Talent And Genius Poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch

I.
ON the high road travelling steady,
Sure, alert, and ever ready,
Prompt to seize all fit occasion,
Courting power and wealth and station;
One clear aim before him keeping
With a vigilance unsleeping;
Prizing most the ephemeral flower
Blooming for a brilliant hour;
With self-conscious action moving;
Well known truths intent on proving;
Radiant in his day and season
With the world's reflected reason;
Noting times, effects, and causes,
Phaon wins the crowd's applauses.
II.
Wing'd like an eagle o'er mountains and meadows,
Lit by their splendors or hid by their shadows;
Borne by a power supernal, resistless;
Dreaming through trances abstracted and listless;
Swooping capricious to faults and to errors,
Redeemed by a virtue unconscious of terrors;
Linking with ease his result and endeavor;
Opening through chaos fresh pathways forever;
Gilding the world with his thoughts and his fancies;
Scornful of fashions and heedless of chances;
Yet in obscurity living and dying —
Hylas, a voice in the wilderness crying,
Only is heard when no hand can restore him,
Only is known when the grave closes o'er him.