Animi Figura 
 
 

 ANIMI FIGURA 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/animifigura01symo 
 
ANIMI FIGURA 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 vap97]K0(l>6pQi TToWot, jSaK^oi de re Travpoi 
 (Plato, Phaed. 6g, C.) 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1882 
 
 rights reserved'^ 
 
I ^ 
 
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 AMICO DILECTISSIMO 
 
 H. R. F. B. 
 
 HANG ANIMI FIGURAM 
 AMICUS POETA 
 
 D.D. 
 
 DAVOSIIS MDCCCLXXXII 
 
 * 
 
 A 3 
 
 501648 
 

PREFACE. 
 
 IS book cannot claim strict unity of subject. 
 Connecting links between its sonnet-sequences 
 are wanting. Yet the fact that they are the 
 product of one mind and deal with cognate problems, gives 
 it a certain unity of tone. Hence the title — borrowed from a 
 famous passage in the Agricola of Tacitus, and suggested to 
 the writer by one whose literary tact and judgment helped 
 to form this Animi Figitra from a mere chaos of miscel- 
 laneous compositions. 
 
 To steal a name from such a source, has the air of pre- 
 sumption. Still, the book is meant to be what it calls itself, 
 the Portrait of a Mind. Nice adaptation may therefore be 
 pleaded as excuse for christening so slight a work by words 
 which every scholar associates with one of the most perfect 
 studies of heroic character transmitted to us from antiquity. 
 
 501648 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 viii 
 
 The mind here figured is intended for that of an artist, 
 as distinguished from the man of action. The chosen tem- 
 perament, moreover, is richer in sensibilities than in artistic 
 faculty.! It is speculative rather than creative. When the 
 meaning of life in general, and the ethics of personality have 
 been discussed, the sense of beauty and its attendant perils 
 supply themes for a more special treatment. The craving 
 for solitude which possesses the man after vain attempts to 
 realise his earlier ideal, gives place to a conviction of sin 
 and failure, inseparable from over-confident application of 
 ethical theories to actual life. It is seen, at this point, that 
 in religion and self-subordination to moral law must be 
 found salvation for a mind thus constituted. But the pro- 
 blem of solving human difficulties by communion with the 
 divine idea is complicated in our age. The whole series 
 ends, therefore, with the soul’s debate upon the fundamental 
 question of man’s place in the universe. 
 
 That this Portrait of a Mind is not a piece of accurate self- 
 delineation will be understood by students of sonnet-literature. 
 They know that this species of poetry has lent itself in all 
 times to the expression of impersonal thought and feeling 
 under forms borrowed from personal experience. The sonnet 
 is essentially a meditative lyric. What the sonnet-writer has 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IX 
 
 conceived as speculation, he is bound by the lyrical con- 
 ditions of his verse to utter as emotion. What conversely 
 has occurred to him as a particular emotion, assumes the 
 character of generality when he invests it with the fixed 
 form of this stanza. On the one hand, he escapes from the 
 aridity of gnomic verse by adopting the language of sub- 
 jective passion. On the other hand, he shuns the direct 
 outpouring of individual joys and griefs by veiling these in 
 a complicated, artificial, stationary structure which can only 
 be accepted as semi-lyrical. 
 
 With regard to the sonnet in general, and to the em- 
 ployment of it in this volume, some observations may be 
 made. The minute attention which has recently been 
 given by English critics to this form, seems to have elicited 
 unanimity of opinion upon at least two important points. 
 
 1. The English sonnet is no longer regarded as an exotic 
 from Italy, but as a poetic species, which, however intro- 
 duced at first, has been acclimatised in England, and has 
 assumed a character accordant with the English genius. 
 
 2. Great varieties in the structure of the sonnet have come 
 to be accepted as equally legitimate ; so that it would now 
 be difficult to exclude a poem of fourteen lines because its 
 rhymes were arranged upon either of the systems exemplified 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 by Surrey, or because they were so irregularly disposed as 
 in the case of Shelley’s Ozymandias. I may refer to the 
 essays inserted by Mr. S. Waddington and Mr. T. Hall 
 Caine in their respective collections entitled English Sennets 
 by Poets of the Prese 7 it and Sontuts of Three Centuries for 
 proofs of this convergence of opinion upon two disputed 
 themes of sonnet-criticism. 
 
 There remains one point which has not yet, I think, 
 been subjected to critical analysis, though Mr. Hall Caine 
 alludes to it in his note on Mrs. Browning (op. cit. p. 310). 
 I mean the question whether the sonnet can be appropriately 
 used as a stanza in poems which demand suspension of the 
 reader’s mind over the more or less prolonged development 
 of some one motive. In other words, MTiat are the just 
 conditions of the sonnet-sequence ? It is clear that the 
 first and larger portion of Shakespeare’s sonnets form a 
 single poem. Though we may detach each stanza for 
 separate consideration, many of these suffer more from iso- 
 lation than any single one of Petrarch’s sonnets In Morte 
 di Madonna Laura would do. Wordsworth’s River Diiddon 
 and hlrs. Browning’s Portuguese Sonnets are sequences, 
 liable to injury in like manner, but not in the same degree, 
 by dismemberment. And the most perfect sonnets which 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XI 
 
 have been published during the last quarter of a century, 
 Mr. D. G. Rossetti’s Willow Wood, are linked together by 
 a chain so delicate that severance is almost mutilation. 
 Still, in all these cases, the essential quality of the sonnet, 
 as hitherto recognised, has been preserved. The continuous 
 argument has been so ordered that each step is presented in 
 a separate and self-sufficient poem. The sonnet has not 
 passed into a strophe. 
 
 Many of the sequences in Animi Figura exhibit a 
 departure from this rule by extending a single train of 
 thought from one sonnet to another in such wise that the 
 point developed in a preceding sonnet is necessary to the 
 comprehension of its successor. Whether this innovation is 
 to be regarded as a violation of the laws of art, or whether 
 it may be accepted as a step in the evolution of the English 
 sonnet, must be left to the consideration of students. It is 
 not without Italian precedent, as the sequences of Folgore 
 da San Gemignano, Campanella’s triad on the Lord’s Prayer, 
 and Onofrio Minzoni’s fine series on the Death of Samson, 
 suffice to prove. Yet, if defence were needed, I should 
 prefer to seek it less in precedent than in the nature of the 
 sonnet itself. The equipoise between the two parts of the 
 stanza lends itself admirably to dialectic, whether this 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 xii 
 
 process of debate be conceived as a dialogue between two 
 persons, or as a conversation carried on within the medi- 
 tative mind. If this point be conceded, it follows that in 
 the conduct of a lengthy argument sonnet may succeed to 
 sonnet, propounding and disputing themes which need for 
 their development the thesis and antithesis of logical discus- 
 sion. That hereby we change the old use of the sonnet will 
 be readily perceived, and must be openly admitted. But it 
 may be urged that something new is gained, which is not 
 inconsistent with that flux and reflux in the sonnet-structure 
 upon which Mr. Hall Caine has eloquently insisted (op. 
 cit. p. xxi), and which he regards, in my opinion rightly, 
 as the distinctive note of the contemporary English 
 sonnet. 
 
 The special fitness of this stanza for themes which 
 demand a monumental style of treatment, the perfec- 
 tion of form which the isolated sonnet assumes in the 
 hands of a true master, are points beyond all contro- , 
 versy. In pleading for the use I have made of it in such 
 sequences as the Debate on Self or Mystery of Mysteries., 
 
 I do but wish to raise a critical question of some inte- 
 rest w'hen we regard the probable future of the sonnet. 
 It certainly w'ould appear that at the present time the 
 
I’REFACE. 
 
 xiii 
 
 sonnet is taking a strong hold on English literature. It 
 has passed beyond that stage of scornful acceptance at the 
 hands of critics which prompted Wordsworth to raise his 
 voice in its defence. Perhaps it is destined to be used even 
 more extensively as the specific vehicle of meditative poetry; 
 and if so, it may accord with its peculiar development in 
 England that it should be employed in continuous poems 
 with the licence I have indicated. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 N.B, — The Sonnets to which an osteTnsk is appended have already 
 appeared in ‘ Many Moods * and ‘ New and Old.* 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A DEDICATION I 
 
 THE INNOVATORS 2 
 
 YGDRASIL . ^7 
 
 ^PERSONALITY II 
 
 *THE PASSING STRANGER 1 3 
 
 PATHS OF LIFE 1 5 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF 1 8 
 
 PRO AND CON ........ 29 
 
 *EROS AND ANTEROS 32 
 
 l’amour de l’impossible 36 
 
 THE TEMPTATION OF ADAM 50 
 
 REVOLT 51 
 
 ♦intellectual ISOLATION 52 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION 59 
 
 o, SI ! o, SI ! 66 
 
 amends 67 
 
 VERSOHNUNG 7 1 
 
 ♦unrest ......... 77 
 
 ♦an old GORDIAN KNOT 79 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE 87 
 
 ♦the thought of death 99 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES I 2 I 
 
I 
 
 A DEDICATION. 
 
 E Bacchus, but a crowd of Thyrse-bearers ! 
 
 So saith the motto on my title-page. 
 
 If this was true in the world’s orient age, 
 
 What hope have I, here amid frozen firs 
 Mending the broken music of past years. 
 
 And like a man whom graver cares engage, 
 .Cheering with song my own life’s pilgrimage. 
 
 While scarce one echo to my singing stirs ? 
 
 Take thou this book. Though frail, foredoomed to perish, 
 Be it the pledge-gift for what shall not fade. 
 
 The loyalty that, each toward each, we cherish. 
 
 The mutual debt that ne’er can be repaid 
 
 Of kindness, feeling, friendship, courtesy. 
 
 Exchanged through many a year ’twixt thee and me. 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 THE INNOVATORS. 
 
 OE unto those who, swen’ing from the ways 
 Of kindly custom, set their soul’s desire 
 On rapt imagination’s wavering fire ; 
 
 Uncertain whether the light that lures their gaze 
 Be dawn’s star orient in the heavens of praise. 
 
 Or phosphorous exhalation from earth’s mire. 
 
 Where husks of creeds, lost lives, foiled hopes expire : 
 Outcasts from home, faith’s Pariahs, in the maze 
 Of doubt and fear they journey ’neath dark skies. 
 
 Lone and despair-bewildered ; like a child. 
 
 Who, wandering lost at eve in forest wild, 
 
 .Sees through grey latticed boughs a smouldering glare. 
 
 And knows not whether it be the swart moon-rise, 
 
 Or bale-fires beaconing from a demon’s lair. 
 
THE INNOVATORS. 
 
 II. 
 
 OE unto those on whom Love’s lamp hath shone 
 With beckoning lustre o’er the untravelled seas, 
 Luring Leander through wild waves that freeze 
 In light malign ’neath waning moonbeams wan ! 
 From life’s firm shore they plunge, and struggle on 
 
 Breasting black breakers crested with a breeze 
 That whispers to mermaidens’ palaces 
 Deep in the darkness of oblivion. 
 
 Hero for them trims her unhallowed oil 
 
 In towers unconsecrate ; and who can say 
 If, having battled with the tempest’s play, 
 
 They shall behold beauty new-born arise 
 
 With heaven’s immortal light in loving eyes. 
 
 Or through blind whirlpools drift, a siren’s spoil ? 
 
 B 2 
 
4 
 
 THE INNOVATORS. 
 
 in. 
 
 OE to doubt’s pioneers ! Against them rise 
 Banded the guardian priests of hearth and home, 
 Who feed faith’s altar flame ’neath custom's dome, 
 And draw world-wisdom from tradition’s eyes : 
 The good, brave, gentle, jocund, loyal, wise. 
 
 Harboured in comely homesteads, loth to roam 
 With death and danger o’er the treacherous foam 
 On blind discovery’s dubious enterprise ; 
 
 The pure, the tender-hearted, on whose lips, 
 
 Dewy with mother’s milk, trembles the prayer 
 Their mothers taught them ; all for whom the bond 
 Of ancient use is holy, w'ho respond 
 
 'Only to oaths rvhereby their fathers sware. 
 
 Shudder in wrath at doubt’s apocal)’pse. 
 
5 
 
 THE INNOVATORS. 
 
 IV. 
 
 ND yet Christ doubted what those Pharisees, 
 Those Rabbis of the hallowed antique creed, 
 Held as it were heaven’s very truth indeed 
 Promulged and ’stablished in God’s chanceries : 
 And doubt dwelt in the heart of Socrates, 
 
 When ’mid Athenian groves he sowed the seed 
 Of living faith and deathless hope, which freed 
 Thought’s dove-wings from despair’s Symplegades. 
 Doubt and the blade of double-edged desire. 
 
 The whetted axe laid to opinion’s tree. 
 
 These are life’s instruments for mounting higher 
 O’er creeds decayed and order’s atrophy : 
 
 Yet who shall prove doubt’s spirit ? Who shall inspire 
 Trust in blind powers which make for anarchy? 
 
6 
 
 THE INNOVATORS. 
 
 V. 
 
 he sage, madman, malefactor, fool. 
 
 Murderer or martyr, the world’s scorn or pride. 
 In Bedlam cells gagged and despised to bide. 
 
 Or crowned with bays give laws from wisdom’s 
 stool, 
 
 Who sets his dauntless intellect to school. 
 
 And with a Samson’s might flings far and wide 
 The treasonous withes wherewith his soul was tied, 
 Hurling defiance at hoar custom’s rule? 
 
 Answer, Calliope ! How oft hast thou 
 Graven thy hero’s history of flame 
 In symbols of derision, hatred, shame. 
 
 Which, when the crown of thorns had bruised his brow. 
 Turned to fair characters of deathless fame. 
 
 Titles to which earth’s proudest empires bow? 
 
7 
 
 YGDRASIL. 
 
 HE tree of life is ever green and whole. 
 
 It grows and grows like a gigantic pine. 
 Through aeons numberless those branches shine 
 Whereof the leaves are lives, each leaf a soul. 
 Creeds are the cones life forms and sheds ; they roll,- 
 Dry gaping husks, when autumn strips the vine. 
 
 And on the fertilising soil decline. 
 
 Barren and grey beneath life’s broadening bole. 
 
 Men change their thoughts of God, fate, sin, free will ; 
 
 For thought is but the unsubstantial shade 
 Of feeling, and pale theory follows still 
 Phantasmal on the path experience made. 
 
