Scenes Of The Mind

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I have run where festival was loud
  With drum and brass among the crowd
  Of panic revellers, whose cries
  Affront the quiet of the skies;
  Whose dancing lights contract the deep
  Infinity of night and sleep
  To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire.
  And I have found my heart's desire
  In beechen caverns that autumn fills
  With the blue shadowiness of distant hills;
  Whose luminous grey pillars bear
  The stooping sky: calm is the air,
  Nor any sound is heard to mar
  That crystal silence--as from far,
  Far off a man may see
  The busy world all utterly
  Hushed as an old memorial scene.
  Long evenings I have sat and been
  Strangely content, while in my hands
  I held a wealth of coloured strands,
  Shimmering plaits of silk and skeins
  Of soft bright wool. Each colour drains
  New life at the lamp's round pool of gold;
  Each sinks again when I withhold
  The quickening radiance, to a wan
  And shadowy oblivion
  Of what it was. And in my mind
  Beauty or sudden love has shined
  And wakened colour in what was dead
  And turned to gold the sullen lead
  Of mean desires and everyday's
  Poor thoughts and customary ways.
  Sometimes in lands where mountains throw
  Their silent spell on all below,
  Drawing a magic circle wide
  About their feet on every side,
  Robbed of all speech and thought and act,
  I have seen God in the cataract.
  In falling water and in flame,
  Never at rest, yet still the same,
  God shows himself. And I have known
  The swift fire frozen into stone,
  And water frozen changelessly
  Into the death of gems. And I
  Long sitting by the thunderous mill
  Have seen the headlong wheel made still,
  And in the silence that ensued
  Have known the endless solitude
  Of being dead and utterly nought.
  Inhabitant of mine own thought,
  I look abroad, and all I see
  Is my creation, made for me:
  Along my thread of life are pearled
  The moments that make up the world.

© Aldous Huxley