All day the Sun looked down

On England; heath and town,

Cornland and woodland, mountain and champaign,

And the bright tangled skein

Of Thames, Avon, Severn, Trent—

Everywhere his beams went.

They lightened upon ships far out to sea,

And sifted every tree.

And few, and dull, were they

Abroad in England that day,

But looking up at the blue heavens overhead,

‘Fine harvest weather,’ said.

Turning him to his rest

Within the patient West—

As though he kept the primal law in mind

To multiply his kind—

Throughout the land his rays

Set windows in a blaze;

But nowhere, save at Wells in Somerset,

Did a live Sun beget.

There, under cottage brows,

Glittered intact the spouse

Whose steadfast welcome the steadfast greeting could match,

And fired a neighbour’s thatch.

Strange chance! (Enough to undo

Man’s wit, might he look through

Seeing, and know the Sun an enormous spark

In caves of endless dark;

And, like ourselves, condemned

His little light to expend

By rote. But our imaginations deck

The heaven’s hideous black.)

Strange chance! meeting well-met!

Chance more wild-faring yet

I woo, that with long hope and true intent

My burning-glass present

To that unmeasured, un-

surmiseable incendiary of suns—

Life—that some beam of it, matched by my art,

May fire a stranger’s heart.