To other worlds and new,

Will keep the promise too.

 

 

   TO IMOGEN AT THE HARP 

 Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen: Dein Sinn ist zu—dein Herz ist todt. Auf, bade, Schüler, unrerdrossen Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenroth! FAUST. 

Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen:

Dein Sinn ist zu—dein Herz ist todt.

Auf, bade, Schüler, unrerdrossen

Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenroth!

FAUST.

 Hast thou seen ghosts? Hast thou at midnight heard In the wind's talking an articulate word? Or art thou in the secret of the sea, And have the twilight woods confessed to thee? So wild thy song, thy smile so faint, so far Thine absent eyes from earthly vision are. Thy song is done: why art thou listening? Spent is the last vibration of the string Along the waves of sound. Oh, doth thine ear Pursue the ebbing chord in some fine sphere, Where wraiths of vanished echoes live and roam, And where thy thoughts, here strangered, find a home? Teach me the path to that uncharted land; Discovery's keel hath never notched its strand, No passport may unbar its sealed frontier,— Too far for utmost sight, for touch too near. Subtler than light, yet all opaque, the screen Which shuts us from that world, outspread between The shows of sense; like as an ether thin Fills the vast microscopic space wherein The molecules of matter lie enisled. A world whose sound our silence is; too wild Its elfin music beats, too shrill, too rare, To stir the slow pulse of our thicker air. 

 A world whose light our darkness is; that lies With its sharp edges turned toward mortal eyes, Like figures painted on a folded fan— The broken colors of some hidden plan. The few who but an instant's look have had 

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