_THE TORCH-BEARERS—II_

THE BOOK OF EARTH




_WORKS OF ALFRED NOYES_


    COLLECTED POEMS—_3 Vols._
    THE LORD OF MISRULE
    A BELGIAN CHRISTMAS EVE
    THE WINE-PRESS
    WALKING SHADOWS—_Prose_
    TALES OF THE MERMAID TAVERN
    SHERWOOD
    THE ENCHANTED ISLAND AND OTHER POEMS
    DRAKE: AN ENGLISH EPIC
    POEMS
    THE FLOWER OF OLD JAPAN
    THE GOLDEN HYNDE
    THE NEW MORNING
    _The Torch-Bearers_—
      WATCHERS OF THE SKY
      THE BOOK OF EARTH




                         _THE TORCH-BEARERS—II_

                               THE BOOK OF
                                  EARTH

                                   BY
                              ALFRED NOYES

                             [Illustration]

                                NEW YORK
                       FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
                                 MCMXXV
                          _Copyright, 1925, by_
                       FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

           _All rights reserved, including that of translation
                         into foreign languages_

                _Printed in the United States of America_




CONTENTS


                                                   PAGE

                 I—THE BOOK OF EARTH

      I. THE GRAND CANYON                             1
     II. NIGHT AND THE ABYSS                         11
    III. THE WINGS                                   22

                    II—THE GREEKS

                    I. PYTHAGORAS

      I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD                      29
     II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE                         37

                    II. ARISTOTLE

      I. YOUTH AND THE SEA                           50
     II. THE EXILE                                   60

                 III—MOVING EASTWARD

      I. FARABI AND AVICENNA                         77
     II. AVICENNA’S DREAM                            85

                IV—THE TORCH IN ITALY

                  LEONARDO DA VINCI

      I. HILLS AND THE SEA                           95
     II. AT FLORENCE                                110

                     V—IN FRANCE

                    JEAN GUETTARD

      I. THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN                125
     II. MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES       137
    III. THE SHADOW OF PASCAL                       146
     IV. AT PARIS                                   154
      V. THE RETURN                                 164

                     VI—IN SWEDEN

         LINNÆUS                                    169

            VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION

      I. LAMARCK AND BUFFON                         187
     II. LAMARCK, LAVOISIER, AND NINETY-THREE       195
    III. AN ENGLISH INTERLUDE: ERASMUS DARWIN       202
     IV. LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_       209

                   VIII—IN GERMANY

                        GOETHE

      I. THE DISCOVERER                             215
     II. THE PROPHET                                226

                    IX—IN ENGLAND

                        DARWIN

      I. CHANCE AND DESIGN                          231
     II. THE VOYAGE                                 242
    III. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS                 249
     IV. THE PROTAGONISTS                           273
      V. THE _VERA CAUSA_                           311

                      X—EPILOGUE

         EPILOGUE                                   325




I—THE BOOK OF EARTH


I

THE GRAND CANYON

    Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth.

    Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon,
    Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine,
    I came to the dreadful brink.

    I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth
    Splitting apart, into two hemispheres,
    Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god.
    On the brink of the Grand Canyon,
    Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows,
    From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down,
    Down from abyss to abyss,
    Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming
    Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings,
    The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,
    Æons unborn, and the unimagined end.
    There, on the terrible brink, against the sky,
    I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting
    Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped
    Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges
    That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down.

