IX.

'Lightly step over the sands! the water - you hear them call!

Life with its anguish, and horrors, and errors away with it all!' And she laid her hand in my own - she was always loyal and sweet — Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our feet. There was a strong sea-current work sweep us out to the main. 'Ah God' tho' I felt as I spoke I was taking the name in vain

'Ah God' and we turn'd to each other, we kiss'd, we embraced, she and I. Knowing the Love we were used to be lieve everlasting would die: We had read their know-nothing books and we lean'd to the darker sideAh God, should we find Him, perhaps, perhaps, if we died, if we died; We never had found Him on earth, this earth is a fatherless Hell

'Dear Love, for ever and ever, for ever and ever farewell,'

Never a cry so desolate not since the world began,

Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man!

X.

But the blind wave cast me ashore, and you saved me, a valueless life. Not a grain of gratitude mine! You have parted the man from the wife. I am left alone on the land, she is all alone in the sea;

If a curse meant aught, I would curse you for not having let me be.

XI.

Visions of youth - for my brain was drunk with the water, it seems;

I had past into perfect quiet at length out of pleasant dreams,

And the transient trouble of drowningwhat was it when match'd with the pains

Of the hellish heat of a wretched life rushing back thro' the veins?

"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 nath ever been. The...neless 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,

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

Nor yet that thou art mortal - nay, my

son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak

with thee,

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 egg,

She finds the fountain where they wail'd 'Mirage'!

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 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 would'st 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."

But that one ripple on the boundless deep Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself

For ever changing form, but evermore One with the boundless motion of the deep.

"Yet wine and laughter friends! and set The lamps alight, and call

For golden music, and forget

The darkness of the pall."

If utter darkness closed the day, my

son

But earth's dark forehead flings athwart the heavens