not; Is it that I half forgot, A year ago, and all despised For a space the things that I had prized: The race of life, the glittering show? Is it that now a year has passed Of vain pursuit of glittering things, Of fruitless searching, shouting, running, And greedy lies and candour cunning, Here as I stand the year above Sudden the heats and the strivings fail And fall away, a fluctuant veil, And the fixed familiar stones restore The old appearance-buried core, The moveless and essential me, The eternal personality Alone enduring first and last? No, this I have known in other ways, In other places, other days. Not only here, on this one peak, Do fixity and beauty speak Of the delusiveness of change, Of the transparency of form, The bootless stress of minds that range, The awful calm behind the storm. In many places, many days, The invaded soul receives the rays Of countries she was nurtured in, Speaks in her silent language strange To that beyond which is her kin. Even in peopled streets at times A metaphysic arm is thrust Through the partitioning fabric thin, And tears away the darkening pall Cast by the bright phenomenal, And clears the obscured spirit's mirror From shadows of deceptive error, And shows the bells and all their ringing, And all the crowds and all their singing, Carillons that are nothing's chimes And dust that is not even dust.... But rarely hold I converse thus Where shapes are bright and clamorous, More often comes the word divine In places motionless and far; Beneath the white peculiar shine Of sunless summer afternoons; At eventide on pale lagoons Where hangs reflected one pale star; Or deep in the green solitudes Of still erect entrancèd woods. O, in the woods alone lying, Scarce a bough in the wind sighing, Gaze I long with fervid power At leaf and branch and grass and flower, Breathe I breaths of trembling sight Shed from great urns of green delight, Take I draughts and drink them up Poured from many a stalk and cup. Now do I burn for nothing more Than thus to gaze, thus to adore This exquisiteness of nature ever In silence.... But with instant light Rends the film; with joy I quiver To see with new celestial sight Flower and leaf and grass and tree, Doomed barks on an eternal sea, Flit phantom-like as transient smoke. Beauty herself her spell has broke, Beauty, the herald and the lure, Her message told, may not endure; Her portal opened, she has died, Supreme immortal suicide. Yes, sleepless nature soundless flings Invisible grapples round the soul, Drawing her through the web of things To the primal end of her journeyings, Her ultimate and constant pole. For Beauty with her hands that beckon Is but the Prophet of a Higher, A flaming and ephemeral beacon, A Phoenix perishing by fire. Herself from us herself estranges, 

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