But when the solar orb has ceased to mark the flight of time,
And three yards off is nothingness--indefinite, sublime,--

Then in the City's teeming streets each soul can get its share,
Its concentrated essence of the high romance of air,
Whose cloudy symbols KEATS beheld, and yearn'd to jot them down,
But anybody nowadays can swallow them in town.

There are, who, fain to dry the tear, and soothe the choking throat,
Would burn those tokens of the hearth that fondly o'er us float;
They cannot trace amid the gloom each dainty spire and whorl,
But smoke, to the true poet's eye, is never out of curl.

The sardine in his oily den, his little house of tin,
Headless and heedless there he lies, no move of tail or fin,
Yet full as beauteous, I ween, that press'd and prison'd fish,
As when in sunny seas he swam unbroken to the dish.

A unit in the vasty world of waters far away,
We could nor taste his toothsome form, nor watch his merry play,
But, prison'd thus, to fancy's eye, he brings his native seas,
The olive-groves of Southern France--perchance the Pyrenees.

The brown sails of the fishing-boats, the lithe sea-season'd crew,
The spray that shakes the sunlight off beneath the breezy blue,
The netted horde that shames the light with their refulgent sheen--
Such charm the gods who dwell on high have given the chill sardine.

So when we find long leagues of smoke compacted in the air,
'Tis not the philosophic part to murmur or to swear,