. . . . .
I am made up of an intensest life,"

and all the succeeding lines down to "Their spirit dwelt in me,
and I should rule."

Even then the poet's inner life was animated by his love
of the beautiful Greek literature. Telling how in "the first dawn of life,"
"which passed alone with wisest ancient books," Pauline's lover
incorporated himself in whatsoever he read -- was the god wandering
after beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light,
the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos --
his second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear
as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him,
then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns
the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him
the electric awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty,
nor sweet nature's face" --

"Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea:
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves --
And nothing ever will surprise me now --
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."

Further, the allusion to Plato, and the more remote one to Agamemnon, the

"old lore
Loved for itself, and all it shows -- the King