 Our faiths, our doctrines, do their work, and fade ; 
 While life abides, the mystic Ygdrasil. 
 
8 
 
 YGDRASIL. 
 
 IK 
 
 HESE therefore — famed religions, systems, creeds. 
 Sciences, shapes of knowledge, social laws. 
 Deductions from the universal cause, — 
 
 Are but the symptoms and effects of deeds. 
 Having expressed whither the world’s life leads. 
 
 Summed past results, flourished with brief applause. 
 They perish ; for the tree, without or pause 
 Or hindrance, strikes new branches, sheds new seeds 
 In feeling, doing, runs the sap of life. 
 
 Nathless each shoot that springs, implies the past : 
 Each faith wins strength and station out of strife. 
 
 Old things in new absorbing, spreads the tree ; 
 
 And still the truth for all eternity 
 Lives in its leaves, not in the husks it cast. 
 
9 
 
 YGDRASIL. 
 
 III. 
 
 NOWLEDGE, condensed in dogma, will be found 
 Falsehood and truth commingled : true in part 
 To the past utterance of the pulsing heart, 
 
 False to the present with experience crowned. 
 True, false, for ever fused and interwound : 
 
 False, true; for ever sundered with the smart 
 Of fibres that reluctantly dispart : 
 
 So runs the wheel of human wisdom round. 
 
 We therefore, born falsehood and truth to cast 
 
 In the just scales of conduct, we who draw 
 Sap from the branch of being, find our law 
 In living self, conditioned by the past. 
 
 Conditioning the present, whence shall roll 
 New music of the sempiternal soul. 
 
10 
 
 YGDRASIL. 
 
 IV. 
 
 self alone past, present, future blend. 
 
 What truth the world hath, is self’s harmon)-. 
 Let self be perfected in thee and me. 
 
 And the world’s choric concert shall not end. 
 Nay, end it cannot. Though men dream they rend 
 With discord the celestial sj-mphony. 
 
 Each note ’s a wave on that mysterious sea : 
 
 Tow'ard God and God’s known purpose all things tend. 
 We are not what we are by chance ; for birth 
 Still binds us to the inviolable past. 
 
 And life conjoins our conduct with the dim 
 Distance through w'hose long years the jocund earth 
 Shall utter God’s experience. First and last. 
 Beginning, midst, and ending meet in Him. 
 
PERSONALITY. 
 
 I. 
 
 KNOW not what I am. — Oh dreadful thought! — 
 Nor know I what my fellow creatures are : 
 Between me and the world without, a bar 
 Impalpable of adamant is wrought, 
 from its own self concealed, is caught 
 Thus in a cage of sense, sequestered far 
 From comradeship, calling as calleth star 
 To star across blank intermediate naught. 
 
 His own self no man sees, and none hath seen 
 
 His brother’s self. Nay, lovers, though they sigh 
 ‘ There is no room for aught to come between 
 Our blended souls in this felicity,’ 
 
 Starting from sleep, shall find a double screen 
 Built ’twixt two sundered selves — and both must die. 
 
12 
 
 PERSONALITY. 
 
 II, 
 
 jlEA, both shall carry with them to the void' 
 Without, the void more terrible within, 
 Tormented haply by the smart of sin. 
 
 And cursing what their wilful sense enjoyed. 
 Yet were they free to take or to avoid ? 
 
 Who knows ! — Amid the dull chaotic din 
 Of wrangling schools which argument can win 
 Conviction, when blind faith hath been destroyed ? 
 Freedom or servitude ? — So fooled is man 
 
 By blind self-ignorance, he cannot say 
 If will alone beneath heaven’s azure span 
 Its self-determined impulses obey ; 
 
 Or if each impulse, wild as wind at play. 
 
 Be but a cog-wheel in the cosmic plan. 
 
13 
 
 THE PASSING STRANGER. 
 
 F all the mysteries wherethrough we move, 
 
 This is the most mysterious — that a face, 
 
 Seen peradventure in some distant place, 
 Whither we can return no more to prove 
 The world-old sanctities of human love. 
 
 Shall haunt our waking thoughts, and gathering grace 
 Incorporate itself with every phase 
 Whereby the soul aspires to God above. 
 
 Thus are we wedded through that face to her 
 
 Or him who bears it ; nay, one fleeting glance. 
 Fraught with a tale too deep for utterance. 
 
 Even as a pebble cast into the sea. 
 
 Will on the deep waves of our spirit stir 
 Ripples that run through all eternity. 
 
THE PASSING STRANGER. 
 
 II. 
 
 S^OUL cries to soul, as star to sundered star 
 
 Calls through the void of intermediate night ; 
 And as each tiniest spark of steUar light 
 Includes a world where moving myriads are, 
 Thus every glance seen once and felt afar 
 
 Symbols an universe : the spirit’s might 
 Leaps through the gazing eyes, with infinite 
 Pulsations that no lapse of years can mar. 
 
 He therefore dwells within me still ; and I 
 
 Within him dwell ; though neither clasp of hand 
 Nor interchange of converse made us one : 
 
 And it shall surely be that when we die. 
 
 In God shall both see clear and understand 
 What soul to soul spake, sun to brother sun. 
 
PATHS OF LIFE. 
 
 . I. 
 
 RIEND, let us try conclusions! Long ago, 
 Speaking of love, you said : pleasure of sense 
 Is only sanctified by permanence ; 
 
 On bride-beds bridal vows their blessings strew. 
 This too you said : the rose of love can blow 
 
 But rarely ; once or haply twice, the intense 
 Perfume exhales which breathes on innocence 
 Passion’s red bloom — life’s sun-blush on pure snow. 
 He then who with inconstant careless wing 
 
 Fluttering from flower to flower, from friend to friend. 
 Counts fellowship a cheap and transient thing, 
 
 By swift or slow declension must descend 
 
 Into the mire where weeds ill-savoured spring. 
 Foredoomed the seamless coat of Love to rend. 
 
i6 
 
 PATHS OF LIFE. 
 
 II. 
 
 TAKE both points, and answer : you misread 
 Marriage and comradeship ; the one ordained 
 For lifelong fellow-service, high sustained 
 By hope of children and the world’s great need ; 
 
 The other, plumed like wind-home thistle-seed, 
 
 Settles where’er it listeth, unconstrained. 
 
 The end whereof in offspring is attained 
 Of thoughts and acts, an immaterial breed. 
 
 The hearth, the city shelter that. This spreads 
 
 Tents on the open road, field, ocean, camp. 
 
 Where’er in brotherhood men lay their heads. 
 
 Soldier with soldier, tramp with casual tramp. 
 
 Cross and recross, meet, part, share boards and beds. 
 Where wayside Love still lights his beaconing lamp. 
 
17 
 
 PATHS OF LIFE. 
 
 in. 
 
 all are wanderers. It is not for naught 
 Life has been likened to the world’s highway. 
 But if this game of wandering we must play, 
 
 See that we learn what simple folk have taught. 
 No tent of love, however lightly wrought. 
 
 Crumbles and falls resolved in formless clay ; 
 
 But, unconsumed in everlasting day. 
 
 Waits and creates the palace-dome of thought. 
 
 Thus then I solve your problem. Transient love. 
 
 Plucked by the roadside, a perennial rose. 
 
 Abides and blossoms in that sphere above, 
 
 That hyper-heavenly realm, where human woes 
 
 And human joys run clear, where souls repose. 
 
 God guards the secret and the use thereof. 
 
 » C 
 
DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 I. 
 
 RIEND, on a dark and tempest-troubled sea 
 Your sails are driven, and whither you run or 
 where 
 
 We know not : fiends around in the wild air 
 Seem fighting for your life confusedly. 
 
 Fain would I help. What help is found in me ? 
 
 Each soul, alone unto herself, must bear 
 The heartache out of which man wins despair 
 Or hope according to his faculty. 
 
 Nathless one thing is certain ; who hath known 
 
 Truth, beauty, goodness, shining in their sphere. 
 Shall not be lost through any lesser lure. 
 
 On black tempestuous waves he may be thrown ; 
 
 Yet to the right port shall he surely steer. 
 
 And God Himself shall make his doings pure. 
 
19 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 II. 
 
 AN hath much need of courage ; need to brace 
 His spiritual nerve in solitude ; 
 
 Self-trusting, self-sustained, and self-imbued ; 
 Seeking God in his own heart’s secret place. 
 
 To perfect self, and in that self embrace 
 
 The triune essence of truth, beauty, good ; 
 
 This is fulfilment, this beatitude 
 
 Throned high above base fears and hopes more base. 
 
 What shall it profit us if, gaining all 
 
 The privilege of priest-made paradise. 
 
 We lose therewith our self which is the soul ? 
 
 And wherefore should we shrink from even the fall. 
 
 If haply we should fail with steadfast eyes 
 Fixed only on so bright, so pure a goal ? 
 
 C 2 
 
20 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 jlATH sin then force to ripen and unfold 
 
 The soul’s flower to the light of nourishing day. 
 Disclosing potencies that slumbrous lay 
 Clasped in the bud, a mine of anthered gold ? 
 Nay, listen ! In some parable ’tis told 
 
 How that a serpent, weary of his grey 
 Life ’mid the dust upon the world’s highway. 
 Devoured a toad sweltering with venom cold : 
 
 Swift through those viperous rings the poison ran ; 
 
 With pain he writhed ; his bright scales changed their 
 hue ; 
 
 Swelled round his stiffening heart the monstrous hide ; 
 Till with a gradual growth from either side 
 
 Sprouted keen claw and light-embattled van ; 
 
 Then through clear air aloft a dragon flew. 
 
21 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 iv. 
 
 CH power, methinks, hath even sin to stir 
 Life in man’s soul. From sloth and dull distress 
 He mounts thereby to mightier consciousness. 
 Translated to a new and livelier sphere. 
 
 There the unfashioned clay of character 
 
 Takes form and purpose, while beneath the stress 
 Of impulse, action, fear, defeat, success. 
 
 The outlines of the essential self appear. 
 
 The risk, you cry, is ruin ; the end, hell ! 
 
 I grant your heart’s reluctance ; yet I know 
 That the soul’s servitude to sleep is death. 
 
 That the soul’s energy is life. Expel 
 
 Sin from the sum of things God made, and breath 
 Fails from the universe, God’s light burns low. 
 
22 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 V. 
 
 HOSO framed good, framed evil too ; and fie 
 Knows what the earth’s huge heart-throbs need 
 for life. 
 
 He counterposed tranquillity to strife, 
 
 Systole weighed against diastole. 
 
 These things may well be termed a mysterj- ; 
 
 For good and evil, like the Delphian knife. 
 
 Are double-handled, and our world is rife 
 With both commingled for eternity. 
 
 Down from the fields of pure untrampled snows. 
 
 Where stars salute the morn and angels tread. 
 Stream-wise the gaunt unyielding glacier goes ; 
 
 By breakage and re-juncture, split and flaw. 
 
 Sealed and resealed, it scoops yon granite bed ; 
 
 Ruin and wreck subserving plastic law. 
 
23 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 VI. 
 
 ARDON ! My speech was crude. You fear per- 
 chance 
 
 That, like a seraph, on your soul’s despair, 
 
 With clash of pinions through tempestuous air. 
 Sin crowned with stars, ethereal, should advance 
 The marvel of her false fair countenance. 
 
 And you be tangled sinless in her snare ? — 
 
 Fear not ! Sin takes no spirit unaware ! 
 
 For man’s own conscience is Ithuriel’s lance ; 
 
 And joy that mystic crystal magic glass 
 
 Which, when Lucrezia’s venom curdling ran 
 Up through the bowl from stem to tingling rim. 
 Shivered and spilt her hell-brewed hypocras : 
 
 Thus joy, at sin’s approach, shudders, grows dim, 
 Shrinks into naught, and saves the menaced man. 
 
24 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 VII. 
 
 not afraid of sin then ! — Sin not thou ! — 
 
 There is no need for sinning. What we need 
 Is courage, the soul’s inmost force to breed 
 And bear the thorns of fortune on our brow. 
 
 I fain would greet you, friend, accoutred now 
 
 As when, new bathed in dragon’s gore, Siegfried 
 Clothed his’ young flesh with steel, bestrode his steed 
 And twined those love-locks with Queen Frejya’ 
 bough. , 
 
 Go forth and conquer ! In your heart beats youth. 
 
 Whom the gods love die young, the proverb saith : 
 Yet rede I not for j-ou this doom of death. 
 
 But triumph in the plenitude of truth ! 
 
 Nay, if death comes, if failure, in God’s breath 
 ^'our soul shall flourish ! \Miat I speak, is sooth. 
 
25 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 EHOLD the knight ! With goodly body bare 
 He kneels before Dame Prowess in the bath : 
 She taketh him in arms of strength, and hath 
 Kissed him upon the frank brow blossom-fair. 
 
 Then comes Discretion, grave but debonnair. 
 
 And sets his firm feet on that upward path, 
 
 Where are the harvest and the after-math 
 Of brave adventure, scaling stair by stair. 
 
 Cry not, I have no courage ! On the sand 
 
 Flank-smitten lies yon athlete, bleeds and bends 
 His panting breast ’neath fate’s unpitying hand. 
 
 ’T is welt ; for o’er him too heaven hangs, and lends 
 Lustre to his undying dying eyes : — 
 
 Vanquished no less than victor storms the skies. 
 
26 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 IX. 
 
 three things round your loins. Three things 
 are strong 
 
 save you scatheless in this human war : 
 Faith, Hope, and Charity, heaven’s triple star. 
 Guided whereby a man shall work no wrong. 
 Look well that you discern them from the throng 
 
 Of lesser orbs wandering where phantoms are ; 
 
 Learn them as Christ and Buddha learned them, far 
 Withdrawn from men in meditation long. 
 
 Trust not the Pharisees, who formulate and fain 
 
 Would mortice dogmas on the untameable soul: 
 Trust not the Sadducees, whose hearts remain 
 Unthrilled by harmonies that heavenward roll. 
 
 Sceptic and orthodox for you are one ; 
 
 Dry boughs that wither ’neath the eternal sun. 
 
27 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 X. 
 
