This wealth of waters might but seem to draw

From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,

Yon summit half-a-league in air - and higher,

The cloud that hides it-higher still, the heavens

Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout

The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.

I am wearied of our city, son, and go
To spend my one last year among the hills.
What hast thou there? Some deathsong
for the Ghouls

To make their banquet relish? let me read.

"How far thro' all the bloom and brake
That nightingale is heard!
What power but the bird's could make
This music in the bird?
How summer-bright are yonder skies,
And earth as fair in hue!

And yet what sign of aught that lies
Behind the green and blue?

But man to-day is fancy's fool

As man hath ever been.

The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule Were never heard or seen."

If thou would'st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive

Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,

By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, As if thou knewest, tho' thou canst not know;

For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake

That sees and stirs the surface-shadow

there

But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within
The blue of sky and sea, the green of
earth,

And in the million-millionth of a grain
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself,
Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And when thou sendest thy free soul thro' heaven,

Nor understandest bound nor boundless

ness,

Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred

names.

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all

Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No,'

She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer thro' the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless

"What rules but the Days and Hours
That cancel weal with woe,
And wind the front of youth with flowers,
And cap our age with snow?"

The days and hours are ever glancing by, And seem to flicker past thro' sun and shade,

Or short, or long, as Pleasure leads, or Pain;

But with the Nameless is nor Day nor Hour;

Tho' we, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought,

Break into 'Thens' and 'Whens' the Eternal Now :

This double seeming of the single world!My words are like the babblings in a dream

Of nightmare, when the babblings break the dream.

But thou be wise in this dream-world of ours,

Nor take thy dial for thy deity,

But make the passing shadow serve thy will.

"The years that made the stripling wise Undo their work again,

And leave him, blind of heart and eyes, The last and least of men;

Who clings to earth, and once would dare

Hell-heat or Arctic cold,
And now one breath of cooler air

Would loose him from his hold;
His winter chills him to the root,
He withers marrow and mind;
The kernel of the shrivell'd fruit
Is jutting thro' the rind;
The tiger spasms tear his chest,
The palsy wags his head;

The wife, the sons, who love him best
Would fain that he were dead;
The griefs by which he once was wrung
Were never worth the while".

Who knows? or whether this earth-narrow life

Be yet but yolk, and forming in the shell? "The shaft of scorn that once had stung But wakes a dotard smile."

The placid gleam of sunset after storm! "The statesman's brain that sway'd the past

Is feebler than his knees;
The passive sailor wrecks at last
In ever-silent seas;

The warrior hath forgot his arms,
The Learned all his lore;

The changing market frets or charms
The merchant's hope no more;

The prophet's beacon burn'd in vain,
And now is lost in cloud;
The plowman passes, bent with pain,
To mix with what he plow'd;
The poet whom his Age would quote
As heir of endless fame

He knows not ev'n the book he wrote.
Not even his own name.

For man has overlived his day,
And, darkening in the light,
Scarce feels the senses break away
To mix with ancient Night."

The shell must break before the bird can fly.

"The years that when my Youth began Had set the lily and rose

By all my ways where'er they ran,
Have ended mortal foes;

My rose of love for ever gone,
My lily of truth and trust
They made her lily and rose in one,
And changed her into dust.

O rosetree planted in my grief,
And growing, on her tomb,
Her dust is greening in your leaf,
Her blood is in your bloom.
O slender lily waving there,

And laughing back the light,
In vain you tell me 'Earth is fair'
When all is dark as night."

My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,

So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.

Who knows but that the darkness is in man?

The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;

For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then

Suddenly heal'd, how wouldst thou glory in all

The splendours and the voices of the world!

And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet

No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore

Await the last and largest sense to make
The phantom walls of this illusion fade,
And show us that the world is wholly
fair.

"But vain the tears for darken'd years
As laughter over wine,
And vain the laughter as the tears,
O brother, mine or thine,

"For all that laugh, and all that weep,
And all that breathe are one
Slight ripple on the boundless deep
That moves, and all is gone."

From sight and night to lose themselves in day.

I hate the black negation of the bier, And wish the dead, as happier than ourselves

And higher, having climb'd one step beyond Our village miseries, might be borne in white

To burial or to burning, hymn'd from hence With songs in praise of death, and crown'd with flowers!

"O worms and maggots of to-day Without their hope of wings!"

But louder than thy rhyme the silent Word Of that world-prophet in the heart of

man.

"Tho' some have gleams or so they say Of more than mortal things."

To-day? but what of yesterday? for oft On me, when boy, there came what then I call'd,

Who knew no books and no philosophies, In my boy-phrase 'The Passion of the Past.'

The first gray streak of earliest summerdawn,

The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom,

As if the late and early were but oneA height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower

Had murmurs 'Lost and gone and lost and gone!'

A breath, a whisper- some divine farewell

Desolate sweetness - far and far away What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy?

I know not and I speak of what has been. And more, my son! for more than once when I

"And Night and Shadow rule below When only Day should reign."

And Day and Night are children of the Sun,

And idle gleams to thee are light to me. Some say, the Light was father of the Night,

And some, the Night was father of the Light,

No night no day!-I touch thy world again

No ill no good! such counter-terms, my

as

this

Raving politics, never at rest poor earth's pale history runs, What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns? Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourn'd by the wise, Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies;

Stately purposes, valour in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet,

Death for the right cause, death for the

wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat;

Innocence seethed in her mother's milk,

and Charity setting the martyr aflame; Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, and recks not to ruin a realm in her name.

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow'd up by her vassal legion of fools;

Trade flying over a thousand seas with her spice and her vintage, her silk and her

Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise; gloom of the evening, Life at a close; Pleasure who flaunts on her wide down

way with her flying robe and her poison'd rose;

Pain, that has crawl'd from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night

Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light;

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone; Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery gilding the rift in a throne;

Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate:

Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurell'd graves of the Great; Love for the maiden, crown'd with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been, Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean; National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire; Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind:

He that has nail'd all the flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;

All new-old revolutions of Empire-change of the tide-what is all of it worth? What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer, All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair? What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last? Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees in their hive?

--

.

Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive.