There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems
Made to Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser--or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch's sonnets--here's the book--the leaf is folded
down!
Or at times a modern volume,--Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie,--
Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate', which, if cut deep down the
middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.