 UILD self upon this rock, this perfect three. 
 Faith bids you trust God and your heart alone ; 
 The world for good in spite of evil known, 
 
 And man beloved maugre the Pharisee; 
 
 Hope teaches you that, cast upon this sea 
 
 Of doubt and error, where sin’s storms are blown. 
 You shall not idly to the winds be thrown. 
 
 But in God’s life, though late, at last be free : 
 
 Love bears you harmless when the strife is set 
 
 ’Twixt tyrannous desire, seifs lawless brood. 
 
 And duty who prescribes their right for all ; 
 
 Loving your neighbour, you shall ne’er forget 
 
 He was not made to be your fancy’s food ; 
 
 Who loves, toward lust shall never wholly fall. 
 
2S 
 
 DEBATE ON SELF. 
 
 HIS triune amulet whereof I speak, 
 
 Nay all have spoken since our world began, 
 Through the dark wood of error guards a man. 
 However turbulent his will or weak. 
 
 Action and passion on this shore shall break 
 
 Harmless like waves, which from the deep sea ran 
 With healthful brine upon their crests, the van 
 Of hosts tumultuous driven by whirlwinds bleak. 
 Fear them not thou ! Their bounds ordained have they ; 
 And God’s own life is in their awful play : 
 
 Affront them with fixed purpose ; more than creeds 
 Are men ; not formulas, nor faiths, nor grey 
 
 Doctrines secluded from the strength of day, 
 Fashion our fate, but firm self-stationed deeds. 
 
29 
 
 PRO AND CON. 
 
 I. 
 
 ELL said, most well ! methinks I hear you cry ; 
 Still on my innermost pain of soul not yet 
 The probe of the physician hath been set. 
 
 The case you treat, calls for the knife ; but I 
 Have thought your thoughts out, summed your when and why. 
 Weighed passion in my balance, banned regret. 
 
 Yea, round this heart the triune amulet 
 Whereof you speak, have bound ; and yet, I die. 
 There is no lack of courage : but I fain 
 
 Would learn my own heart’s hunger, whence it 
 springs, 
 
 Whither it tends, before I breed those wings. 
 
 Fledged by gaunt appetite from glut of pain. 
 
 For soaring hence toward undiscovered things. 
 
 Where lust hath lurked, who proves that love shall 
 reign ? 
 
PRO AND CON. 
 
 II. 
 
 OT I. ^Vhat I have counselled, is to test 
 
 That hunger of the heart, its whence and where. 
 By frank adventure light and free as air ; 
 Holding for certain that each human breast 
 Which owns the God wdthin it, will not rest 
 
 On lust, but choose love for its lord, not snare 
 The vermin of some close uncleanly lair. 
 
 But pluck from cloud-capped heights yon eagle's nest. 
 You shrink from sin. Nay, shrink ! But say what sin 
 Is deadlier than this slow disease distilled 
 From unassuageable yearnings, pent within 
 Thought’s dungeon walls, whereby the soul is filled 
 With writhing worms of fancy, and alive 
 Lives only for the deaths that in her strive ? 
 
PRO AND CON. 
 
 III. 
 
 H, I have urged enough ! Pray, pardon me ! 
 
 ’T was not my purpose to declaim. Yet still 
 I think you murdered good for fear of ill, 
 
 And walked by faith less than by what you see. 
 
 Our difference bears plain statement : you and she. 
 
 Meeting, are conscious of a mutual thrill, 
 
 Haply the stirring of love’s seed ; you kill 
 This bloom unborn ; I would have let it be, 
 
 Given it the chance of flower-time. Sure I am 
 
 The touch-stone of companionship will test 
 Heart’s gold, and purge base pinchbeck : true and 
 sham 
 
 Fly far as poles asunder, when man’s breast 
 
 Hath harboured loyalty, faith’s willing guest. 
 
 Let none fear lust, following Love’s oriflamme. 
 
EROS AND ANTEROS. 
 
 WIN Loves, of one high lineage undefiled, 
 
 As ye are strong and dreadful, and must be 
 Lords of my life for all eternity. 
 
 So be ye also merciful and mild. 
 
 To you I gave myself while yet a child : 
 
 I cried, ‘ For beauty, lo, I live ; for me 
 There shall be naught in earth or air or sea, 
 
 By Love to my soul’s Lord unreconciled.’ 
 
 Slay not your servant ! See me stabbed and stung 
 With arrows of intolerable ire ! 
 
 Shafts from your splendours on my spirit flung, 
 Have parched my heart’s blood with intensest fire : 
 
 I vowed to live for your divinity ; 
 
 Like lightning-smitten Semele, I die. 
 
33 
 
 EROS AND ANTEROS. 
 
 II. 
 
 I AIR sights and sounds assail me. I am torn 
 By the quick pulses of the passionate sky, 
 Throbbing with light of stars, or stormfully 
 Piling pearled thunder-clouds athwart the morn. 
 
 The strange sweet glance, the smile of passers borne 
 
 From hearts that know me not through lip and eye, 
 Thrill me with fruitless longing — I would die 
 To feel their life and be less love-forlorn. 
 
 The world is thus a quiver stored with sharp 
 
 Fledged shafts of inexpressible pleasure-pain, 
 Searching the marrow of the wakeful brain ; 
 
 While memory, like a tense /Eolian harp. 
 
 Sensitive to the breath of dreams that sweep 
 Its tingling chords, torments the soul in sleep. 
 
 * B 
 
34 
 
 EROS AND ANTEROS. 
 
 III. 
 
 ST ANS gustavi mellis paullulum, 
 
 Et ecce morior ! — A little honey 
 I tasted, pure as palest agrimony, 
 
 And lo, the death-pangs on my soul are come 
 Was this my sin ? Amid the tangled trees 
 
 Where He hath set our going, drops the comb 
 From many a pendent bough, the wild bee’s home 
 May we not take thereof a little ease ? 
 
 God hangs that harmless venom in our sight ; 
 
 But man’s vow makes it mortal, or man’s will 
 Bent upon lawlessness and lewd delight. 
 
 Could we but extirpate each thought of ill. 
 
 Could we but strip our soul of self, we might 
 Aye taste God’s honey on His holy hill. 
 
35 
 
 EROS AND ANTEROS. 
 
 IV. 
 
 IS self whereby we suffer : ’t is the greed 
 To grasp, the hunger to assimilate 
 All that earth holds of fair and delicate, 
 
 The lust to blend with beauteous lives, to feed 
 And take our fill of loveliness, which breed 
 This anguish of the soul intemperate : 
 
 ’Tis self that turns to pain and poisonous hate 
 The calm clear life of love the angels lead. 
 
 Oh, that ’twere possible this self to burn 
 
 In the pure flames of joy contemplative ! 
 
 Then might we love all loveliness, nor yearn 
 With tyrannous longings ; undisturbed might live. 
 
 Greeting the summer’s and the spring’s return. 
 Nor wailing that their bloom is fugitive ! 
 
 * 
 
 D 2 
 
36 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 Proxmium. 
 
 HREE times the Muse, with black bat wings out- 
 spread, 
 
 Darkening the night, with lightning in her eyes 
 And wrath upon her forehead, bade me rise 
 Where I lay slumbering in oblivion’s bed. 
 
 The first time I was young ; and though I shed 
 Hot tears for fear of that great enterprise, 
 
 I followed her, forth to the starless skies. 
 
 And sang her songs, wild songs of pain and dread. 
 The second time I listened and obeyed : 
 
 Presumptuous ! ft>r that same thick cloud of song 
 Dwelt on my manhood with a dreadful shade. 
 
 Once more she comes and calls me all night long. 
 
 Nay, Muse of Death and Hades ! We have played 
 O’ermuch with madness ! Ah, thou art too strong ! 
 
37 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE, 
 
 II. 
 
 The Furies. 
 
 HIMiERA, the winged wish that carries men 
 Forth to the bourne of things impossible ; 
 
 Maya, the sorceress, who meets them when 
 Their hearts with vague untameable longing 
 swell ; 
 
 These wait on wrinkled Madness, in her den 
 
 Crouching with writhen smile and mumbled spell. 
 Dread Sisters ! Though thou hadst the strength of 
 ten, 
 
 Down shalt thou go into the depth of hell. 
 
 Should one of these once make thy spirit her prize. 
 
 Who love what may not be, are sick of soul ; 
 
 And sick of soul who seek with thirsting eyes 
 Wells where the desert’s mirage mist-wreaths roll. 
 
 Who wed discretion, they alone are wise ; 
 
 And who place limits on their lusts, are whole. 
 
38 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L'IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 III. 
 
 Chimara. 
 
 4pav aSwaraiv vSa'os rrjs ^f/vxvs. 
 
 IIILDHOOD brings flowers to pluck, and butter- 
 
 flies ; 
 
 Boyhood hath bat and ball, shy dubious dreams. 
 Foreshadowed love, friendship, prophetic gleams ; 
 Youth takes free pastime under laughing skies ; 
 
 Ripe manhood weds, made early strong and wise ; 
 
 Clasping the real, scorning what only seems. 
 
 He tracks love’s fountain to its furthest streams. 
 Kneels by the cradle where his firstborn lies. 
 
 Then for the soul athirst, life’s circle run. 
 
 Yet nought accomplished and the world unknown. 
 Rises Chimoera. Far beyond the sun 
 fler bat’s wings bear us. The emp3 real zone 
 
 Shrinks into void. ^Ye pant. Thought, sense rebel. 
 And swoon desiring things impossible. 
 
39 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 The Pursuit of Beauty. 
 
 H AN’S soul is drawn by beauty, even as the moth 
 By flame, the cloud by mountains, or as the sea 
 
 Roaming around earth’s shore incessantly, 
 
 Ebbs with the moon and surges with her growth 
 And as the moth singes her wings in fire, 
 
 As clouds upon the hillsides melt in rain. 
 
 As tides with change unceasing wax and wane. 
 
 Nor in the moon’s white kisses quell desire j 
 So the soul, drawn by beauty, nothing loth, 
 
 Burns her bright wings with rapture that is pain. 
 Faints and dissolves or e’er her goal she gain. 
 
 Flies and pursues that unclasped deity. 
 
 Fretful, forestalled, blown into foam and froth. 
 Following and foiled, even as I follow Thee ! 
 
40 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 V. 
 
 The Vanishing Point. 
 
 HERE are who, when the bat on wing transverse 
 Skims the swart surface of some neighbouring 
 mere, 
 
 Catch that thin cry' too fine for common ear : 
 Thus the last joy-note of the universe 
 Is borne to those few listeners who immerse 
 Their intellectual hearing in no clear 
 Pman, but pierce it with the thin-edged spear , 
 Of utmost beauty which contains a curse. 
 
 Dead on their sense fall marches hynneneal. 
 
 Triumphal odes, hy'mns, symphonies sonorous ; 
 
 They crave one shrill vibration, tense, ideal. 
 Transcending and surpassing the world’s chorus ; 
 
 Keen, fine, ethereal, exquisitely real. 
 
 Intangible as star’s light quivering o’er us. 
 
41 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 The Tyranny of Chimara. 
 
 ERAPH, Medusa, Mystery, Sphinx ! Oh Thou 
 That art the unattainable ! Thou dream 
 Incarnate ! Thou frail iridescent gleam ! 
 Fugitive bloom atremble on life’s bough ! 
 
 Fade, prithee, fade ; and veil thy luminous brow, 
 
 Chimmra ! Let me ruin adown the stream 
 Of the world’s desolation ! All things seem. 
 
 Mock, change, illude, from time’s first pulse till now. 
 Nothing is real but thirst, the incurable. 
 
 Thirst slaked by nought save God withdrawn from 
 sight ; 
 
 And God is life’s negation ; with Him dwell 
 Souls swallowed in the ocean of blank night. 
 
 Where vast Nirvana drowneth heaven and hell, 
 
 And self-annihilation is delight. 
 
42 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Reiiitnciation. 
 
 EARN to renounce ! Oh, heart of mine, this long 
 Life-struggle with thyself hath been for thee 
 Nought but renunciation ! Souls are free. 
 
 We cry in youth, and wish can work no wrong. 
 Thus planted I the fiend of fancy strong 
 
 Within the palace of my mind, to be 
 Master and lord, for perpetuity 
 Of anguish, o’er a fierce rebellious throng : 
 
 Those tyrannous appetites, those unquelled desires. 
 
 Day-dreams arrayed like angels, longings crude, 
 Forth-stretchings of the heart toward wandering fires. 
 Forceful imaginations, loves imbued 
 
 With hell and heaven commingling, which have 
 thrust 
 
 Hope, health, strength, reason, manhood in the dust. 
 
43 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Use of Pain. 
 
 that hath once in heart and soul and sense 
 Harboured the secret heat of love that yearns 
 With incommunicable violence, 
 
 Still, though his love be dead and buried, burns 
 Y ea, if he feed not that remorseless flame 
 
 With fuel of strong thought for ever fresh. 
 
 The slow fire shrouded in a veil of shame 
 
 Corrodes his very substance, marrow and flesh. 
 Therefore, in time take heed. Of misery 
 
 Make wings for soaring o’er the source of pain. 
 Compel thy spirit’s strife to strengthen thee : 
 
 And seek the stars upon that hurricane 
 Of passionate anguish, which beyond control 
 Pent in thy breast, would rack and rend thy soul. 
 
44 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Limbo. 
 
 N dreams I walked by Lethe on this side ; 
 
 There where souls taste not yet the sleepy flood ; 
 Nor in oblivion drink beatitude ; 
 
 But roam and dote on memory, as they died. 
 Each man, alone unto himself, wide-eyed. 
 
 Inwardly gazing in abstracted mood, 
 
 Went by the rvaves ; and all that multitude 
 Seemed in my dreaming thought unsatisfied. 
 
 Some too there were whose longing, like a crown 
 
 Of leaden anguish, weighed on weary brows ; 
 
 Who murmured in delirium : ‘ Down, down, down ! 
 We lived not, for we loved not ! Dreams are we ! 
 
 Death shuns us, who shunned life ! ^^Tlat hell shall 
 rouse 
 
 Blank souls from blurred insensibility ? ’ 
 
45 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 X. 
 
 Wishes. 
 
 jjH, God, that it could be that by some spell 
 Poignant or imperceptible, of pain 
 Or sleep, I might grow young in body and 
 brain. 
 
 Forgetful and forgiven, as poets tell 
 Men were re-made who drank of Merlin’s well ! 
 
