As, in musical cadence full and tender,
Which was half like talking and half like singing,
And up-borne on a mighty sway and swinging,
She spoke what I cannot rightly render,
But can only give in plain narration,
Like a noble poem's bad translation.

She said that he must leave his home,
And up and down the wide world roam,
Till, in a land beyond the seas,—
A land far off in the lulling distance,
Where the winds are drows'd in the thick pine trees
With the murmur of their sweet persistence,—
He should attain to Life's chief Treasure,
The bliss that knows not stint nor measure;
Yea, even unto the high communion
Of soul with soul in mystical union,
Wherefrom, by a process unbeholden,
The leaden dross of earth turns golden,
As sullen Winter melts to smiles
When Spring's warm arms are round him folden.
But if thenceforward he should leave
This wealthy boon of Heaven's sending,
And throw contempt on such great befriending
He might wander over weary miles,
And sit in weedy nooks and grieve,
Yet never after would regain
The end and guerdon of his pain;
Never till he had cross'd a dim
And noiseless river with crumbling brim,
Whose stream flows onward steady and swift
Beneath a sky of blackest seeming,
Which on the other shore is rift
By the lustre of a crystal clift
And a royal city vast and gleaming:
A city built with domes and towers
And terraces of blossoming flowers,
Where the sculptured colonnades behold,
Through their sultry light of beaten gold,
The far-off silver spires freeze
In the shadows of high pyramides:
The home of many crown'd Magicians,
And solemn pageantry of visions,
Closed round with triple walls, and sheer,
Between whose bulwarks broad and steep
The green tops of the palm-trees sleep
In the still and scented atmosphere.

And, having to this purpose spoken,
In empty air, she paled and vanish'd
And all the magic gleams lay broken
Before the darkness they had banish'd.
Walter was seiz'd with a general quaking
When the Shape had gone; and, at length awaking,
Saw the shining fringe of morning light
On the edge of the eastern robe of Night;
When, suddenly into rapture breaking,
He cried aloud, " To me is given
The glorious task of making known
The nature of the Marvellous Stone
And the noblest secret under Heaven.
Yet the Spirit might have spared her warning;
For who would leave the great adorning
Which comes of the only perfect Science?
Trust me, O Spirit sweet and fair,
That, by the exquisite appliance
Of thy most sumptuous revelation,
A radiance primitive and rare
Shall flow from nation unto nation,
Till all the world is richly lying
In the Golden Age that is undying.

It was not long
Ere Walter, with only one attendant,
But his heart like a star in the ascendant,
Set out on his adventurous travel
Through distant countries, and among
Outlandish people subtle and strong,
This solemn Mystery to unravel.
I will not speak of half his wanderings,
Or a quarter of his schemes and ponderings:
Suffice it, that, from France to Poland,
From Greece to Muscovy, there was no land
Of Europe—North, South, East, or West—
That came not in his painful quest
After Alchemical Philosophy.
Likewise, all grave and learned men
Who kept the planets in their ken,
Or had any pretension to theosophy,—
Those priests of science, who took their stand
In the mists of that debatable land
Between religion and gymnosophy,—
He sought for, and consulted often:
And sometimes in old tomby places
And abbey ruins whose ponderous bases
The rains and the tempest sap and soften,
He would delve at midnight by the glimmer
Of a leering lanthorn that made still dimmer
The walls and the gloomy interspaces,
In the hope of finding the Stone of all stones;
But, although he dug up large and small stones
And tested their virtues in projection,
Years laps'd, and yielded not the spoil
Of all his travel and weary toil,
While in nowise changing his mind's direction.

The years they came, the years they passed;
And a purple day-spring dawn'd at last
Over his work of dross and mire.
—You have doubtless found in Life's short proem
When the Universe's epic poem,
As if pregnant with God's etherial fire,
Is veil'd in the awful light of Beauty,
And the earth, like a sudden revelation,
Seems all fresh with the dew of its creation,—
You have found in that season rich and fruity
A strange delight—a winged wonder—
A living soul in sight and sound,
That fills as with harmonious thunder
And flame the regions over and under,
And the meanest aspects standing round—
A song from which all discords dwindled—
A light as of a star just kindled
In some white virgin tract of space:
And I wot you know as well as I do
That this magic centres in one face;
For, since the period of Queen Dido,
(Or, perhaps, in days still more antique
Than those of fabulous Æneas)
We've all been subject to this freak,
Albeit some sages strive to free us.
Even thus in time it chanced with Walter:
Not that his heart began to falter
In seeking for the promised boon;
Or that he felt the burning noon
Of existence growing an oppression;
But simply that the sweet possession
Of that gentle mystery, like a dream,
Through the silent chambers of his being,
Brought depths on depths of inward seeing.
And the sunrise of a glory extreme,
Which stamp'd with some divine new mark
Whatever came within its beam.
So, knowing that his hair now dark,