Classic Poem

How shall we honor him and in his place
His comrades of the Old and Happy Race
Whose Art is refuge Sorrow comes not nigh,
Though Art be twin to Sorrow? They reply
From all the centuries they outsoar,
From every shore
Of that three-continented sea
To which the streams of our antiquity
Fell swift and joyously:
“How, but to live with Beauty?”

Across our Western world without surcease
How many a column sounds the name of Greece!
The sun, loth-lingering on the crest of Rome,
Finds here how many an imitative dome!
O classic quarries of our modern thought,
What blasphemies in stone from you are wrought!
For though to Law, Religion, or the State,
These stones to Beauty first are dedicate,
Yet to what purpose, if we but revere
The temple, not the goddess?—if whene'er
The magic of her deep obsession seem
To master any soul, we call it dream?
Come, let us live with Beauty!
Her name is ever on our lips; but who
Holds Beauty as the fairest bride to woo?
The gods oft wedded mortals: now alone
May man the Chief Immortal make his own.
To Time each day adds increment of age
But Beauty ne'er grows old. There is no gauge
To count the glories of the counted hours.
Flowers die, but not the ecstasy of flowers.
Come, let us live with Beauty!
What infinite treasure hers! and what small need
Of our cramped natures, whose misguided greed,
Hound-like, pursues false trails of Luxury
Or sodden Comfort! Who shall call us free—
Content if but some casual wafture come
From fields Elysian, where the valleys bloom
With life delectable? Such happy air
Should be the light we live in; unaware
It should be breathed, till man retrieves the joy
Philosophy has wrested from the boy.
Come, let us live with Beauty!

Who shall put limit to her sovereignty?
Who shall her loveliness define?
Think you the Graces only three?—
The Muses only nine?
Beyond our star-sown deep of space
Where, as for solace, huddles world with world
(A human instinct in the primal wrack),
Mayhap there is a dark and desert place
Of deeper awe
With but one outer star, there hurled
By cataclysm and there held in leash by law:
If lonely be that star, 't is not for Beauty's lack.
She was ere there was any need of Truth,
She was ere there was any stir of Love;
And when Man came, and made her world uncouth
With sin, and cities, and the gash of hills
And forests, and a thousand brutish ills,—
Moved by eternal ruth
She hid her wounds and gave him, from above,
The magic all his happiness is fashioned of.
Come, let us live with Beauty!