 Ah, might joy waken, like buds ’neath April rain, 
 
 At view of yon snow-flushed far Alpine chain. 
 Soaring in storm-swept air immeasurable ! 
 
 Could I shake off these pangs, these cares that bind 
 Down to base use the incorruptible mind ! 
 
 Ah, friend, and walk with thee, who art so strong, 
 Freed from old tyrannous yearnings, calm as thou. 
 
 Bearing abreast with thine a comrade’s brow, 
 Unshamed, unenvious, unperplexed by wrong ! 
 
46 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 
 Convmt Bells. 
 
 Ifry spake. Those crazy bells 
 three divers messages. 
 
 Eat, drink, slumber ; take thine 
 
 ease ; 
 
 Nothing abides ; void are heaven’s promised 
 wells ! 
 
 The Tenor sang : Life flies ; my music tells 
 
 Of human bliss ; delay not, seek and seize ! 
 
 Then, bat-like, shrill, borne on the twilight breeze. 
 The Treble cried : Buy, buy, what fancy sells ! 
 
 Yet each voice taught me nothing. How shall I 
 
 Glut me on thy gross banquet, booming Bass ? 
 
 And, Tenor, youth was kind, but I was shy ! 
 
 And thou, keen Treble, is the nightly chase 
 
 Of dreams that sting but do not satisfy", 
 
 Food for the soul that craves some living grace ? 
 
 HE gaunt grey be 
 Sent to my soul 
 The Bass said : 
 
47 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 xir. 
 
 Dcfve sono i bei Alomenti? 
 
 ORNING of life ! O ne’er recaptured hour, 
 Which some have dulled with fumes of meat and 
 wine ; 
 
 And some have starved upon the bitter brine 
 Of lean ambition grasping place and power ; 
 
 And some have drowned in Danae’s vulgar shower 
 
 Caught by keen harlot souls where ingots shine ; 
 
 And some have drowsed with ivy wreaths that twine 
 Around Parnassus and the Muses’ bower ; 
 
 And some exchanged for learning, pelf of thought ; 
 
 And some consumed in kilns of passion hot 
 With lime and fire to sear the sentient life ; 
 
 And some have bartered for high-blooded strife 
 
 Of battle ; — where art thou ? These all have bought 
 With thee their heart’s wish. Youth ! I sold thee not. 
 
48 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’IMPOSSIBLE. 
 xm. 
 
 Natura Consolatrix . 
 
 D and the saints forgive us — we who blight 
 With mists of passion and with murk of lust 
 This wonderful fair world, and turn to dust 
 The diamonds of life’s innocent delight ! 
 
 Who bear within our hearts black envious night, 
 
 Blunting the blade of joy with sensual rust, 
 Breaking vain wings against the stern Thou Must 
 Blazed in star-fire on Nature’s brows of light ! — 
 Nature, thou gentle mistress, back to thee 
 
 Thy wandering children bring their cureless thirst 
 Take them, and nurse them, mother, on thy knee 
 Teach them, with vain insatiate longing cursed. 
 
 To cool life’s ardent anguish at thy breast ; 
 
 And in thy law that limits give them rest ! 
 
49 
 
 L’AMOUR DE L’lMrOSSIBLE 
 
 XIV. 
 
 To the Genius of Eternal Slumber. 
 
 LEEP, that art named eternal ! Is there then 
 No chance of waking in thy noiseless realm ? 
 Come there no fretful dreams to overwhelm 
 The feverish spirits of o’erlaboured men ? 
 
 Shall conscience sleep where thou art ; and shall pain 
 Lie folded with tired arms around her head ; 
 
 And memory be stretched upon a bed 
 Of ease, whence she shall never rise again ? 
 
 O sleep, that art eternal ! Say, shall love 
 
 Breathe like an infant slumbering at thy breast ? 
 Shall hope there cease to throb ; and shall the smart 
 Of things impossible at length find rest ? 
 
 Thou answerest not. The poppy-heads above 
 Thy calm brows sleep. How cold, how still thou 
 art ! 
 
 E 
 
50 
 
 THE TEMPTATION OF ADAM. 
 
 ( Tintoretto at San Rocco . ) 
 
 AKE thou and eat ; for I have eaten. Lo, 
 
 These sunbeams through the thick enamelled 
 screen 
 
 Of apple-laden boughs and laurels green, 
 Stamping the day’s warm kisses, amber glow. 
 Full oil my breasts and flanks of rounded snow. 
 
 Flecked with smooth shade those flakes of fire be- 
 tween — 
 
 It is not these have crowned me pleasure’s queen : 
 
 I am thus wonderful because I know. 
 
 Take thou and eat : know thou as I have known : 
 
 Be thou, like me, transformed. On yonder couch. 
 Where the tree’s bole, moss-wrinkled, builds a throne 
 For dalliance deep-embowered in moon-proof gloom. 
 
 Sense-swallowing bliss Eve’s wisdom shall avouch. 
 And gods, thy seed, stir in my satiate womb. 
 
51 
 
 REVOLT. 
 
 ( To an Italian Verista. ’) 
 
 De Musset, Byron : these, you say, 
 ed in your poet’s brain that devilish broth, 
 reof the sugary juice and bitter froth 
 Sicken the heart within me this spring day. 
 
 Kisses that cloy, sleek flesh, veins warm in May, 
 
 Opulent haunches, scent of Ashtaroth — 
 
 With such-like nauseous nonsense I am wroth ; 
 
 I loathe the spirit that wallows in this wet clay ! 
 
 Nay, claim no kinship with those men of worth. 
 
 Spirits compact of air and fire, though cursed 
 With crookedest counsel from their hour of birth ! 
 
 You are of different lineage ; and your worst 
 
 Was spawned of world-old spoiled Italian earth, 
 Blasphemous, blood-stained, dry with secular thirst. 
 
 E 
 
 2 
 
52 
 
 INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION. 
 
 I. 
 
 WILL outsoar these clouds, and shake to naught 
 The doubts that daunt my spirit : that is free, 
 Invincible by death or destiny ; 
 
 Nor need she take of love or friendship thought. 
 Self-centred, self-sustained, self-guided, fraught 
 
 With fervour of the brain enlightening me. 
 
 Alone with God upon a shoreless sea. 
 
 I’ll find what men in crowds have vainly sought. 
 
 I am at one with solitude, and loathe 
 
 The tumult of those hopes and fears that fret 
 Weak hearts in throbbing bosoms. Haply yet 
 Some Titan vice or virtue shall unclothe 
 
 Her mighty limbs for my sole sight, ai d I, 
 
 Sufficing to myself and wisdom, die. 
 
53 
 
 INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION. 
 
 II. 
 
 HE world of human woe and weal I shun, 
 
 Not forasmuch as I despise the joy 
 That lightens when life wakes in girl or boy, 
 And glittering sands through passion’s hour-glass 
 run : 
 
 Of mortal joys there is not any one 
 
 But I have made it for myself the toy 
 Of fancy, nor hath love had power to cloy 
 Him who leaves all the deeds of love undone. 
 
 Despair of full fruition drives me hence. 
 
 Uncomforted to seek repose in God : 
 
 Those tyrannous desires that stung my sense 
 
 At every turn upon the road I trod, 
 
 Seek their assuagement in a sphere where naught 
 Dares to dispute the sovereignty of thought. 
 
54 
 
 INTELLECTUAL ISOLATIONL 
 
 III. 
 
 AY, soul, though near to dying, do not this ! 
 
 It may be that the world and all its ways 
 Seem but spent ashes of extinguished days. 
 
 And love the phantom of imagined bliss ; 
 
 Yet what is man among the mysteries 
 
 Whereof the young-eyed angels sang their praise ? 
 Thou know’st not. Lone and wildered in the maze. 
 See that life’s crown thou dost not idly miss. 
 
 Is friendship fickle ? Hast thou found her so ? 
 
 Is God more near thee on that homeless sea 
 Than by the hearths where children come and go? 
 Perchance some rotten loot of sin in thee 
 
 Hath made thy garden cease to bloom and glow : 
 Hast thou no need from thine own self to flee ? 
 
55 
 
 INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION. 
 
 OULDST thou clasp God apart from man, or dwell 
 Merged in the ocean of that infinite good 
 Where truth and beauty are beatitude, 
 
 This earth might well appear a living hell. 
 
 The prison of damned spirits that rebel. 
 
 Matched with thy paradise of solitude : 
 
 Nathless it is not clasping God to brood 
 Upon thine own delusive dreams ; the cell 
 Built by an anchorite that strives with fate 
 
 And kindly fellow feeling, may be found 
 Like to a maniac’s chamber, when too late. 
 Abandoned to his will, without or sound 
 
 Or sight of men his brethren, on the ground 
 He lies, and all his life is desolate. 
 
56 
 
 INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION. 
 
 T is the centre of the soul that ails : 
 
 We carry Muth us our own heart’s disease ; 
 
 And craving the impossible, we freeze 
 The lively rills of love that never fails. 
 
 What faith, what hope will lend the spirit sails 
 
 To waft her with a light spray-scattering breeze 
 From this Calypso isle of phantasies. 
 
 Self-sought, self-gendered, where the daylight pales ? 
 Where wandering visions of forgone desires 
 
 Pursue her sleepless on a stony strand ; 
 
 Instead of stars the bleak and baleful fires 
 Of vexed imagination, quivering spires 
 
 That have nor rest nor substance, light the land. 
 Paced by lean hungry men, a ghostly band ! 
 
57 
 
 INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION. 
 
 VI. 
 
 that the waters of oblivion 
 Might purge the burdened soul of her life’s dross, 
 Cleansing dark overgrowths that dull the gloss 
 Wherewith her pristine gold so purely shone ! 
 
 Oh that some spell might make us dream undone 
 
 Those deeds that fret our pillow, when we toss 
 Racked by the torments of that living cross 
 Where memory frowns, a grim centurion ! 
 
 Sleep, the kind soother of our bodily smart, 
 
 Is bought and sold by scales-weight ; quivering nerves 
 Sink into slumber when the hand of art 
 Hath touched some hidden spring of brain or heart ; 
 
 But for the tainted will no medicine serves ; 
 
 The road from sin to suffering never swerves. 
 
INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION. 
 
 VII. 
 
 HAT skill shall anodyne the mind diseased ? 
 
 Did Rome’s fell tyrant cure his secret sore 
 With those famed draughts of cooling hellebore ? 
 What opiates on the fiends of thought have 
 seized ? 
 
 This fever of the spirit hath been eased 
 
 By no grave simples culled on any shore ; 
 
 No surgeon’s knife, no muttered charm, no lore 
 Of Phoebus Paian have those pangs appeased. 
 
 Herself must be her saviour. Side by side 
 
 Spring poisonous weed and helpful antidote 
 Within her tangled herbage ; lonely pride 
 
 And humble fellow-service ; dreams that dote, 
 
 Deeds that aspire ; foul sloth, free labour : she 
 Hath power to choose, and what she wills, to be. 
 
59 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 OOL, fool ! Is this the end of all thy vaunts ? 
 Where is thy will, that pinnacle sublime 
 Whereto thou daredst thy brother souls to climb, 
 Assailing men more wise with nettling taunts ? 
 Where is that self thou saidst no danger daunts. 
 
 No dread of years flown by or brooding time? 
 
 Where is that self-made god ? Like morning rime. 
 He melts ; and horror thy lone spirit haunts. 
 
 Crouch ’mid thy ruins ! Scatter dust and dung 
 
 On those proud curls by thine own choice discrowned ! 
 Bite with remorseful teeth that boastful tongue ! 
 Strive in the toils those impious hands have wound ! 
 
 Howl ! from thy seat of empire thou art flung 
 Forth ’mid brute beasts to grovel on the ground. 
 
oo 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 HOU fool, that saidst : ‘ Lo, I have set my will 
 Firm on yon pinnacle fronting the stars ! 
 
 I care not how, rending their prison bars. 
 
 The wild beasts of the passions rage and kill. 
 
 I am athirst for beauty, and will fill 
 
 The wine-cup of my madness. I will be 
 God in desire, and god in mastery. 
 
 Both worlds are mine, for I am sovereign still.’ 
 Thou fool ! No lightning struck thy regal town : 
 
 No Mene Mcne from thy palace wall 
 Paled the fierce rubies flaming on thy crown : 
 
 But at the moment when thou hadst chine all, 
 
 A still small voice within thee murmured ; ‘ Down, 
 Down, headlong down for ever, shalt thou fall I ‘ 
 
6i 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 HI. 
 
 EA, this thyself hath wrought, O impotent thou ! 
 That couldst not face the spirit when he came, 
 Whom thine own incantation clad with flame, 
 And meditated joy burned on his brow ! 
 
 Where are thy spells and thine enchantments now — 
 
 Magician, who didst boast that thou couldst tame 
 The mightiest of hell’s seraphim, and claim 
 Tribute from Him to whom heaven’s angels bow ? 
 One word hath quelled thee ; one small spoken word, 
 Whispered in silent sadness of thy soul ; 
 
 While the full tide of beauty round thee stirred. 
 
 And thy heart’s wish lay in thy will’s control. 
 
 Down ! spake the voice ; and when that voice was 
 heard. 
 
 Thy purpose shrivelled like a shrunken scroll. 
 
62 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 IV. 
 
 COURGE me no more ! Satan, that word not I 
 But God within me spake it. Soft and clear 
 He speaketh to His children, ‘ Cast out fear ; 
 The whirlwind and the fire have passed you by. ’ 
 Speak to me, Lord ! \Miat though my spirit, high 
 U plifted, heard not as Thy children hear ; 
 
 Though, when the whirlwind and the fire were near, 
 
 I mocked them ; yet behold how low I lie ! 
 
 Am I not Thine ! Bless me too. Father, Lord ! 
 
 Esau and Ishmael and Saul were Thine. 
 
 Make me but see Thy seraph’s fiery sword 
 Waved o’er the Paradise for which I pine ! 
 
 Christ bared Plis side to Thomas. Give to me 
 Vision of what still veils my soul from Thee ! 
 
63 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 N, hast thou sought Me ? Ere that voice that 
 cried : 
 
 ‘ Down, headlong down, for ever, shalt thou fall ! ’ 
 Didst thou not seal thine ears against My call. 
 And thrust the angel of My love aside ? 
 Rebellious and disdainful in thy pride. 
 
