1. Without all fear, without presumption, he

2. Who wrote this work would speak respecting it

3. A few brief words, and face his friend the world;

4. Revising, not reversing, what hath been.

5. Poetry is itself a thing of God;

6. He made His prophets poets; and the more

7. We feel of poesie do we become

8. Like God in love and power, — under-makers.

9. All great lays, equals to the minds of men,

10. Deal more or less with the Divine, and have

11. For end some good of mind or soul of man.

12. The mind is this world’s, but the soul is God’s;

13. The wise man joins them here all in his power.

14. The high and holy works, amid lesser lays,

15. Stand up like churches among village cots;

16. And it is joy to think that in every age,

17. However much the world was wrong therein,

18. The greatest works of mind or hand have been

19. Done unto God. So may they ever be!

20. It shews the strength of wish we have to be great,

21. And the sublime humility of might.

22. True fi ction hath in it a higher end

23. Than fact; it is the possible compared

24. With what is merely positive, and gives

25. To the conceptive soul an inner world,

26. A higher, ampler Heaven than that wherein

27. The nations sun themselves. In that bright state

28. Are met the mental creatures of the men

29. Whose names are writ highest on the rounded crown

30. Of Fame's triumphal arch; the shining shapes