Classic Poem

What Leagues are wandered by misguided men
Who think that Beauty lies not in their ken;
That she resides abroad where nations meet,
And sons of exile sons of exile greet;
Or in the fading Past where phantoms glide
To woo the witless to their siren side.
Stray not afield; to your own Hearth she clings,
In your cheap cot her welcome song she sings;
She misses none, she comes to one and all,
In staring day and when the shadows fall;
Always she sings, she does not tire or fail,
She haunts the Temple as she does the Jail;
She haunts the Palace as she does the Slums—
Wherever men abide she surely comes.

Dan Chaucer met her with a Pilgrim band:
And Froissart with the Princes of the land:
She lent the lilt of Roland martial aid:
She laughed with Villon in the scaffold's shade:
She prayed with Bunyan in a prison-cell:
She mused with Dante in his home-made Hell:
Melodious Shakespeare wooed her in the strain
That sweeps the circle, charged of Joy and Pain:
Velasquez with the dwarfs that tell to time
How grace of style makes any theme sublime:
Burns in his one clear note, serene and strong—
The song of Love, the democratic song:
Wordsworth in homely lays of calm content
That breathe of peace to tired minds and spent:
She touched Béranger in a garret high:
She came to Heine 'twixt a sob and sigh:
To wistful Chopin in the phrasing choice
Of Music, with its sad and thrilling voice—
The subtile splendour of the singing tone
On waves of wordless passion lightly blown:
She flew to Tennyson on golden wing
Where roses cluster and the robins sing:
De Musset knew her in a squalid street
Where prowling crime and sad-eyed misery meet:
Verlaine in verse that ravishes the sense
Like dreamy odours, delicate and tense:
Poe held her hand where vengeful Memory flames:
Hawthorne, by greenwood ways and Scarlet Shames:—

In countless forms the flowing years prolong
Her changeful music rises clear and strong
And types the Universal, with its surge
Of joys and griefs, its song and solemn dirge;
Those swelling harmonies with witchery rife
That sweep the sounding chords of Common Life,
And mark, like golden memories of youth,
The strain of Beauty in the march of Truth.