It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
A Variation
Youth rambles on life’s arid mount,
And strikes the rock, and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount,
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanish’d out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones.
The mount is mute, the channel dry;
And down he lays his weary bones.
This sentence have I left behind:
An aching body, and a mind
Not wholly clear, nor wholly blind,
Too keen to rest, too weak to find,
That travails sore, and brings forth wind,
Are God’s worst portion to mankind.
Ask not my name, O friend!
That Being only, which hath known each man
From the beginning, can
Remember each unto the end.
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Vain thy onset! all stands fast;
Thou thyself must break at last.
Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will!
Thou art tired; best be still!
They out-talk’d thee, hiss’d thee, tore thee.
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and pass’d,
Hotly charged—and broke at last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!
“Man is blind because of sin;
Revelation makes him sure.
Without that, who looks within,
Looks in vain, for all’s obscure.”
Nay, look closer into man!
Tell me, can you find indeed
Nothing sure, no moral plan
Clear prescribed, without your creed?
“No, I nothing can perceive;
Without that, all’s dark for men.
That, or nothing, I believe.”—
For God’s sake, believe it then!
Lines Written for Miss Story’s Album
The armless Vatican Cupid
Hangs down his beautiful head;
For the priests have got him in prison,
And Psyche long has been dead.
But see, his shaven oppressors
Begin to quake and disband!
And The Times, that bright Apollo,
Proclaims salvation at hand.
“And what,” cries Cupid, “will save us?”
Says Apollo: “Modernise Rome!
What inns! Your streets, too, how narrow!
Too much of palace and dome!
“O learn of London, whose paupers
Are not pushed out by the swells!
Wide streets with fine double trottoirs;
And then—the London hotels!”
The armless Vatican Cupid
Hangs down his head as before.
Through centuries past it has hung so,
And will through centuries more.
To daily tasks we set our hand,
And oft the spirit, pent at home,
Breaks out and longs for Switzerland,
Longs oftener yet and pines for Rome.
I pass’d to-day o’er Walton Heath—
The coming spring-time’s earliest stir
Quickened and moved, a happy breath,
In moss, and gorse, and shining fir.
Fortunate firs! who never think
How firs less curst by Fortune’s frown
O’er Glion fringe the mountain’s brink,
Or dot the slopes to Vevey down.
I cross’d St. George’s Hill to-day—
There in the leaf-strewn copse I found
The tender foxglove-plants display
Their first green muffle on the ground.
They envy not, this tranquil brood,
The cyclamens whose blossoms fill
With fragrance all Frascati’s wood
Along the gracious Alban Hill!
Man only, with eternal bent
To come and go, to shift and range,
At life and living not content,
Chafes in his place, and pines for change.
Yet happy—since his feverish blood
Leaves him no rest, and change he will—
When restlessness is restless good,
Still mending, lessening, human ill!
Unwearied, as from land to land
The incessant wanderer takes his way,
To hold the light and reach the hand
To all who sink, to all who stray!
I read in Dante how that horned light,
Which hid Ulysses, waved itself and said:
“Following the sun, we set our vessel’s head
To the great main; pass’d Seville on the right
“And Ceuta on the left; then southward sped.
And last in air, far off, dim rose a Height.
We cheer’d; but from it rush’d a blast of might,
And struck—and o’er us the sea-waters spread.”
I dropp’d the book, and of my child I thought
In his long black ship speeding night and day
O’er those same seas; dark Teneriffe rose, fraught
With omen; “Oh! were that Mount pass’d,” I say.
Then the door opens and this card is brought:
“Reach’d Cape Verde Islands, Lusitania.”
Four years!—and didst thou stay above
The ground, which hides thee now, but four?
And all that life, and all that love,
Were crowded, Geist! into no more?
Only four years those winning ways,
Which make me for thy presence yearn,
Call’d us to pet thee or to praise,
Dear little friend! at every turn?
That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span,
To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?
That liquid, melancholy eye,
From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
Seem’d surging the Virgilian cry,53
The sense of tears in mortal things—
That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled
By spirits gloriously gay,
And temper of heroic mould—
What, was four years their whole short day?
Yes, only four!—and not the course
Of all the centuries yet to come,
And not the infinite resource
Of Nature, with her countless sum
Of figures, with her fullness vast
Of new creation evermore,
Can ever quite repeat the past,
Or just thy little self restore.
Stern law of every mortal lot!
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.
But thou, when struck thine hour to go,
On us, who stood despondent by,
A meek last glance of love didst throw,
And humbly lay thee down to die.
Yet would we keep thee in our heart—
Would fix our favourite on the scene,
Nor let thee utterly depart
And be as if thou ne’er hadst been.
And so there rise these lines of verse
On lips that rarely form them now;
While to each other we rehearse:
Such ways, such arts, such looks hadst thou!
We stroke thy broad brown paws again,
We bid thee to thy vacant chair,
We
