THE BURNING-GLASS

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.