Raphael

"I shall not soon forget that sight     The glow of Autumn's westering day,     A hazy warmth, a dreamy light,     On Raphael's picture lay.     It was a simple print I saw,     The fair face of a musing boy;     Yet, while I gazed, a sense of awe     Seemed blending with my joy.     A simple print, the graceful flow     Of boyhood's soft and wavy hair,     And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow     Unmarked and clear, were there.     Yet through its sweet and calm repose     I saw the inward spirit shine;     It was as if before me rose     The white veil of a shrine.     As if, as Gothland's sage has told,     The hidden life, the man within,     Dissevered from its frame and mould,     By mortal eye were seen.     Was it the lifting of that eye,     The waving of that pictured hand?     Loose as a cloud-wreath on the sky,     I saw the walls expand.     The narrow room had vanished, space,     Broad, luminous, remained alone,     Through which all hues and shapes of grace     And beauty looked or shone.     Around the mighty master came     The marvels which his pencil wrought,     Those miracles of power whose fame     Is wide as human thought.     There drooped thy more than mortal face,     O Mother, beautiful and mild     Enfolding in one dear embrace     Thy Saviour and thy Child!     The rapt brow of the Desert John;     The awful glory of that day     When all the Father's brightness shone     Through manhood's veil of clay.     And, midst gray prophet forms, and wild     Dark visions of the days of old,     How sweetly woman's beauty smiled     Through locks of brown and gold!     There Fornarina's fair young face     Once more upon her lover shone,     Whose model of an angel's grace     He borrowed from her own.     Slow passed that vision from my view,     But not the lesson which it taught;     The soft, calm shadows which it threw     Still rested on my thought:     The truth, that painter, bard, and sage,     Even in Earth's cold and changeful clime,     Plant for their deathless heritage     The fruits and flowers of time.     We shape ourselves the joy or fear     Of which the coming life is made,     And fill our Future's atmosphere     With sunshine or with shade.     The tissue of the Life to be     We weave with colors all our own,     And in the field of Destiny     We reap as we have sown.     Still shall the soul around it call     The shadows which it gathered here,     And, painted on the eternal wall,     The Past shall reappear.     Think ye the notes of holy song     On Milton's tuneful ear have died?     Think ye that Raphael's angel throng     Has vanished from his side?     Oh no! We live our life again;     Or warmly touched, or coldly dim,     The pictures of the Past remain,     Man's works shall follow him