Of all we would believe,[1] and sadly blame
The jarring and inexplicable frame
Of this wrong world:—and then anatomize160
The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes
Were closed in distant years;—or widely guess
The issue of the earth's great business,
When we shall be as we no longer are—
Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war 165
Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not;—or how
You listened to some interrupted flow
Of visionary rhyme,—in joy and pain
Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain,
With little skill perhaps;—or how we sought170
Those deepest wells of passion or of thought
Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years,
Staining their[2] sacred waters with our tears;
Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed!
Or how I, wisest lady! then endued175
The language of a land which now is free,
And, winged with thoughts of truth and majesty,
Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a cloud,
And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud,
'My name is Legion!'—that majestic tongue180
Which Calderon over the desert flung
Of ages and of nations; and which found
An echo in our hearts, and with the sound
Startled oblivion:—thou wert then to me
As is a nurse—when inarticulately185
A child would talk as its grown parents do.
If living winds the rapid clouds pursue,
If hawks chase doves through the aethereal[3] way,
Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey,
Why should not we rouse with the spirit's blast190
Out of the forest of the pathless past
These recollected pleasures?
You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.195
Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see
That which was Godwin,—greater none than he
Though fallen—and fallen on evil times—to stand
Among the spirits of our age and land,
Before the dread tribunal of to come200
The foremost,—while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb.[4]
You will see Coleridge[5]—he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
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362
LETTER TO MARIA GISBORNE
