Page:The Dial (Volume 74).djvu/84

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains,
As though to choose whatever shape it wills,
And never stoop to a mechanical,
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not gung
But that he found more substance there than dreams,
That out of life's own self delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell, flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain where the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master's buried mice can play
And maybe the great-grandson of that house
For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.

Oh, what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;