 Clothing thyself with passion for a pall. 
 
 Thou didst ring round thy spirit as with a wall 
 Self-deemed impregnable. — The deep seas hide 
 Cities and nations of unburied men ; 
 
 Earth guards her secret : but the heart that feels, 
 Withholdeth not her purpose from My ken. 
 
 Thou wouldst not hear the voice that, like a rill 
 O’er field and forest, fertilising steals ; 
 
 Then spake My wrath, but spake in mercy still. 
 
64 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 VI. 
 
 OW have I sought Thee not, O Lord my God ? 
 Have I not sought the stars that stud Thy skies ; 
 Thine oracles of sunset and sunrise ; 
 
 The domes of clouds whereon Thy feet have trod ; 
 The flowers which Thou hast scattered on earth s sod ; 
 
 The winds and waves wherethrough Thy spirit cries ; 
 The pine-clad hills that to Thy praise arise ; 
 
 Men in Thine image moulded from the clod ? 
 
 I sought them all ; but, seeking, found not Thee. 
 
 Self seeking, or wrong seeking, sought I them. 
 
 And Thou at length, in this last agony, 
 
 Criest : ‘ Thine own heart seek ! I, I am here ! ’ 
 
 Oh, let me take Thy mantle by the hem ! 
 
 Deliver me. Lord God, from this blank fear ! 
 
6s 
 
 SELF-CONDEMNATION. 
 
 VII. 
 
 HAVE not sought Thee as I might have sought. 
 I said : In this tempestuous turbid age 
 Walk we at will on our own pilgrimage. 
 
 Take we the impulse of each natural thought : 
 God dwells not in the houses hands have wrought. 
 
 Nor in the words of any printed page : 
 
 Man’s heart holds God ; where good and evil wage 
 Eternal war, God’s self to sight is brought. 
 
 Spake I thus in my suffering or my strength ? 
 
 Was this commandment from the voice above, 
 
 Or malediction of the muttering pit ? 
 
 I know not. I but crave through life at length 
 To reach the universal song of love, 
 
 And faint on this world’s v/ays desiring it. 
 
 * F 
 
66 
 
 O, SI! O, SI! 
 
 HE good thou era vest might have once been thine, 
 Hadst thou not made thy will the instrument 
 Of forceful folly, on vain rapture bent. 
 
 Thou from the boughs didst rend that fruit 
 malign. 
 
 Which, slowly ripening ’neath the touch divine 
 
 Of hours and days and seasons, should have leant 
 At last to bless thee with the full content 
 Of wedded lives in love’s most holy shrine. 
 
 Now with intemperate fingers having tom. 
 
 Thou findest beauty but a poisonous lure 
 Unto thy soul’s destruction, joy a thorn. 
 
 Love’s orient wings smirched with the mire impure 
 Of frustrate lust, friendship no sooner born 
 Than tettered with disease what skill can cure ? 
 
67 
 
 AMENDS. 
 
 ROM evil things can things of good take growth, 
 Even as the lily and life-nourishing corn 
 From rank corruption, where worms twine, are 
 born ? 
 
 ’Twixt vice and virtue shall there be sworn troth; 
 T ruth spring from falsehood and a futile oath ; 
 
 Honour emerge, white as the jocund morn. 
 
 From the heart’s night and utter shame forlorn? — 
 Heaven’s stars shine overhead. My soul is loth 
 To know that God who made her. He for whom 
 She yearns in darkness and her living tomb. 
 
 Meant not, through beauty and the dreadful stress 
 Of tyrannous desire, toward light from gloom 
 
 To lead her blindfold, and by love’s excess 
 To prove of good the supreme loveliness. 
 
 F 2 
 
AMENDS. 
 
 II. 
 
 IS good we crave in all things : naught but this 
 Quenches the quick sharp agony of fire 
 Wherein we singe the wings of vain desire, 
 
 And swoon, scorched, sentient, ere we seize our bliss. 
 Not evil but good hales us ; and our kiss. 
 
 Pressed on live lips of flame where hopes e.xpire, 
 
 Is given to some pure image, loftier, higher, 
 
 MTiose full fruition man must ever miss. 
 
 Thus wrestle we with pale similitudes 
 
 And phantoms of the sempiternal fair : 
 
 Yet finding passion, through those various moods 
 Weak as grey cobweb meshes spun in air. 
 
 Beaded with dew which the frail sight illudes. 
 
 Turn we to God. Lo, what we seek is there ! 
 
69 
 
 AMENDS. 
 
 HI. 
 
 E turn to God. But, turning, at His touch. 
 Force is we face the everlasting debt 
 Contracted to that living light which yet 
 Burns in the one we loved ; whom overmuch 
 We sought ; whose soul of souls we dared to smutch. 
 Bound to ourself by bonds both ne’er forget, 
 
 That self emerges ; and all hope is set 
 On that loved self’s salvation. So we clutch. 
 
 As some wave-whelmed wretch will grasp a straw, 
 
 At good deeds ’mid the whirlpool of deeds bad. 
 Help we our fellow-sufferer ! May our sin. 
 Transmuted by divine soul-softening law. 
 
 Assume the shape of kindness ! Let us win 
 Mercy ! In purgatorial flames our soul is clad. 
 
70 
 
 AMENDS. 
 
 IV. 
 
 SWIFT and easy the descent to hell ! 
 
 Toilsome and slow the resurrection way 
 Toward righteousness and heaven’s immortal day! 
 Yet faint not thou. What seems impossible, 
 
 By blank persistence and a stubborn will 
 
 Shall be accomplished. Or if God say nay, 
 
 Strive thou. It is thy duty. Strive and pray. 
 
 Pray, love, believe that all must yet be well. 
 
 Thou hast one only hope. Give thou thy best : 
 
 Thought, substance, time, volition : to the task. 
 Forget things flown. Care not what men may ask. 
 Stretch forth thy self to help, to save that soul 
 
 Which to thy soul in sin’s red hour was pressed. 
 
 The end is God’s : He planned. He rules the whole. 
 
71 
 
 VERSOHNUNG. 
 
 Union with God. 
 
 AN’S solitude brings the soul back to Him 
 
 In whom all live and move and have their being. 
 Baffled by dreams of bliss before us fleeing, 
 
 Pent in our prison-house of yearnings dim, 
 Barred by stern fate from blending limb with limb 
 
 And life with life, though tortured by the seeing 
 Of beauteous shapes with our heart’s wish agreeing. 
 Clasping fair fiends of hell for seraphim. 
 
 Deceived and desolate, at length we’re driven 
 Into His arms for everlasting fusion. 
 
 It is no groundless hope, no vain delusion. 
 
 That makes this earth we know less real than heaven. 
 
 We need God to explain man ; God once given. 
 
 The problems that perplexed life find solution. 
 
 « 
 
 F 4 
 
72 
 
 VERSOH^*UXG. 
 
 A Belief. 
 
 O seed shall perish which the soul hath sown. 
 Nothing in man declines toward death, but flies 
 Heavenward to fold pure plumes in Paradise, 
 And build the immortal concert, tone by tone. 
 Of earthly grossness purged, zone over zone 
 
 Ascending, 'neath those everlasting eyes 
 That stud with stars of life the invisible skies, 
 
 Each word, each act shines clear before the throne. 
 There He makes all things whole. Not down to vice. 
 
 But up to good, sustained by strong desire. 
 
 This faith prompts man to soar. This fervent fire 
 Melts at a touch fear’s old thick-ribbW ice. 
 
 Consumes hope’s dungeon-bars, and sets love free 
 To triumph o’er destructibility. 
 
73 
 
 VERSOHNUNG. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Prism of Life, 
 
 LL that began with God, in God must end : 
 
 All lives are garnered in His final bliss : 
 
 All wills hereafter shall be one with His : 
 
 When in the sea we sought, our spirits blend. 
 Rays of pure light, which one frail prism may rend 
 Into conflicting colours, meet and kiss 
 With manifold attraction, yet still miss 
 Contentment, while their kindred hues contend. 
 Break but that three-edged glass : — inviolate 
 
 The sundered beams resume their primal state, 
 Weaving pure light in flawless harmony. 
 
 Thus decomposed, subject to love and strife, 
 
 God’s thought, made conscious through man’s mortal 
 life, 
 
 Resumes through death the eternal unity. 
 
74 
 
 VERSOHNUNG. 
 
 Forgetting things past. 
 
 UG not thy lives o’erlived. For plastic souls 
 Oblivion is the everlasting source 
 Of youth renewed, hope, courage, action, force : 
 This Lethe from life’s deepest fountain rolls. 
 Pore not upon thy past’s worm-eaten scrolls. 
 
 Nor linger by the dead sea of remorse ; 
 
 Press forward with sails straining on thy course 
 Toward either of earth’s undiscovered poles. 
 
 Nature remembers not her past : each hour. 
 
 Oblivious of unnumbered sons fled. 
 
 She sows new seeds with inexhausted power 
 Through the vast universe divinely spread ; 
 
 And lives afresh in star, man, beast, and flower ; 
 
 Nor wastes one tear for generations dead. 
 
75 
 
 VERSOHNUNG. 
 
 V. 
 
 The Victo?-. 
 
 OUL, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire. 
 
 Lay thou the laws of thy deliberate will. 
 
 Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel ; 
 Though hell’s lost legions ring thee round with 
 fire. 
 
 Learn to endure. Dark vigil hours shall tire 
 
 Thy wakeful eyes ; regrets thy bosom thrill ; 
 
 Slow years thy loveless flower of youth shall kill ; 
 Yea, thou shalt yearn for lute and wanton lyre. 
 
 Y et is thy guerdon great : thine the reward 
 
 Of those elect who, scorning Circe’s lure. 
 
 Grown early wise, make living right their lord. 
 Clothed with celestial steel, these walk secure ; 
 
 Masters, not slaves. Over their heads the pure 
 Ifeavens bow, and guardian seraphs wave God’s 
 sword. 
 
VERSOHNUNG. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Adventante Deo. 
 
 I FT up your heads, gates of my heart, unfold 
 Your portals to salute the King of kings f 
 Behold him come, home on cherubic wings _ 
 Engrained with crimson eyes and grail of gold ! 
 Before His path the thunder clouds rvithhold 
 
 Their stormy pinions, and the desert sings : 
 
 He from His lips divine and forehead flings 
 Sunlight of peace unfathomed, bliss untold. 
 
 O soul, faint soul, disquieted how long ! 
 
 Lift up thine eyes, for lo, thy Lord is near. 
 
 Lord of all loveliness and strength and song. 
 
 The Lord who brings heart-sadness better cheer. 
 
 Scattering those midnight dreams that dote on wrong, 
 Purging with heaven’s pure rays love’s atmosphere ! 
 
77 
 
 UNREST. 
 
 r of the night ? Upon the western bar 
 white light lingers ; and the East is grey 
 ot yet with risings of the wished-for day, 
 Nor yet the glimmering of dawn’s herald star 
 Sheds hope, however faint and frail and far : 
 
 Still ringed around with gloom we sit and say, 
 What of the night ? Still wrestle we as they 
 Who wage with shapes of fever fruitless war. 
 
 For weariness our very souls expire. 
 
 For watching and for waiting. Is there worse 
 Torment than this of ours, for whom no fire 
 Of Hell is lighted ; but our barren curse 
 
 Is summed in one inexorable verse — 
 
 That without hope we languish in desire ? 
 
78 
 
 UNREST. 
 
 II. 
 
 APPY were they who fought with beasts and fell 
 Bloodstained on sand beneath the lion’s paw ; 
 Heaven open with untroubled eyes they saw, 
 And through the fierce assembly’s savage yell 
 Heard symphonies of angels. It was well 
 Thus daring nobly for the better law, 
 
 To march into the wide and ravening maw 
 Of mere material death unterrible. 
 
 But we who strike at shadows, we who fight 
 
 With yielding darkness and with thin night-air, 
 
 Who shed no blood, who see no hideous sight. 
 
 For whom no heaven is opened — our despair 
 And utter desolation infinite 
 Can find nor calm nor comfort anywhere. 
 
79 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 ETWEEN tliose men of old who nothing knew, 
 But sang their song and cried the world is fair. 
 Or dreamed a dream of heaven to cheat despair, 
 Piling void temples ’neath the voiceless blue. 
 And those for whom with revelation due 
 
 Pure wisdom and the lore of all things good 
 May yet be granted in the plenitude 
 Of ages still to come and aeons new, 
 
 Stand we who, knowing, yet know naught : undone 
 Is all the fabric of that former dream ; 
 
 Those songs we have unlearned, and, one by one. 
 Have tossed illusions down the shoreless stream ; 
 
 Tearless and passionless we greet the sun. 
 
 And with cold eyes gaze on a garish gleam. 
 
8o 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 II. 
 
 STOOD at sunrise on an Alpine height 
 Whence plains were visible, and the domed sky 
 Spread vacant in serene immensity ; 
 
 Westward beneath my feet-curled vapours white, 
 And grew and gathered, while the East was bright : 
 
 Then as the silver wreaths clomb silently, 
 
 Methought a shadowy giant steeple-high 
 Towered up above me ringed with radiant light. 
 Standing he bore the shape of me who stood 
 
 Sole on that summit ; yea, he bowed or rose. 
 Beckoned or threatened, as my varying mood 
 Constrained his movement ; till the light that grew. 
 
 Wrought from the strife of clouds supreme repose. 
 And heaven once more was still and stainless blue. 
 
8i 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 []HEN in my soul I cried : even such is God — 
 Made in our image, fashioned in our form. 
 Woven on the vapours of the secular storm. 
 Where spirit stirred not, nay nor Seraph trod : 
 He framed no Adam from the plastic clod. 
 
 No Eve for Adam’s helpmate ; but this worm. 
 Spawned by the world what time her spring wa.s 
 warm. 
 
 This man, that crawled on earth’s primeval sod. 
 Learned not himself, but seeking outward saw 
 Transfigured self on circumambient air ; 
 
 Whence seized by fatal impulse and strange awe, 
 Worshipping what he knew not, he enslaved 
 
 Aions of men who blindly wept and raved 
 To filmy phantoms of their own despair. 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 IV. 
 
