Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening
Like clouds in starlight widely spread
Like memory of music fled
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given:
Therefore the names of God and ghosts and Heaven
Remain the records of their vain endeavour:
Frail spells whose uttered charm might not avail to sever
From all we hear and all we see
Doubt, chance and mutability
Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument
Or moonlight on a midnight stream
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent
Man were immortal and omnipotent
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart
Thou messenger of sympathies
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not--lest the grave should be
Like life and fear, a dark reality

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard; I saw them not;
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of buds and blossoming
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery
That thou, O awful LOVELINESS
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky
Which through the summer is not heard or seen
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee
And every form containing thee
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind