[117]
Then came the bard with his lyre,
And the sage with his pen and scroll,
And the prophet with his eye of fire,
To unriddle a human soul.
But the soul stood up in its might;
Its stature they could not scan;
And it rayed out a dazzling mystic light,
And shamed their wisest plan.
Yet sweetly the bard did sing,
And learnedly talked the sage,
And the seer flashed by with his lightning wing,
Soaring beyond his age.
This is sonorous.
It has a majesty of expression and a greatness of thought which makes
Longfellow's “Psalm of life” seem weak and even common-place.
The whole poem is pitched in the same key, and
Cranch never equalled it again, excepting once, and then in a very different manner.
Rev. Gideon Arch, a Hungarian scholar, philologist, and exile of 1849, said of his “
Endymion” that there were Endymions in all languages, but that
Cranch's was the best.
To resuscitate it from the oblivion into which it has fallen, it is given entire:
Yes, it is the queenly moon
Walking through her starred saloon,
Silvering all she looks upon:
I am her Endymion;
For by night she comes to me,--
O, I love her wondrously.