 OLOCH whose frown with furnace flame is dim, 
 Starlike Astarte and crowned Ashtaroth, 
 
 With her who rising from the bitter froth 
 Of ocean waves loosened each languid limb ; 
 Jehovah, Lord of holiness, whose wrath 
 
 Scatters like clouds the shuddering Seraphim, 
 
 And He, the Crucified, who bound to Him 
 The bleeding nations with a brother’s oath ; 
 
 All these, and all besides whom all men fear. 
 
 Are the phantasmal shadowy shows of man, 
 
 Flesh of our flesh, soul of our soul, made clear 
 And magnified for feeble eyes to scan ; 
 
 Our gods ourselves are, glorious or base. 
 
 As the dream varies with the varying race. 
 
83 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 V. 
 
 T then was He, the Sun, who flashed his ray 
 'n that thin veil of momentary mist, 
 i^ho summoned from the darkness and dis- 
 missed 
 
 The spectre of myself at break of day ? 
 
 Was he not Lord perchance ? The phantom grey. 
 Glimmering with purple and pale amethyst. 
 
 He played with, as kings play with whom they list. 
 Then did but smile, and made it melt away. 
 
 Thus, howsoe’er our dreams and visions range. 
 
 Dwells there not One secure, who still abides. 
 Creating all, surveying chance and change. 
 
 Whose ray the darkness and the cloud divides ? 
 
 Him yet we see not, but shall surely see 
 When in His time He bids the shadows flee. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 VI. 
 
 this indeed be truth, how long .shall man, 
 Involved in dreams, deluded by vain hope, 
 Fulfil the past’s forgotten horoscope. 
 
 Nor raise his head to heaven’s meridian ? 
 let him raise it : let him scan 
 temples of the sky from base to cope : 
 What finds he there? The azure arches slope 
 Upward as when creation’s day began ; 
 
 Pure light, pure ether, fine, impalpable : 
 
 No form appears ; no thunder from the void 
 Startles the stillness with plain oracle ; 
 
 The powers of earth and heaven are still employed 
 In weaving their thin veil invisible. 
 
 Nor have the growing years the veil destroyed. 
 
 Alas ! nay, 
 The 
 
85 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 VII. 
 
 ART of the whole that never can be known, 
 
 Is this poor atom that we call our world ; 
 
 Part of this part amid confusion hurled 
 Is man, an idiot on a crumbling throne : 
 
 Yea, and each .separate soul that works alone, 
 
 Striving to pierce the clouds around him curled. 
 Gasps but one moment in the tempest whirled, 
 And what he builds strong Death hath overthrown. 
 How shall this fragment of a waif, this scape 
 In the oblivion of unreckoned years. 
 
 This momentary guest of time, this ape 
 That grins and chatters amid smiles and tears, — 
 
 How shall he seize the skirts of God and shape 
 To solid form the truth that disappears? 
 
86 
 
 AN OLD GORDIAN KNOT. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 T man with man, let race with race, let age 
 With age aeonian linked in serried line. 
 
 Scale the celestial station crystalline 
 And with high God continual battle wage ; 
 Nay, let them pace in patient pilgrimage 
 
 Toward that unknown mysterious hidden shrine 
 Where dwells the very truth and life divine. 
 
 If haply they may greet and kiss their liege. 
 
 O whither, whither shall their steps be led ? 
 
 Upward or downward, on what paths of thought ? 
 Have ye not seen the clouds that morning bred. 
 Storming Olympus with fierce thunder fraught? 
 
 Ere noon they went their way, and overhead 
 The same clear web of limpid light was wrought. 
 
87 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 TAIR over stair, we scaled the gradual way, 
 Through chestnut woods and smooth deep-shel- 
 tered lawns 
 
 Unshaven, where the starry wind-flower dawns ; 
 
 And, as we rose, outspread beneath us lay 
 The Lombard champaign — lake and castle grey. 
 
 And liquid lapse of river, and the line 
 Of dim aerial snow-touched Apennine, 
 
 With Milan like an island far away. 
 
 And still, at every turning, as we trod, 
 
 A chapel rose before us, built for prayer, 
 
 With dome and pinnacle and statue white 
 Sculptured upon that azure depth of air ; 
 
 Till on the mountain’s brow the house of God 
 Flung wide huge portals to the orient light. 
 
88 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 II. 
 
 WAS Easter morning. We too knelt and prayed 
 Among the country folk who sought that shrine, 
 And felt with them a something more dhine 
 Breathe in the gloom of arch and colonnade ; 
 
 As though some god high o’er this hill had made 
 
 A meeting-place where heaven on earth might shine, 
 Between gross plain and pure skies cr)-stalline, 
 
 With more of lustre and with softer shade. 
 
 How many a century of pilgrim feet 
 
 Have worn those flinty ways whereby we came ! 
 
 How many a deity from yonder seat 
 Hath jrazed across the incense and the flame 
 
 To mountains where yon vapours roll and meet. 
 
 And nature reigns, changeful, unchanged, the same ! 
 
89 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 HI. 
 
 HO knows the names of all the powers who held 
 This holy mountain and this seat of prayer ? 
 With what blood-sacrifice and horrid blare 
 The first rude wood-god’s bestial rage was 
 quelled ! 
 
 Then reigned a queen of heaven, whose smile compelled 
 The wandering stars and soothed tempestuous air ; 
 Hers were the cubs of wild beasts, hers the fair 
 Virgins who clashed their timbrels silvery-belled. 
 
 She passed, and in her stead great Alpine Jove 
 Dwelt on this summit, with fraternal nod 
 Hurling his thunders southward to the grove 
 Iguvian, where his brother ruled, a god : 
 
 And when he failed, came Mary and her Son, 
 
 And all those elder creeds were blurred in one. 
 
90 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 IV. 
 
 is a solemn and soul-sobering truth 
 That faiths must fade, and deities decay, 
 
 No less than men who kneel to them and pray. 
 Earth hides no fountain of perpetual youth ; 
 life’s nursing father, knows not ruth ; 
 
 Whether the flower fate pluck have bloomed to-day. 
 Or grown through lingering ages faint and grey. 
 
 It falls, and dies, and yields to fresher growth. 
 
 This is the law that on all things of earth 
 
 Weighs for some purposed end we may not scan. 
 Meanwhile, supplanting decadence with birth. 
 
 From stage to stage travels the soul of man. 
 
 Crowned with the spoils of time, spurning the tomb. 
 Thought wins her upward way to light from gloom. 
 
 And death. 
 
91 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 V. 
 
 EA, though our faiths fade ; though the roseate 
 glow 
 
 Pass from pure lips of gods auroral born 
 In Hellas ; though the mute pale Christ forlorn 
 Breathe from his cross no more than human woe 
 And human will to succour ; yet we know 
 
 That faith emergent from her husks outworn 
 Spreads ampler pinions in the eternal morn, 
 
 And truth’s immortal sinews stronger grow. 
 
 Types fail ; forms fade ; gods perish ; man survives. 
 
 More than the gods she made, loftier than they. 
 
 Older and younger, through unnumbered lives 
 And endless deaths fulfilling destiny. 
 
 From dawn to noon of her seonian day 
 Sphere over sphere ascends Humanity. 
 
92 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 VI. 
 
 AN too shall fade and perish. That must be. 
 
 The fields of space with seventy million suns 
 Sparkle. For each, for all, time's hour-glass 
 runs 
 
 Toward some fixed moment of mortality. 
 
 Look up ; ’tis night : there on that starry sea 
 
 The Pharos-flame of Algol ebbs and flows ; 
 
 Now shrinks to twilight, now intensely glows ; 
 Waxing and waning as the minutes flee. — 
 
 For Algol had a comrade, whose clear song 
 
 Resounds no longer from the angelic choir ; 
 
 Nameless and voiceless, round his brother’s fire 
 He circles dark amid the luminous throng : 
 
 And there are countless worlds which, dead like him. 
 Still roll through interstellar midnight dim. 
 
93 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 VII. 
 
 RUE, man shall fall on dotage, like his creeds ; 
 Naught shall remain of all those cities fair. 
 
 This wondrous knowledge, these strong brains 
 that dare. 
 
 Stout hearts and hands that work heroic deeds. 
 Earth shall grow cold : the humblest, hardiest weeds. 
 
 That spread tough filaments to Arctic air. 
 
 Shall fail from our frore planet, while the bare 
 Dry vacant globe still through void ether speeds. 
 There is no dreadfulness in death and doom. 
 
 Annihilated worlds daunt not man’s soul. 
 
 She looks beyond the tempest and the tomb 
 Of faiths and lives and systems, based secure 
 
 On her own strength that dateless must endure. 
 
 Joying in Beauty, Goodness, God, the Whole. 
 
94 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 BLIND, misguided, wandering, wilful age I 
 The hosts of heaven are numbered ; the deep sky 
 Is robbed of her cerulean secresy ; 
 
 Earth’s runic scrolls unravel, page by page. 
 
 Why go ye forth, O men, on pilgrimage 
 
 To map the mountains and the sea to spy, 
 
 Leaving yourseh'es ? Locked in your bosoms lie 
 Depths deeper than thought’s plummet-line can 
 gauge. 
 
 Seek what ye seek. Garner the boundless store 
 
 Of science. Tempt each year new paths untrod. 
 
 Pile the huge pyramid of facts. Explore 
 Life’s sentient shrines. On pain unshuddering pry. 
 
 Yet find ye not the everlasting I, 
 
 Nor solve the secret of the name of God. 
 
95 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 AINLY we name and measure Him, whose name. 
 Were the whole universe voiced in one word, 
 Would still be wrongly, indistinctly heard ; 
 
 Whose substance, were the wide world’s walls of 
 flame 
 
 Contracted to one calculable frame. 
 
 Would foil the meting-rod, and still be found 
 Subtler and vaster than all thought can sound ; 
 
 For ever varying, yet for aye the same. 
 
 Leave then this quest, and let earth’s oracle 
 
 Henceforward be the still small human cry, 
 
 Speaking through silence from life’s inmost cell. 
 
 The time may come — nay, haply, now is nigh — 
 
 When, as at Pentecost those fire-tongues fell, 
 
 New creeds shall dawn, doomed, like the old, to die 
 
96 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 X. 
 
 ODS fade ; but God abides, and in man’s heart 
 Speaks with the clear unconquerable cry 
 Of energies and hopes that cannot die. 
 
 We feel this sentient self the counterpart 
 Of some self vaster than the star-girt sky. 
 
 Yea, though our utterance falter ; though no art 
 By more than sign or .symbol may impart 
 This faith of faiths that lifts our courage high ; 
 
 Yet are there human duties, human needs. 
 
 Love, charity, self-sacrifice, pure deeds. 
 
 Tender affections, helpful ser\-ice, war 
 Waged against tyranny, fraud, suffering, crime : 
 
 These, ever strengthening with the strength of time. 
 Exalt man higher than fabled angels are. 
 
97 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 HIS is religion, leading us to God. 
 
 For this those dumb blind generations wrought 
 In midnight darkness and the dawn of thought . 
 To win this faith those myriad pilgrims trod 
 Yon stairs, and soaked with blood this sacred sod ; 
 
 Forged iron creeds and idols terror-fraught ; 
 Wandered long years in mazy labyrinths caught ; 
 Scourged, tortured, slew with persecution’s rod. 
 Faiths fade, and superstitions fail; but still 
 
 Men live by faith, and still from erring creeds 
 Extract truth’s essence. Gods decline and die ; 
 
 Yet God endures: and still, while God recedes, 
 
 Man probes the earth, weighs planets, sweeps the 
 sky ; 
 
 But finds God here in his own heart and will. 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 ON THE SACRO MONTE. 
 
 XII. 
 
 HEREFORE the shrine is sacred, and that old 
 Dumb instinct leads the country folk to pray 
 Still on this Field of Flowers each holy day : 
 Yea, when the creeds of Christendom are cold 
 When Jesus’ tale in Bethlehem shall be told 
 
 Like Buddha’s or like Mahomet’s ; and the grey 
 Shades from the sepulchre be rolled away ; 
 
 And all men’s eyes the corpse of Christ behold ; 
 Still shall the country folk ascend these stairs, 
 
 Still shall this shrine be holy : for man’s heart. 
 Although faiths fade, will seek a place for prayers, 
 Where soothing life’s immedicable smart. 
 
 It may repose fanned by diviner airs. 
 
 And commune with the Soul that dwells apart. 
 
99 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 j|HO hath not dreamed, amid this toilsome life, 
 
 Of tranquil spirits fallen upon sleep. 
 
 Sighing — ‘ Dear Death ! they have no pain who 
 keep 
 
 Sabbath in thy mild realm withdrawn from 
 strife ? ’ 
 
 But when the heart-blood ebbs, when day by day 
 
 Our own thin fingers grow more pinched and white. 
 When the starved nerves are thirsting for the light. 
 We mourn — ‘ O Life that leaves us, strong Life, stay ! 
 Give back once more the throb, the pulse, the pain ! 
 
 Nay, if it need be, rend and torture us : 
 
 But leave us not to languish ! ’ — Even thus. 
 
 Between the boon of life and the grave’s gain. 
 
 There is a dreadful moment, ere the brain 
 Sinks into nothing spent and slumberous. 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH, 
 i.i. 
 
 OW is it that the thoughts of Love and Death 
 Are so indissolubly blent that Love, 
 
 When first he wings the soul to soar above 
 This prison-house wherein she languisheth, 
 Calls with the strength of morning in his breath, 
 
 And in his eyes the calm pure light thereof. 
 
 On Death — as though Death only knew what Love 
 In his clear cry, far above singing, saith ? 
 
 Death answers. — Hark ! Von surly sullen knell 
 
 Swings o’er the sward where lovers hand in hand 
 Stroll ’mid forget-me-nots from glade to glade : 
 Through tears they smile and listen where they stand, 
 
 The while that low note of the booming bell 
 Saith to their soul ; ‘ With me Love shall not fade 
 
lOI 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH, 
 in 
 
 EEP calleth unto deep : the Infinite 
 Within us to the Infinite without 
 Cries with an inextinguishable shout, 
 
 In spite of all we do to stifle it. 
 
 Therefore Death in the coming gloom hath lit 
 
 A torch for Love to fly to. Dread and Doubt 
 Vanish like broken armies in the rout, 
 
 When the swords splinter and the hauberks split. 
 
