Bring us back your wandering Homer!

Glorious pedlar-poem-pack'd!

Midas old shall greet the Roamer

With a clause from Vagrant Act.

Count not on your fresh creation!

Living Homer begged his bread.

'Twas a second generation

Twined its wreath for Homer-dead.

RAISING THE DEAD.

RAISING THE DEAD.

We all have heard, and marvelled as we heard,

Of

seers, who have raised the Dead from out their tombs,

And made them parley. Nor would I gainsay

Such story. For who knows the invisible links,
Mysterious sympathies of life with life,

Or life, perchance, with death? Or guesses what
Thessalian spells, or what divining rod

The soul erewhile may have weird gift to use,
And, with strange power, interrogate the grave,
Yet leave the turf unbroke? Or even may reach
Up the blue regions, where freed spirits dwell,

With her far-finding telescope of love;

Or, may be, hate!

Nay, are our nightly dreams

But fancies of the brain? some straggling shreds
From memory? or, meaner still, mere jet

From stomach or nerve? Or, rather, do we not,
(So sometimes I have deemed) what time we sleep,
If sleep it be, and not a wider waking —
Within the close-drawn curtains, face to face,
Hold actual commerce with the living Dead?
Who stand beside us; and do look upon us;
And well nigh touch us with their stony hands;
And see themselves in our fixed lineaments:

Fit comradeship! dead life with living death!
And then, when morn hath come, with crow of cock,

Or early swallow, twittering by the lattice,

To summon them back to their lonely homes,