LONDON, thou hast thy poet; lift thy head! Florence may find sweet homage in his lays, But thou,—thou art his home, with thee he stays; And in his poems loving eyes have read Thy very self; the multitudinous tread Of that quick motley throng that crowds thy ways, Where all the game is tangled, and who plays For this world only, wins a stone for bread. Standing on solid earth, with heaven above, The squalor and splendour of life thy poet sees, The sordid seeming, and the fact divine; Grim byways, lacking not their almond-trees, And, in the midmost noise and whirl, a shrine, A sacred altar to the Lord of Love. |