Fact and Fancy

Written 1917


        
            How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind 
            Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind; 
            Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude, 
            And wreck the solace of the poet's mood! 
            Young Zeno, practis'd in the Stoic's art, 
            Rejects the language of the glowing heart; 
            Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws; 
            Condemns th' effect whilst looking for the cause; 
            Freezes poor Ovid in an iced review, 
            And sneers because his fables are untrue! 
            In search of hope the hopeful zealot goes, 
            But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! 
            Stay! Vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast 
            The grateful legends of the storied past; 
            Whose tongue in censure flays th' embellish'd page, 
            And scorns the comforts of a dreary age: 
            Wouldst strip the foliage from the vital bough 
            Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou? 
            Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye 
            Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky; 
            Finds sylphs and dryads in the waving trees, 
            And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze 
            For whom the stream a cheering carol sings, 
            While reedy music by the fountain rings; 
            To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide 
            Till friendly presence fills the rising tide. 
            Happy is he, who void of learning's woes, 
            Th' ethereal life of bodied Nature knows; 
            I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems, 
            And flout his gravity in sunlight dreams! 

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