the soul's gains must be wrought,
The Actual claims our coarser thought,

The Ideal hath its higher duties.

ON A PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO.

CAN this be thou who, lean and pale,

With such immitigable eye

Didst look upon those writhing souls in bale,
And note each vengeance, and pass by
Unmoved, save when thy heart by chance
Cast backward one forbidden glance,

And saw Francesca, with child's glee,
Subdue and mount thy wild-horse knee

And with proud hands control its fiery prance?

With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow,

And eye remote, that inly sees

Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now

In some sea-lulled Hesperides,

Thou movest through the jarring street,
Secluded from the noise of feet

By her gift-blossom in thy hand,
Thy branch of palm from Holy Land ;-

No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.

Yet there is something round thy lips
That prophecies the coming doom,
The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse
Notches the perfect disk with gloom;

A something that would banish thee,

And thine untamed pursuer be,

From men and their unworthy fates,

Though Florence had not shut her gates,

And grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.

Ah! he who follows fearlessly

The beckonings of a poet-heart