Elegies
Beauteous, mysterious, solitary boy,
Awakening slowly to the Poet's joy!
Fire-fountain of young genius, showering rays
Of ruby sparkle through thy dreariest days—
Heart in its hardy frame of manhood, ever
Kept fresh and dewy through the stony ways
And dust of toil, with all its vain endeavour—
Oh, pathos of the dreaming azure gaze,
Mute mirror of the wonders far away,
That once so witched with its unconscious blaze
The stranger-artist[1]—quenchless to this day,
Like stars burnt out in ages long gone by,
Whose phantoms still are splendid in the sky—
So all with thee, dear love, 1s dark and blind;
With us, the smile, the flash, the glory, stay behind!
Awakening slowly to the Poet's joy!
Fire-fountain of young genius, showering rays
Of ruby sparkle through thy dreariest days—
Heart in its hardy frame of manhood, ever
Kept fresh and dewy through the stony ways
And dust of toil, with all its vain endeavour—
Oh, pathos of the dreaming azure gaze,
Mute mirror of the wonders far away,
That once so witched with its unconscious blaze
The stranger-artist[1]—quenchless to this day,
Like stars burnt out in ages long gone by,
Whose phantoms still are splendid in the sky—
So all with thee, dear love, 1s dark and blind;
With us, the smile, the flash, the glory, stay behind!
But words tell nothing—How tell half the rest?
The fancy's quaint inventiveness of jest—
Wild, beautiful caprices of a speech
Now long unwritten, mute, and past from reach—
The rebel spirit's free-born questionings,
Past use and fashion, to the core of things—
But words tell nothing. Dim, how dim, alas!
My painting shows upon no magic glass.
The fancy's quaint inventiveness of jest—
Wild, beautiful caprices of a speech
Now long unwritten, mute, and past from reach—
The rebel spirit's free-born questionings,
Past use and fashion, to the core of things—
But words tell nothing. Dim, how dim, alas!
My painting shows upon no magic glass.
- ↑ A French artist whom he once met in a Paris salon soon after his return from Australia, observed to his sister that "among all the strange birds he had seen there in the woods, there were none with eyes so bright as his."
85