 But in the interval of crossing spears 
 
 There is a stagnant dark, where all things seem 
 By frauds encompassed and confused with fears : 
 
 . Herein we live our common lives, and dream ; 
 
 Yet even here, remembering Love, we may 
 Look with calm eyes for Death to summon day. 
 
102 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 IV. 
 
 AN dissolution build ? Shall death amend 
 Chaos on chaos hurled of human hope, 
 Co-ordinate our effort with our scope. 
 
 And in white light the hues of conflict blend ? — 
 Alas ! we know not where our footsteps tend : 
 
 High overhead the unascended cope 
 Is lost in ether, while we blindly grope 
 ’Mid mist-wreaths that the warring thunders rend. — 
 Somehow, we know not how ; somewhere, but where 
 
 We know not ; by some hand, we know not whose. 
 Toy must absorb the whole wide world’s despair. 
 
 This we call Faith : but if we dare impose 
 
 Form on this faith, we shall but beat the air 
 Or build foundations on the baseless ooze. 
 
103 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 V. 
 
 many cities have been builded there — 
 le Sybaris and Croton of dead creeds, 
 here now the Nereids hang their filmy weeds, 
 And ’neath the sand the slain gods slumber fair. 
 None stirs their sleep with praise or any prayer ; 
 
 For a young god is reigning, and he leads 
 Our faint eyes upward from the flowery meads, 
 
 As though to greet an angel unaware. 
 
 He too shall sink and sleep. Age after age 
 Invents new saviours and new deities, 
 
 Crying Hosannah ! while the withered page 
 Of mortal life blackens with blood and sighs ; 
 
 Nor all our loves nor all the wars we wage. 
 
 Can lift us to the cold unpitying skies. 
 
104 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 VI. 
 
 ILL death be outlet for us into light 
 And peace and plenitude of happiness ? 
 
 Shall we grasp all things which we do but guess ? 
 Or shall we lie lost in a starless night ? 
 
 Or by slow upward strivings infinite 
 
 Shall we plod on, for ever comfortless, 
 
 For ever ringed with impotent distress, 
 
 And fooled as now with many a vain delight ? 
 
 Shall we ourselves survive, or do we live 
 Enfolded in a life that is not ours. 
 
 Flaming like sparks intense but fugitive 
 To make the whole vast sea of splendour glow ? 
 
 Shall we gain insight ; or the more we know. 
 
 Still find new limits for our widening powers ? 
 
105 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 VII. 
 
 not the large life of the Universe 
 Ifil its children ? — Haply ’t were enough 
 ke April snakes to cast the treacherous slough 
 Of fleshly stupors that the soul immerse. 
 
 Who knows if Death, miscalled the primal curse, 
 
 Be not life’s crown of blessings ? Stern and rough. 
 His breath perchance will sever at a puff 
 The birth-bred vapours that our sun amerce. 
 
 The self that binds thought, feeling, flesh in one, 
 
 Is form, not matter ; nay, whate’er we see. 
 
 Hath form ; blank matter is a name or nought. 
 
 Shall then each point of vital unity 
 
 Perish ? Or shall new webs of life be spun 
 To clasp it quivering in the skein of thought ? 
 
io6 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 HESE questions all men ask ; but none can make 
 Su Fit answer for their anguish here below. 
 
 |SH| The howling whirlwinds of existence blow 
 Onward for ever o’er an endless lake : 
 
 We watch the struggling barks around us take 
 
 Their fated course ; and that is all we know ; 
 
 They sail, they sink ; no sign the waters show ; 
 While straining myriads follow in our wake. 
 
 The force that speeds our flight we cannot see : 
 
 No voice of man or God survives the storm ; 
 
 Nor ’mid the weltering waves hath any form 
 Risen to fill the vast vacuity : 
 
 Nay, if at times there stream athwart the night 
 Some forked flame, it dazzles but to blight. 
 
107 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 IX. 
 
 ARD for ever flows the tide of Life, 
 ill broadening, gathering to itself the rills 
 rat made dim music in the primal hills, 
 
 And tossing crested waves of joy and strife. 
 
 We watch it rising where no seeds are rife, 
 
 But fire the elemental vortex fills ; 
 
 Through plant and beast it streams, till human wills 
 Unfold the sanctities of human life. 
 
 Further we see not. But here faith joins hands 
 With reason : life that onward came to us 
 From simple to more complex, still must flow 
 Forward and forward through far wider lands : — 
 
 If thought begins with man, the luminous 
 Kingdom of mind beyond him still must grow. 
 
io8 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 S there then hope that thou and I shall be 
 Saved from the ruin of the ravenous years, 
 
 And placed, though late, at last among our peers 
 On the firm heights of immortality ? 
 
 Nay, not so. Thought may bum eternally. 
 
 And beacon through ten thousand broadening spheres. 
 Using our lives like wood that disappears 
 In the fierce flame it feeds continually. 
 
 Thus we may serve to build the cosmic soul 
 As moments in its being : but to deem 
 That we shall therefore grow to grasp the whole, 
 
 Or last as separate atoms in the stream 
 
 Of Life transcendent, were a beauteous dream, 
 
 Too frail to bear stern reason’s .strong control. 
 
109 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XI. 
 
 Hope, cast back on Feeling, argues thus 
 ‘ thought be highest in the scale we see, 
 'hat thought is also personality. 
 
 Conscious of self, aspiring, emulous. 
 Growth furthermore means goodness : naught in us 
 Abides and flourishes, unless it be 
 Tempered for life by love’s vitality : 
 
 Evil is everywhere deciduous. 
 
 Shall then the universal Thought, pure mind, 
 
 Pure growth, pure good, be found impersonal ? 
 And if a Person, dare we think or call 
 Him cruel, to his members so unkind. 
 
 As to permit our agony, nor bind 
 
 Each flower Death plucks into Life’s coronal ? 
 
no 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XII. 
 
 foolish Hope ! How many flowers have faded 
 Long ere the petals of their prime were spread ; 
 How many on dry earth their bloom have shed, 
 By blight deformed, by canker-worms invaded ! 
 To arch these aisles, these labyrinths colonnaded. 
 
 That soar so light and lustrous overhead, 
 
 To build these domes that echo to our tread. 
 
 How many million men have died unaided ! 
 
 Each stone of this huge house of human thought 
 
 Was hewn with sweat and sighs, with blood and tears 
 Cemented, by dumb children of blind j’ears. 
 
 Toiling instinctively and terror-fraught, 
 
 ’Mid anguish and intolerable fears. 
 
 Nor knowing what their bleeding hands had wrought. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 HALL these arise winged by immortal mind, 
 
 Who toiled on earth obscure and vegetive ? 
 
 If life be prescient thought’s prerogative, 
 
 They can but die whose germ of thought was 
 blind. — 
 
 Sightless and mute, leaving no trace behind. 
 
 See them whirl past like mists the breezes weave. 
 Blurred forms, and faces undemonstrative, 
 
 Blown by the blank and elemental wind. — 
 
 First founders of our race, the name whereby 
 
 God knows you in the place of death and hell, 
 
 Is legion ! Numberless they hurry by. 
 
 Growing more vaporous ; till who shall tell 
 
 If those last shapes be men, — those clouds that fly 
 ’Twixt lurid lights and glooms inscrutable? 
 
II2 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 OR these alone perplex me : but I see 
 The multitudes of babes untimely slain ; 
 
 The phalanx of bleared idiots in whose brain 
 Echo is dumb ; the blank-eyed company 
 Of self-imbruted slaves, whose atrophy 
 
 Sinks the blunt spirit beneath sense of pain ; 
 
 The serfs of crime and labour who remain 
 Lost ’mid our daylight in dull miser)' : 
 
 All who through fault of self or circumstance, 
 
 Through sin of parents or through primal flaw. 
 
 Live stunted, dwarfed, foredoomed to ignorance. 
 Perverse, abortive, swerving from the law, 
 
 Twy-formed, twy-natured, crude, corrupted, raw — 
 How can these claim a God’s inheritance? 
 
THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XV. 
 
 ELIVERANCE may reach them from the wrong 
 Of Life — but not such salvage as we crave 
 From the cold clutch of Death’s congealing wave 
 Into a land of warmth and morning song. 
 
 Is this then all wherefor we dare to long? 
 
 Is rest the end — rest in the silent grave. 
 
 For king and clown, fool, sage, and saint and knave. 
 Whelmed in one nameless, dateless, rankless throng ? 
 Not even thus would the huge wrongs of life 
 
 Be righted : for annihilation is not peace. 
 
 Nor sleep, nor passiveness, nor truce to strife ; 
 
 All these imply something that doth not cease ; 
 
 Nor by obliterating man shall God 
 
 Straighten the paths whereon man’s feet hare trod. 
 
THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 F God exist, justice demands that He 
 
 Should compensate the pains of earth, redress 
 The balance of unequal happiness. 
 
 And mould aright misshaped monstrosity. 
 
 The time hath long gone by since man could bless 
 A monarch throned above a sapphire sea. 
 
 With seraphim for songsters, smilingly 
 Surveying earth and all earth’s helplessness. 
 
 But when we prate of God, what do we mean ? 
 
 Our age that hath so many faiths outworn. 
 Outlived so many longings on the scene 
 Of human hopes and human agony. 
 
 Waits a new reading of that Name, forlorn 
 And wrapped in dreamings of the things to be. 
 
”5 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 I 
 
 ERCHANCE our sons shall learn to cling to Him, 
 As scarce less impotent than we, who will 
 But can not, tempest-tossed by passions still, 
 And thwarted by blind force and anguish grim. 
 It may be they will need no teraphim 
 
 To pray to, but will take the good and ill 
 With calm indifference, content to fill 
 Their place and pass into the twilight dim. 
 
 Nay, peradventure they shall thrill with joy. 
 
 Feeling the pulse of the huge Being throb, 
 
 Divining God in forces that destroy 
 And build afresh, praising the years that rob 
 
 And years that yield, dizzy and drunk with bliss 
 By gazing on the infinite abyss. 
 
 1 2 
 
ii6 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 HIS also were a creed. Less amorous 
 
 Than Nature was grim Baal or Juggernaut : 
 Nor have the sons of Zion chaunted aught 
 Richer with love divine, more rapturous, 
 Than that thanksgiving chorus borne to us 
 
 Across dead years from marshes fever-fraught. 
 Where the Imperial Stoic waked and wrought 
 ’Mid the wild din of legions mutinous. 
 
 Nature will then usurp on Deity ; 
 
 And with the shadow of the God we fear, 
 
 The dread of life to come will disappear. — 
 
 Oh ! without God shall Love or Reason be? 
 
 Lacking the hope of life, how cold and drear 
 Must be the joys of poor mortality ! 
 
THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 s'E saith, ‘The world’s a stage : I took my seat 
 I saw the show ; and now ’t is time to rise. ’ 
 Another saith, ‘ I came with eager eyes 
 Into life’s banquet-hall to drink and eat : 
 
 I'he hour hath struck, when I must shoe my feet, 
 
 And gird me for the way that deathward lies.’ 
 Another saith, ‘ Life is a bird that flies 
 From dark through light to darkness, arrowy-fleet.’ 
 One show ; one feast ; one flight must that be all ? 
 Could we unlearn this longing, could we cry, 
 
 ‘ Thanks for our part in life’s fair festival ! 
 
 We know not whence we came, we know not why 
 We go, nor where ; but God is over all ! ' 
 
 It would not then be terrible to die. 
 
iiS 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 pNE saith : The whole world is a Comedy 
 
 Played for the mirth of God upon his throne, 
 Whereof the hidden meanings will be known 
 When IMichael's trumpet thrills through earth 
 and sea. 
 
 Fate is the dramaturge ; necessity 
 
 Allots the parts ; the scenes, by nature shown, 
 Embrace each element and every zone 
 Ordered with infinite vaiiety. — 
 
 Another saith : No calm-eyed Sophocles 
 
 Indites the tragedy of human doom. 
 
 But some cold scornful Aristophanes, 
 
 Whose zanies gape and gibber in thick gloom. 
 
 While nightingales, shrill ’mid the shivering trees. 
 
 Tar on the silence of the neighbouring tomb. 
 
THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 USH, heart of mine ! Nor jest nor blasphemy 
 Beseems the strengthless creature of an hour ! 
 Wed resignation rather ; dread the power, 
 Whate’er it be, that rules thy destiny. 
 
 Nay, learn to love ; love irresistibly ! 
 
 With obstinate reiteration shower 
 
 Praises and prayers, thy spirit’s dearest dower. 
 
 On the mute altar of that deity ! 
 
 They work no wrong who worship : they are pure 
 Who seek God even in the sightless blue : 
 
 And they have hope of victory who endure. 
 
 This mortal life, like a dark avenue, 
 
 Is leading thee perchance to light secure 
 And limitless horizons clear to view. 
 
120 
 
 THE THOUGHT OF DEATH, 
 
 xxn. 
 
 {A Palinode.) 
 
 AY, Death, thou art a shadow ! Even as light 
 Is but the shadow of invisible God, 
 
 And of that shade the shadow is thin Night, 
 Veiling the earth whereon our feet have trod ; 
 
 ■So art Thou but the shadow of this life. 
 
 Itself the pale and unsubstantial shade 
 Of living God, fulfilled by love and strife 
 Throughout the universe Himself hath made : 
 
 And as frail Night, following the flight of earth. 
 
 Obscures the world we breathe in, for a while. 
 
 So Thou, the reflex of our mortal birth, 
 
 Veilest the life wherein we weep and smile ; 
 
 But when both earth and life are whirled away. 
 
 What shade can shroud us from God’s deathless day? 
 
I2I 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 I. 
 
 O sins, shall die ; who dies, shall suffer pain. — 
 Dire trinity of anguish, death and guilt. 
 
 On whose inscrutable foundations built 
 The riddle of creation racks man’s brain ! 
 
 Probe as we will, with firm persistent strain 
 
 Plunging thought’s rapier-blade from point to hilt. 
 Till the last heart’s drop of the world be spilt. 
 
 Deep at the roots of life these three remain. 
 
 Sin, Death and Suffering ! Mystery triune. 
 
 Whereof the name is legion ! Multiform 
 Symptom of irremoveable disease ! 
 
 Discord that jars upon the sphery tune 
 
 Sung in the ears of seraphs ! Sunless storm 
 Troubling the depth of God’s refulgent ease ! 
 
