Why This Volume Is So Thin.

In youth I dreamed, as other youths have dreamt,          Of love, and thrummed an amateur guitar      To verses of my own,--a stout attempt          To hold communion with the Evening Star      I wrote a sonnet, rhymed it, made it scan.      Ah me! how trippingly those last lines ran.--      O Hesperus!    O happy star! to bend          O'er Helen's bosom in the tranced west,      To match the hours heave by upon her breast,          And at her parted lip for dreams attend--      If dawn defraud thee, how shall I be deemed,      Who house within that bosom, and am dreamed?      For weeks I thought these lines remarkable;          For weeks I put on airs and called myself      A bard: till on a day, as it befell,          I took a small green Moxon from the shelf      At random, opened at a casual place,      And found my young illusions face to face      With this:--'Still steadfast, still unchangeable,          Pillow'd upon my fair Love's ripening breast      To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,          Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;      Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,      And so live ever,--or else swoon to death.'      O gulf not to be crossed by taking thought!          O heights by toil not to be overcome!      Great Keats, unto your altar straight I brought          My speech, and from the shrine departed dumb.     --And yet sometimes I think you played it hard      Upon a rather hopeful minor bard.