Once all-sufficient for men's needs, Are palimpsests that scarce disguise The tracings of still earlier lies, Themselves as surely written o’er An older fib erased before. So from these days I fly to those Where morning's eyes see nothing No crude perplexity of change, Then priests could pile the altar's sods, With whom gods spake as they with gods, And everywhere from haunted earth Then hills and groves and streams and seas Thrilled with immortal presences, Now Pan at last is surely dead, Fly thither? Why, the very air This world and that are growing dark; Still borne before him since the Fall, Whichever box the truth be stowed in, The culture curtailed independents, Try it with Zeus, 't is just the same; They make things admirably plain, But one hard question will remain : and If one hypothesis you lose, A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears, Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease Our dear and admirable Huxley Cannot explain to me why ducks lay, Or rather, how into their eggs Blunder potential wings and legs With will to move them and decide Whether in air or lymph to glide. Who gets a hair's-breadth on by showing That Something Else set all agoing? Farther and farther back we push From Moses and his burning bush; Cry," Art Thou there?" Above, below, All Nature mutters yes and no! 'T is the old answer: we're agreed Being from Being must proceed, Life be Life's source. I might as well Obey the meeting-house's bell. And listen while Old Hundred pours Forth through the summer-opened doors, From old and young. I hear it yet, Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet, While the gray minister, with face Radiant, let loose his noble bass. If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll Waked all the echoes of the soul, And in it many a life found wings To soar away from sordid things. Church gone and singers too, the song Sings to me voiceless all night long, Till my soul beckons me afar, Glowing and trembling like a star. Will any scientific touch With my worn strings achieve as much? Are much persuasive with the wall And who can tell but some fine day TEMPORA MUTANTUR. THE world turns mild; democracy, they say, Rounds the sharp knobs of character away, And no great harm, unless at grave ex pense Of what needs edge of proof, the moral sense; For man or race is on the downward path Since office means a kind of patent drill To force an entrance to the Nation's till, And peculation something rather less Whose fibre grows too soft for honest Risky than if you spelt it with an s; wrath, Now that to steal by law is grown an art, Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart, And 'slightly irregular" dilutes the At ease in mind, with pockets filled for life: His "lady" glares with gems whose vulgar blaze The poor man through his heightened taxes pays, Himself content if one huge Kohinoor All templars and minstrels and ladies and pages, And love and adventure in Outre-Mer land; But ah, where the youth dreamed of building a minster, The man takes a pew and sits reckoning his pelf, And the Graces wear fronts, the Muse thins to a spinster When Middle-Age stares from one's glass at oneself! II. Bulge from a shirt-front ampler than Do you twit me with days when I had before, stones? an Ideal, And saw the sear future through spectacles green? Then find me some charm, while I look round and see all These fat friends of forty, shall keep me nineteen ; Should we go on pining for chaplets of laurel Who 've paid a perruquier for mending our thatch, Or, our feet swathed in baize, with our Fate pick a quarrel, If, instead of cheap bay-leaves, she sent a dear scratch? III. With choker white, wherein no cynic We called it our Eden, that small patent baker, As I think what I was, I sigh Desunt nonnulla! Years are creditors Sheridan's self could not bilk; A spirited cross of romantic and But then, as my boy says, "What right grand, has a fullah No fairer new moon's crescent. With what fumes of fame was each con- And set our slow old sap aflow fident pate full ! That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys, To sprout in fresh ideas! III. Alas, think I, what worth or parts Have brought me here competing, To speak what starts in myriad hearts Himself had loved a theme like this; With Burns's memory beating! Must I be its entomber? No pen save his but 's sure to miss IV. For the goose of To-day still is Mem- As I sat musing what to say, ory's swan. VII. And yet who would change the old dream for new treasure? Make not youth's sourest grapes the best wine of our life? Need he reckon his date by the Almanac's measure Who is twenty life-long in the eyes of his wife? And how my verse to number, Which I will put in metre, V The saint, methought, had left his post |