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But they are few, and all romance has flown, And men can prophesy about the sun, And lecture on his arrows—how, alone, Through a waste void the soulless atoms run, How from each tree its weeping nymph has fled, And that no more ’mid English reeds a Naiad shows her head.

Methinks these new Actæons boast too soon That they have spied on beauty; what if we Have analysed the rainbow, robbed the moon Of her most ancient, chastest mystery, Shall I, the last Endymion, lose all hope Because rude eyes peer at my mistress through a telescope!

What profit if this scientific age Burst through our gates with all its retinue Of modern miracles! Can it assuage One lover’s breaking heart? what can it do p. 34To make one life more beautiful, one day More godlike in its period? but now the Age of Clay

p. 34

Returns in horrid cycle, and the earth Hath borne again a noisy progeny Of ignorant Titans, whose ungodly birth Hurls them against the august hierarchy Which sat upon Olympus; to the Dust They have appealed, and to that barren arbiter they must

Repair for judgment; let them, if they can, From Natural Warfare and insensate Chance, Create the new Ideal rule for man! Methinks that was not my inheritance; For I was nurtured otherwise, my soul Passes from higher heights of life to a more supreme goal.

Lo! while we spake the earth did turn away Her visage from the God, and Hecate’s boat Rose silver-laden, till the jealous day Blew all its torches out: I did not note The waning hours, to young Endymions Time’s palsied fingers count in vain his rosary of suns!

p. 35Mark how the yellow iris wearily Leans back its throat, as though it would be kissed By its false chamberer, the dragon-fly,  Who, like a blue vein on a girl’s white wrist, Sleeps on that snowy primrose of the night, Which ’gins to flush with crimson shame, and die beneath the light.

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Come let us go, against the pallid shield Of the wan sky the almond blossoms gleam, The corncrake nested in the unmown field Answers its mate, across the misty stream On fitful wing the startled curlews fly, And in his sedgy bed the lark, for joy that Day is nigh,

Scatters the pearlèd dew from off the grass, In tremulous ecstasy to greet the sun, Who soon in gilded panoply will pass  

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