• These coins that jostle on my hand do own
• No single image: each name here & date
• Marks? Denoting in man's consciousness & in his state
• New change. In some, the face is clearly known,—
• In others marred. The badge of some that old throne
• Of Kings is on the obverse; or that this sign
• Which says, “I France am all— ah wholly mine/ [?] lo, I am mine!”
• Or else the eagle that dared soar alone.
• Even as these coins, so are these lives & years
• 10 Mixed and bewildered; yet hath each of them
• No less its part in what is come to be
• For France. Empire, Republic, Monarchy,—
• Each beast—more or less strongly but the ? clamours or keeps silence in her name,
• Has life—even in And lives within the pulse that now is hers.

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• Scarcely, I think; yet it indeed may be
• The meaning reached him, when this music rang
• Sharp through his brain, a distinct rapid pang,
• And he beheld these rocks and that ridged sea.
• But I believe he just leaned passively,
• And felt their hair carried across his face
• As each nymph passed him; nor gave ear to trace
• How many feet; nor bent assuredly
• His eyes from the vague fixedness of thought
• 10 To see the dancers. It is bitter glad
• Even unto tears. Its meaning filleth it,
• A portion of most secret life: to wit:—
• Each human pulse shall keep the sense it had
• For all, though the mind's labour run to nought.

   

• I waited for the train unto Versailles.
• I hung with bonnes and gamins on the bridge
• Watching the gravelled road where, ridge with ridge,
• Under black arches gleam the iron rails
• Clear in the darkness, till the darkness fails
• And they press on to light again—again
• To reach the dark. I waited for the train
• Unto Versailles; I leaned over the bridge,
• And wondered, cold and drowsy, why the knave
• 10 Claude is in worship; and why (sense apart)
• Rubens preferred a mustard vehicle.
• The wind veered short. I turned upon my heel
• Saying, “Correggio was a toad”; then gave
• Three dizzy yawns, and knew not of the Art.

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• In a dull swiftness we are carried by
• With bodies left at sway and shaking knees.
• The wind has ceased, or is a feeble breeze
• Warm in the sun. The leaves are not yet dry
• From yesterday's dense rain. All, low and high,
• A strong green country; but, among its trees,
• Ruddy and thin with Autumn. After these
• There is the city still before the sky. x x x
• Versailles is reached. Pass we the galleries
• 10 And seek the gardens. A great silence here,
• Thro the long planted alleys, to the long
• Distance of water. More than tune or song,
• Silence shall grow to awe within thine eyes,
• Till thy thought swim with the blue turning sphere.

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• “Messieurs, le Dieu des peintres”. We felt odd;—
• 'Twas Rubens, sculptured. A mean florid church
• Was the next thing we saw,—from vane to porch
• His drivel. The Museum: as we trod
• Its steps, his bust held us at bay. The clod
• Has slosh by miles along the wall within.
• Poor ass!(“I say, I somehow feel my gorge begin
• To rise.”) His chair in a glass case, by God!
• . . . To the Cathedral! Here too the vile snob
• 10 Has fouled in every corner. (“Wherefore brave
• Our fate? Let's bolt go.”) There is a monument
• We pass. “Messieurs, you tread upon the grave
• Of the great Rubens.” “Well, that's one good job!
• What time to-morrow this evening is the train for Ghent?”

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• We are upon the Scheldt. We know we move
• Because there is a floating at our eyes
• Whatso they seek; and because all the things
• Which at on our outset were distinct and large
• Are smaller and much weaker, and quite grey,
• And at last gone from us. No motion else.

• We are upon the road. The thin swift moon
• Runs with the running clouds that are the sky,
• And with the running water runs—at whiles
• 10Weak 'neath the film and heavy growth of reeds.
• The country swims with motion. Time itself
• Is consciously beside us, and perceived.
• Our speed is such, the sparks our engine leaves
• Are burning after the whole train has passed.

• The darkness is a tumult. We tear on,
• The roll behind us and the cry before,
• Constantly, in a lull of intense speed
• And thunder. Any other sound is known
• Merely by sight. The shrubs, the trees your eye
• 20Scans for their growth, are far along in haze.
• The sky has lost its clouds, and lies away
• Oppressively at calm: the moon has failed:
• Our speed has set the wind against us. Now
• Our engine's heat is fiercer, and flings up
• Great glares alongside. Wind, and steam, & speed,
• And clamour, and the night. We are in Ghent.

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• Ah yes, exactly so: but when a man
• Has trundled out of England into France
• And half through Belgium, always in this prance
• Of steam, and still has stuck to his first plan
• Blank verse or sonnets; and as he began
• Would end:—why, even the blankest verse may chance
• To falter in default of circumstance,
• And even the sonnet lack its mystic span.
• Trees will be trees, grass grass, pools merely pools,
• 10 Unto the end of time and Belgium. Points
• Of fact which Poets (very abject fools)
• Get scent of—once their epithets grown tame
• And scarce. Even to these foreign rails—my joints
• Begin to find their jolting much the same.

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