122 
 
 MYSTERY OT MYSTERIES. 
 
 LD as the oldest origins of life ; 
 
 Before the fixed stars and the planets were; 
 While yet these elements, earth, water, air. 
 With fire commingling ignorant of strife. 
 Whirled in fierce eddying gyres ; was evil there 
 
 Where good was ; and the fruitful twins were rife 
 With multitudinous worlds; on good, his wife. 
 
 Evil begat this daedal earth so fair. 
 
 Yet oh, the intolerable cross of pain ! 
 
 And oh, the envenomed viper-tooth of guilt ! 
 
 And oh, death’s dreadful knocking at our gate ! 
 
 The suffering heart, the sentient human brain. 
 
 Shrink from this law whereby the world was built ; 
 Faith seeks some blessing in the curse of fate. 
 
123 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 III. 
 
 WEEPING the wintry skies with optic glass, 
 High on his tower, the stationed eremite 
 Of science through long vigil hours of night 
 Views in continuous procession pass 
 Suns beyond suns, countless as blades of grass : 
 
 Thousands on thousands quail his eager sight ; 
 
 And still as earth spins round, new sparks of light 
 Start from the void and swell the glittering mass. 
 
 A million billion worlds, could we but gauge 
 
 One interstellar point of gloom, would swim 
 From those black gulfs; yet far beyond the dim 
 Scope of man’s sense and engine-building brain. 
 
 Heaven’s endless depths unfathomed, heaven’s dark 
 page 
 
 Unread, unransacked, unexplored, remain. 
 
124 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 HROUGH all those suns, throughout those cir- 
 cling spheres, 
 
 Are sin, death, suffering, then the steadfast 
 law ? 
 
 Must the whole universe endure this flaw 
 Eternally through heaven's asonian years ? — 
 Nay, break these prison-bands of fleshly fears ! 
 
 On plumes of soul-born freedom mounting high, 
 Outsoar the imposition of this lie ! 
 
 Clasp God in whom the heart’s dread disappears ! 
 The whole creation, faith and science cry, 
 
 Travails and groans : yet, once well understood, 
 
 God and the world are one, and Love is God. 
 
 These things elude our grasp ; but bye and bye 
 
 Sin shall be shown the complement of good. 
 
 And death life’s door, and pain the path joy trod. 
 
125 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 V. 
 
 AY, saith the Tempter, I am all in all ; 
 
 Mine is this universe submerged in woe. 
 
 For ever and for ever doomed to go 
 Hurling and howling, sin’s, death’s, suffering s 
 thrall. 
 
 Come ye to me, my children ! Quaff the gall 
 
 And myrrh, which from the founts of being flow ! 
 
 Ye reap but pain and death, whate’er ye sow 
 Between the sinful womb and shameful pall ! 
 
 Who shall gainsay him ? Fact, experience, proof, 
 
 Conscience, the world without, within, combine 
 To cast us grovelling ’neath the accursM hoof. 
 
 Yet from man’s ignorance, man’s agony. 
 
 Rises the low unconquerable cry : 
 
 Rule thou thine own ! Man’s spirit is not thine ! 
 
MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 VI. 
 
 RAIL human voice ! Sad sinful child of earth, 
 Fain to assert the everlasting Yea, 
 
 In spite of universes thundering Nay, 
 
 In spite of death unshunned, unchosen birth ! 
 
 In spite of life’s few gains, so little worth. 
 
 Matched with so huge a debt of doom to pay ; 
 
 In spite of clouds that turn heaven’s daylight grey : 
 Tons-weight of misery to one ounce of mirth ! 
 
 How hast thou dared the Tempter to gainsay ? 
 
 And Hope, the evergreen, that in thy breast 
 \Yaves her staunch boughs against the wintry sky. 
 Where is she rooted? How shall words convey 
 That dumb blunt unintelligible cry 
 Which wills thee, maugre sin, death, suffering, blessed 
 
127 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 VII. 
 
 HE flux and reflux of world-destiny, 
 
 One saith, in equiponderant strife ’twixt good 
 And evil, on the dark pain-crested flood 
 Of dubious being, this abysmal sea 
 Wherein all suffer, sin, and cease to be. 
 
 Tosses man’s impotent soul : man is God’s pawn 
 Played in His game for empire ; risked, withdrawn ; 
 Lost, won ; at hazard for eternity. 
 
 As on the Xanthian shore dead Patroclus 
 
 Stripped of Peleian armour helpless lay 
 To Greeks and Ilians a disputed prey ; 
 
 So, save that man is sentient, ’gainst his will 
 
 Framed to choose sides perforce with good or ill. 
 Those powers of Light and Dark contend for us. 
 
128 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 NOTHER saith : ‘ There is no hope that Light 
 Shall triumph over Darkness ! Even as day 
 Dawns, growls to noon, declines, and fades 
 away ; 
 
 So for the gods themselves there cometh night. 
 Mischief will tread down might and stifle right; 
 
 The worm that at the core of all things lay. 
 
 Still gnaws and frets life’s fruit with slow decay ; 
 Balder himself must bend to Loki’s spite. 
 
 How then shall man fare ? Let man fight and die ! 
 
 Fight for his gods, and with his gods decline ! 
 
 Go where his gods go, when their Asgard, high 
 Uplifted in its golden glittering shine. 
 
 Sinks to that bottomless black ooze of brine : 
 
 There let man lost among his lost gods lie ! 
 
129 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 IX. 
 
 ERE spake man’s heart heroic ! For a cause 
 Foreknown as failure, in the face of doom, 
 Wide-eyed to front the intolerable tomb ; 
 Smiling to walk into Hell’s ravening jaws ; 
 Because the gods we clung to, they whose laws 
 
 Loving through life we reverenced, sink in gloom ; 
 Because the beauteous world with all its bloom 
 Falls to the loathly worm that crawls and gnaws ; 
 Holding this faith, to battle and abide 
 
 As dying warriors staunch by gods that die ; 
 
 To flinch not from their ranks, nor swerve aside, 
 Nor join hell’s conquering hosts that scale the sky ; 
 
 This is sublimity ! This desperate creed, 
 
 ’Mid sin, pain, death, proves man’s immortal breed. 
 
 K 
 
MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES 
 
 X. 
 
 NOTHER saith ; Will, passion, pride, desire. 
 Whose spurs into the flanks of sense are thrust ; 
 Life, and the love of life ; the fervid lust. 
 
 Who at her girdle bears a whip of wire. 
 
 Slung with seven knotted thongs and tongued with fire. 
 Hounding man’s soul, her sumpter, ’mid the dust 
 Of the world’s highways with a fierce ‘ Thou must, ’ 
 Through cycles of existence, gyre on gyre : 
 
 These are the cause of sin, death, passion, pain ; 
 
 And these are all illusion : man may rise. 
 
 By penance and abstention and the strain 
 Through centuries of stern self-sacrifice. 
 
 To fusion with unconsciousness, and reign 
 In self-annihilation calmly wise. 
 
131 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 HE universe is God, another saith ; 
 
 He for His own well-being weaves this veil 
 Which hides Him from our human insight frail ; 
 
 God is what leaps to life, form, motion, breath. 
 Therefore disease, sin, suffering, passion, death. 
 
 Are but the brain-throbs of that consciousness 
 Which else were unselfconscious, limitless, 
 
 Light as void ether which environeth 
 These daedal worlds. We, struggling to express 
 Infinity ; thwarted by laws unknown 
 Of sentient being bound to finite form ; 
 
 Stung by felt incompleteness, spurred no less 
 
 By growth-pangs toward perfection ; ’neath the storm 
 Of life’s inexplicable urgence groan. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XII. 
 
 OTHER saith : Man, know thyself the part 
 Of an incalculable mystic whole 
 Wherein God moves, the omnipresent soul. 
 Timing each pulse of that stupendous heart. 
 Leave but earth’s stand-point : on thought’s voyage start 
 Through space, where systems in their cycles roll. 
 Restrained by His omnipotent control 
 Who gives them life, and makes thee what thou art. 
 Viewed from that apogee of nature’s being, 
 
 W’hat men call sin, death, suffering, doom, are naught 
 But strains wherefrom the world’s huge joy is wrought — 
 Infinite bliss from finite senses fleeing. 
 
 Man to the world, not it to man, was given : 
 
 All ill is good for which some life hath striven. 
 
133 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 OTHER saith ; All things, both last and first, 
 
 By laws of universal order are. 
 
 Thou hast thy fate ; so too hath yonder star. 
 Where is the bubble’s misery, should it burst ? 
 Or, should it float and sparkle, is it cursed 
 
 Because the frail sphere trembles on that bar 
 Of dissolution ? Mount death’s fiery car ; 
 
 Cling to life’s cross : what matters best or worst. 
 When all, or good or ill, concerns not thee 
 
 But that which moulds thee ? Therefore pray : O 
 world, 
 
 Whate’er thou findest good is good for me ! 
 
 Our bond is holy. Give me strength that I, 
 
 E’en ’mid life’s ruined walls around me hurled, 
 
 May love thee still, yea bless thee when I die ! 
 
134 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 NOTHER saith : God is omnipotent, 
 
 Yet suffereth evil ; God made man to be 
 Inheritor of earth’s felicity, 
 
 Framed in His image ; yet so subtly blent 
 Weakness and will, desire and discontent. 
 
 In man’s mixed nature that infallibly 
 Falling by fate from primal goodness, he 
 Quailed ’neath his Maker’s just displeasurement. 
 What course could Mercy take ? Creation’s plan 
 Forbade the blast of that almighty breath, 
 
 Which should have scathed the serpent and saved man. 
 So when four thousand years of sin had hurled 
 
 Millions to hell, God’s own Son suffered death. 
 Christ lived, knew sin, felt pain, redeemed the world. 
 
135 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XV. 
 
 RSED in this creed, our fathers lived and died. 
 Evil, they said, within the God-made world, 
 
 A serpent at the core of all things curled, 
 
 Crept into Eden and God’s will defied. 
 
 God, in the strife with sin, from His own side 
 
 Sent Christ, who stooped to bear the curse of birth, 
 And having veiled His deity in earth. 
 
 Wrestled with Hell, the scourged, the crucified. 
 From sin, pain, death, men turn their piteous eyes 
 
 Toward sin-distressed, pain-smitten, bleeding God. 
 Thwarted like us, like us abandoned, lies 
 He who planned heaven, whose feet with stars were shod. 
 With us God died ; for us on death He trod ; 
 
 And as God rose, man’s kindred soul must rise. 
 
136 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THOS of piety ! Poor human brain 
 In thine own image moulding God, to be 
 Victim and victor of sin’s curse like thee, 
 
 Like thee submissive to the laws of pain ! 
 
 Rising not up in anger to arraign 
 
 Heaven’s justice, thou with proud humility 
 Didst own thy guileless guilt the cause why He 
 MTio made man’s soul thus faulty, wrought in vain ! 
 Sad tender thought, that God Himself should bow 
 
 Under the doom He graved on Adam’s brow ! 
 
 Logic illogical, that He who framed 
 Man thrall of sin, death’s stave, for suffering bom. 
 
 Should on His own head weave that crown of thorn. 
 And dying prove man’s soul from death reclaimed ! 
 
137 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 EAFENED with voices from that hoarse-tongued 
 sea 
 
 Howling around doubt’s dungeon walls, I rise 
 And gaze at midnight on the liquid skies, 
 
 The calm clear stars with patient ministry 
 Performing each heaven’s task unweariedly. — 
 
 Then, since life’s mystery, death’s dread surmise, 
 
 In silence with the world’s weight on me lies ; 
 
 Voice of my heart, listening I lean to thee ! 
 
 Voice of my heart, that art God’s voice in me ! 
 
 Spirit unknown, that wilt not let hope die. 
 
 E’en though the death-pangs on my soul are nigh ! 
 Speak through the stillness ! Strength and comfort bring 
 Once more with faith’s unconquerable cry ! 
 
 Lift me aloft on love’s unfaltering wing ! 
 
138 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 AUGHT, naught is left but blind unwavering 
 trust : 
 
 Trust that this world were not the world we see, 
 Fashioned in every part harmoniously. 
 
 Rising with life-throbs rhythmically just 
 Up from each particle of formless dust 
 
 Through herb and beast to man’s complexity, 
 
 Were evil master, were this world and we 
 Subject to cold malignant murderous lust. 
 
 Reason milst rule. Reason ordains that man. 
 
 The climax of earth’s miracle, suspense 
 On the last wave of being, should demand 
 From his staunch heart, faith’s steadfast partisan. 
 
 Armour of triple brass, wherewith to fence 
 His soul, and spite of fate aspiring stand. 
 
139 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 from dark ocean’s tumult, ringed with cloud, 
 Belted with gloom, its deep foundations hid, 
 Soars the huge adamantine pyramid 
 Of Teneriffe or Athos thunder-browed ; 
 
 So let the unmoved soul, sedately proud. 
 
 Strike through life’s agony of storm bestrid 
 With fear-born fiends which faith and hope forbid. 
 Spring to the skies and pierce doubt’s vaporous 
 shroud. 
 
 Seas rage beneath us : winds and tempests range 
 
 Earth’s everduring darkness round our feet : 
 
 Air’s wild mid-region whirls with chance and change ; 
 
 Yet soars the soul inviolate ; heaven’s powers. 
 
 Prophets, saints, heroes, martyrs, poets, greet 
 Their sister stationed on life’s crumbling towers. 
 
140 
 
 MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 XX. 
 
 H, thou who sole ’neath heaven’s impiteous stars, 
 Chained to thy crucifix on those fierce fells, 
 Pierced by the pendent spikes of icicles, 
 Quailest beneath the world-wind’s scimetars ; 
 Thou on whose wrinkling forehead delved with scars 
 Unnumbered ages score time’s parallels ; 
 
 Deep in whose heart sin’s deathless vulture dwells ; 
 Who on the low earth’s limitarj- bars 
 Seest suns rise, suns set, ascending signs 
 
 And signs descending through seonian years ; 
 
 Still uncompanioned save by dreams and fears. 
 
 Still stayed by hope deferred that ne’er declines ; 
 
 Oh, thou, Prometheus, protomartyr, thus 
 Teach man to dree bfe’s doom on Caucasus ! 
 
 Spottisvjoode Co.^ Printers^ New-street Sqtiare. London. 
 
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