Introduction (Fisher 1837)

Another year—again our page
    Goes wandering over sea and land,
And gathers, in its pilgrimage,
    The shells on many a foreign strand;—

And asks their music and their dreams—
    What of the future, and the past.
Waking the visionary gleams
    Around the colder present cast.

Two worlds there are—one, chill and stern,
    Is the external world alone,
Whose lessons all mankind must learn,
    Whose troubles all mankind have known.

It were too harsh, it were too cold,
    But for the world within that lies;
The spirit, by the clay controlled,
    There yet asserts its native skies.

It is the minstrel’s part to fling
    Around the present’s common cope,
The solemn hues on Memory’s wing,
    The spiritual light of Hope.

The scene that to a careless eye
    Seems nothing but itself to be,
Has charmed earth and haunted sky—
    Seen as the minstrel’s eye can see.

Himself is but an instrument
    Inspired by that diviner hour,
When first Imagination lent
    To earth its passion and its power.

Its presence to the heart of man
    Is like the sunshine to the earth:
The soul of its eternal plan,
    And whence the beautiful has birth.

All things divine and elevate
    Attend its mighty influence here—
The daylight of our actual state,
    The moral glory of our sphere.

Without its being, earth’s fair face
    Has no sweet shadows, flung of yore;
The present lacks the sacred grace
    Bequeathed by those that are no more.

Without such lovely light the while,
    Dark, silent, strange, all scenes would be;
And Ithaca were but an isle,
    Unknown, upon a nameless sea!

But now a thousand years come back,
    The gift of one immortal line;
Each with new splendor on its track,
    As stars upon the midnight shine.

All tender thoughts that fill the heart
    With tears, and dreams more soft than tears,
Have in imagination part,
    Which sanctifies what it endears.

I only wake the softest chord
    That is upon the dreaming lyre;
One low, one love-touched whispering word,
    Which asks its tears, but not its fire.

I ask of every pictured scene
    What human hearts have beaten there;
What sorrow on their soil has been,
    What hope has lighted human care?

I have myself forgot regret,
    Care, trouble, wrong, amid my strain;
If I win others to forget,
    My song has not been quite in vain.