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
That in the landlocked Past repose,
Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes
From bloom-flushed boughs untimely
flakes;

Where morning's eyes see
strange,

nothing

No crude perplexity of change,
And morrows trip along their ways
Secure as happy yesterdays.
Then there were rulers who could trace
Through heroes up to gods their race,
Pledged to fair fame and noble use
By veins from Odin filled or Zeus,
And under bonds to keep divine
The praise of a celestial line.

Then priests could pile the altar's sods, With whom gods spake as they with gods,

And everywhere from haunted earth
Broke springs of wonder, that had birth
In depths divine beyond the ken
And fatal scrutiny of men;

Then hills and groves and streams and

seas

Thrilled with immortal presences,
Not too ethereal for the scope
Of human passion's dream or hope.

Now Pan at last is surely dead,
And King No-Credit reigns instead,
Whose officers, morosely strict,
Poor Fancy's tenantry evict,
Chase the last Genius from the door,
And nothing dances any more.
Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do,
Drumming the Old One's own tattoo,
And, if the oracles are dumb,
Have we not mediums? Why be glum?

Fly thither? Why, the very air
Is full of hindrance and despair!
Fly thither? But I cannot fly;
My doubts enmesh me if I try,
Each lilliputian, but, combined,
Potent a giant's limbs to bind.

This world and that are growing dark;
A huge interrogation mark,
The Devil's crook episcopal,

Still borne before him since the Fall,
Blackens with its ill-omened sign

Whichever box the truth be stowed in,
There's not a sliver left of Odin.
Either he was a pinchbrowed thing,
With scarcely wit a stone to fling,
A creature both in size and shape
Nearer than we are to the ape,
Who hung sublime with brat and spouse
By tail prehensile from the boughs,
And, happier than his maimed descend-
ants,

The culture curtailed independents,
Could pluck his cherries with both paws,
And stuff with both his big-boned jaws;
Or else the core his name enveloped
Was from a solar myth developed,
Which, hunted to its primal shoot,
Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root,
Thereby to instant death explaining
The little poetry remaining.

Try it with Zeus, 't is just the same;
The thing evades, we hug a name;
Nay, scarcely that, perhaps a vapor
Born of some atmospheric caper.
All Lempriere's fables blur together
In cloudy symbols of the weather,
And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas
But to illustrate such hypotheses.
With years enough behind his back,
Lincoln will take the selfsame track,
And prove, hulled fairly to the cob,
A mere vagary of Old Prob.
Give the right man a solar myth,
And he 'll confute the sun therewith.

They make things admirably plain, But one hard question will remain :

and

If one hypothesis you lose,
Another in its place you choose,
But, your faith gone, O man
brother,
Whose shop shall furnish you another?
One that will wash, I mean, and wear,
And wrap us warmly from despair?
While they are clearing up our puzzles,
And clapping prophylactic muzzles
On the Acteon's hounds that sniff
Our devious track through But and If,
Would they 'd explain away the Devil
And other facts that won't keep level,
But rise beneath our feet or fail,
A reeling ship's deck in a gale!
God vanished long ago, iwis,
A mere subjective synthesis;

A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears,
Too homely for us pretty dears,
Who want one that conviction carries,
Last make of London or of Paris.
He gone, I felt a moment's spasm,
But calmed myself with Protoplasm,
A finer name, and, what is more,
As enigmatic as before;

Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease
Minds caught in the Symplegades
Of soul and sense, life's two conditions,
Each baffled with its own omniscience.
The men who labor to revise
Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise,
And print it without foolish qualms
Instead of God in David's psalms:
Noll had been more effective far
Could he have shouted at Dunbar,
"Rise, Protoplasm!" No dourest Scot
Had waited for another shot.

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?

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.

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.

baker,

As I think what I was, I sigh Desunt nonnulla!

Years are creditors Sheridan's self could not bilk;

grand,

has a fullah