| THIS outer world is but the pictured scroll | |
| Of worlds within the soul, | |
| A coloured chart, a blazoned missal-book | |
| Whereon who rightly look | |
| May spell the splendours with their mortal eyes | 5 |
| And steer to Paradise. | |
| |
| O, well for him that knows and early knows | |
| In his own soul the rose | |
| Secretly burgeons, of this earthly flower | |
| The heavenly paramour: | 10 |
| And all these fairy dreams of green-wood fern, | |
| These waves that break and yearn, | |
| Shadows and hieroglyphs, hills, clouds and seas, | |
| Faces and flowers and trees, | |
| Terrestrial picture-parables, relate | 15 |
| Each to its heavenly mate. | |
| |
| O, well for him that finds in sky and sea | |
| This two-fold mystery, | |
| And loses not (as painfully he spells | |
| The fine-spun syllables) | 20 |
| The cadences, the burning inner gleam, | |
| The poet’s heavenly dream. | |
| |
| Well for the poet if this earthly chart | |
| Be printed in his heart, | |
| When to his world of spirit woods and seas | 25 |
| With eager face he flees | |
| And treads the untrodden fields of unknown flowers | |
| And threads the angelic bowers, | |
| And hears that unheard nightingale whose moan | |
| Trembles within his own, | 30 |
| And lovers murmuring in the leafy lanes | |
| Of his own joys and pains. | |
| |
| For though he voyages further than the flight | |
| Of earthly day and night, | |
| Traversing to the sky’s remotest ends | 35 |
| A world that he transcends, | |
| Safe, he shall hear the hidden breakers roar | |
| Against the mystic shore; | |
| Shall roam the yellow sands where sirens bare | |
| Their breasts and wind their hair; | 40 |
| Shall with their perfumed tresses blind his eyes, | |
| And still possess the skies. | |
| |
| He, where the deep unearthly jungles are, | |
| Beneath his Eastern star | |
| Shall pass the tawny lion in his den | 45 |
| And cross the quaking fen. | |
| He learnt his path (and treads it undefiled) | |
| When, as a little child, | |
| He bent his head with long and loving looks | |
| O’er earthly picture-books. | 50 |
| His earthly love nestles against his side, | |
| His young celestial guide. | |
