SONNET

(WITH A COPY OF Mademoiselle de Maupin)

This is the golden book of spirit and sense, The holy writ of beauty; he that wrought Made it with dreams and faultless words and thought That seeks and finds and loses in the dense Dim air of life that beauty's excellence Wherewith love makes one hour of life distraught And all hours after follow and find not aught. Here is that height of all love's eminence Where man may breathe but for a breathing‑space And feel his soul burn as an altar‑fire To the unknown God of unachieved desire, And from the middle mystery of the place Watch lights that break, hear sounds as of a quire, But see not twice unveiled the veiled God's face.