Sweet is the poesy of the olden time,
In the unsullied infancy of rhyme,
When Nature reigned omnipotent to teach,
And Truth and Feeling owned the powers of speech.
Rich is the music of each early theme,
And sweet as sunshine in a summer dream,
Giving to stocks and stones, in rapture’s strife,
A soul of utterance and a tongue of life.
Sweet are these wild flowers in their disarray,
Which Art and Fashion fling as weeds away,
To sport with shadows of inferior kind,
Mere magic-lanthorns of the shifting mind,
Automatons of wonder-working powers,
Shadows of life, and artificial flowers.