New learning all! yet fresh from fountains old,
Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep:
Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unroll'd,
And mouldering volumes from monastic sleep,
Reclad with life by more than magic art:
Till that old world renew'd
His youth, and in the past the present own'd its part.

--O vision that ye saw, and hardly saw,
Ye who in Alfred's path at Oxford trod,
Or in our London train'd by studious law
The little-ones of Christ to Him and God,
Colet and Grocyn!--Though the world forget
The labours of your love,
In loving hearts your names live in their fragrance yet.

O vision that our happier eyes have seen!
For not till peace came with Elizabeth
Did those fair maids of holy Hippocrene
Cross the wan waves and draw a northern breath:
Though some far-echoed strain on Tuscan lyres
Our Chaucer caught, and sang
Like her who sings ere dawn has lit his Eastern fires;--

Herald of that first splendour, when the sky
Was topaz-clear with hope, and life-blood-red
With thoughts of mighty poets, lavishly
Round all the fifty years' horizon shed:--
Now in our glades the Aglaian Graces gleam,
Around our fountains throng,