E.A.P.; ON THE FLY-LEAF OF WHITTY'S 'POE' by GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

IN the proudest of the nations
Was a wandering poet born;
Skyward its accumulations
Towered, from mine and forest torn;
Never state was so victorious
In world-plundering wars of gold;
Never land so earthly glorious
Of the conquering lands of old.

From the star-bound pole of heaven
That spins in lyric mirth,
Where the Pleiads are, the Seven,
Came that vagrant soul to earth;
Echoes of some lost existence,
Pre-natal melody,
As of angels in the distance,
Haunted his mortality.

But because the poet ever
Needs befriending, most of men,
And his soul reposes never
In the gross and citizen,
From the moment that he quickened
In the heavy air,
The heavenly spirit pined and sickened
Because no love was there.

Spectral thoughts -- grim foes -- assailed him
Only poets' minds evoke;
Nought his beauty there availed him,
Dying, stroke on stroke;
Long his genius pleaded, pealing
Melancholy chimes, --
As from Paradise came stealing
The supra-mundane rhymes.

Then his living turned to anguish
Of the demon-driven storm,
And men saw his glory languish
Into one pale form,
Ghostly, ghastly, -- and his heart was torn with
Life's wan dream, Despair;
And the beauty he was born with
Faded in the sepulchre.

The proudest of the nations
Watched that starved power decay;
Heard the maniac lamentations
Where that soul of beauty lay.
Now, men whisper, genius glorious
Flees that barbarous strand forlorn,
Lined with turrets, gold-victorious, --
And no poets there are born.

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