GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
of which a familiar stanza, "Truth crushed to Earth," in "The Battle-Field," may be cited as a specimen. Perhaps the most finished poem of this volume is the "Day-Dream." The poet sits by Posilippo's steep, gazing at the bay, and recalling the olden time when its sea-nymphs were visible to the clear, believing eye. Witness such stanzas as these:
I sat and watched the eternal flow
Of those smooth billows toward the shore,
While quivering lines of light below
Ran with them on the ocean floor.
The Nereids rise before his view:
Then moved their coral lips: a strain,
Low, sweet, and sorrowful, I heard,
As if the murmurs of the main
Were shaped to syllable and word.
****
"Earth rears her flowers for us no more;
A half-remembered dream are we.
Unseen we haunt the sunny shore,
And swim, unmarked, the glassy sea.
****
"Yet sometimes, as in elder days,
We come before the painter's eye,
Or fix the sculptor's eager gaze,
With no profaner witness nigh.
"And then the hearts of men grow warm
With praise and wonder, asking where
The artist saw the perfect form
He copied forth in lines so fair?"
[116]
