It was a booth no larger than the rest, <br />No loftier fashioned and no more sublime, <br />As poor a shrine as ever youth possessed <br />In which to worship truth revealed in time. <br />Yet to my soul the mean remembrance clings <br />With all the folly of that far fair eve, <br />And my pulse throbs with lost imaginings, <br />And passion rises from its grave to grieve. <br />Vain dreams, brute images! and over all <br />The shrill--voiced dwarf its hierarch and priest, <br />Vaunting its praise, a pagan prince of Baal. <br />It scared me as of some wild idol feast. <br />``The Booth of Beauty,'' thus it was I read, <br />Blazoned in scarlet letters overhead.<br /><br />Wilfrid Scawen Blunt<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/esther-a-sonnet-sequence-viii/
