When science from creation’s face
Enchantment’s veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws!
Campbell.
FANCY, thou art a waking dream,
For ever frail and flitting,
Like sunlight on a varying stream,
With shadows intermitting.
Thou art a bird in song and heart,
Mirth’s ever favoured minion,
‘Tis thine amidst the clouds to dart,
On gay fantastic pinion.
Thou art a queen but of what land,
No human wights discover,
Save those enchanted by thy wand,
The poet, child, and lover.
They revel ‘mid the shows of things,
And pleasure but ideal,
To their rapt heart contentment brings,
To them is treasure real.
PHILOSOPHY derides their sport,
Majestically deeming
These butterflies of nature’s court,
Degrade her by their dreaming.
He looks abroad, and tells of space
Magnificently spreading,
Calls every star a dwelling-place,
Where men perchance are treading.
Flowers he can class, make light his own,
All nature’s analyser,
He only loves her having grown
Mechanically wiser.
But Fancy not a moment checks
Her wanderings aerial,
With “wreathed smiles, and nods, and becks,”
She scoffs his laws material.
The stars are little drops of light,
Or, power alchymic showing,
She deems them “golden eyes of night”
From earthly matter growing.
The flowers, the fields, the air of earth,
She views in simple glory,
Loves with the joy of infant mirth,
And consecrates in story.
Yet nature will to her unseal
Deep secrets, all unbidden,
Beauty, no learning may reveal,
And truths from reason hidden.
Philosophy, thou sway’st the mind,
In thought, in action dealing;
Thou, Fancy, art in hearts enshrined,
Thy triumphs those of feeling.
(Mary Jane Jewsbury)
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Based on Topics: Love Poems, Night Poems, Light Poems, Mind Poems, Nature Poems, Joy & Excitement Poems, Dreams Poems, Place Poems, Flowers Poems, Kings & Queens Poems, Thought & Thinking PoemsBased on Keywords: majestically, becks, mechanically, intermitting