    A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock,
    The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light
    It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it.
    It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun.
    All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots.
    I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men.
    Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss
    Endlessly on.
                Far down, as a cloud sailed over,
    A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs,
    Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite,
    Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow
    With smouldering colours of those buried fires
    Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb.
    And there, so far below that not a sound,
    Even in that desert air, rose from its bed,
    I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado,
    The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade,
    The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains,
    For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder,
    Rolls to the broad Pacific.
                          From Flaming Gorge,
    Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain
    Of subject canyons, the green river flows,
    Linking them all together in one vast gulch,
    But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn,
    With names like pictures, for six hundred miles:
    _Black Canyon_, where it rushes in opal foam;
    _Red Canyon_, where it sleeks to jade again
    And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below;
    _Split-Mountain Canyon_, with its cottonwood trees;
    And, opening out of this, _Whirlpool Ravine_,
    Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls
    With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire;
    _Kingfisher Canyon_, gorgeous as the plumes
    Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues;
    _Glen Canyon_, where the Cave of Music rang
    Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song;
    _Vermilion Cliffs_, like sunset clouds congealed
    To solid crags; the _Valley of Surprise_
    Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass;
    _Labyrinth Canyon_, and the _Valley of Echoes_;
    _Cataract Canyon_, rolling boulders down
    In floods of emerald thunder; _Gunnison’s Valley_
    Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail;
    Then, for a hundred miles, _Desolation Canyon_,
    Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road
    Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world;
    _Gray Canyon_ next; then _Marble Canyon_, stained
    With iron-rust above, but brightly veined
    As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it;
    Then deep _Still-water_.
                            And all these conjunct
    In one huge chasm, were but the towering gates
    And dim approaches to the august abyss
    That opened here,—one sempiternal page
    Baring those awful hieroglyphs of stone,
    Seven systems, and seven ages, darkly scrolled
    In the deep Book of Earth.
                                Across the gulf
    I looked to that vast coast opposed, whose crests
    Of raw rough amethyst, over the Canyon, flamed,
    A league away, or ten. No eye could tell.
    All measure was lost. The tallest pine was a feather
    Under my feet, in that ocean of violet gloom.
    Then, with a dizzying brain, I saw below me,
    A little way out, a tiny shape, like a gnat
    Flying and spinning,—now like a gilded grain
    Of dust in a shaft of light, now sharp and black
    Over a blood-red sandstone precipice.
                                          “Look!”
    The Indian guide thrust out a lean dark hand
    That hid a hundred forests, and pointed to it,
    Muttering low, “Big Eagle!”
                                All that day,
    Riding along the brink, we found no end.
    Still, on the right, the pageant of the Abyss
    Unfolded. There gigantic walls of rock,
    Sheer as the world’s end, seemed to float in air
    Over the hollow of space, and change their forms
    Like soft blue wood-smoke, with each change of light.
    Here massed red boulders, over the Angel Trail
    Darkened to thunder, or like a sunset burned.
    Here, while the mind reeled from the imagined plunge,
    Tall amethystine towers, dark Matterhorns,
    Rose out of shadowy nothingness to crown
    Their mighty heads with morning.
                                      Here, wild crags
    Black and abrupt, over the swimming dimness
    Of coloured mist, and under the moving clouds,
    Themselves appeared to move, stately and slow
    As the moon moves, with an invisible pace,
    Or darkling planets, quietly onward steal
    Through their immense dominion.
                                    There, far down,
    A phantom sword, a search-beam of the sun,
    Glanced upon purple pyramids, and set
    One facet aflame in each, the rest in gloom;
    While from their own deep chasms of shadow, that seemed
    Small inch-wide rings of darkness round them, rose
    Tabular foothills, mesas, hard and bright,
    Bevelled and flat, like gems; or, softly bloomed
    Like alabaster, stained with lucid wine;
    Then slowly changed, under the changing clouds,
    Where the light sharpened, into monstrous tombs
    Of trap-rock, hornblende, greenstone and basalt.

    There,—under isles of pine, washed round with mist,
    Dark isles that seemed to sail through heaven, and cliffs
    That towered like Teneriffe,—far, far below,
    Striving to link those huge dissolving steeps,
    Gigantic causeways drowned or swam in vain,
    Column on column, arch on broken arch,
    Groping and winding, like the foundered spans
    Of lost Atlantis, under the weltering deep.
    For, over them, the abysmal tides of air,
    Inconstant as the colours of the sea,
    From amethyst into wreathing opal flowed,
    Ebbed into rose through grey, then melted all
    In universal amethyst again.
    There, wild cathedrals, with light-splintering spires,
    Shone like a dream in the Eternal mind
    And changed as earth and sea and heaven must change.
    Over them soared a promontory, black
    As night, but in the deepening gulf beyond,
    Far down in that vast hollow of violet air,
    Winding between the huge Plutonian walls,
    The semblance of a ruined city lay.
    Dungeons flung wide, and palaces brought low,
    Altars and temples, wrecked and overthrown,
    Gigantic stairs that climbed into the light
    And found no hope, and ended in the void:
    It burned and darkened, a city of porphyry,
    Paved with obsidian, walled with serpentine,
    Beautiful, desolate, stricken as by strange gods
    Who, long ago, from cloudy summits, flung
    Boulder on mountainous boulder of blood-red marl
    Into a gulf so deep that, when they fell,
    The soft wine-tinted mists closed over them
    Like ocean, and the Indian heard no sound.

II

NIGHT AND THE ABYSS

    A lonely cabin, like an eagle’s nest,
    Lodged us that night upon the monstrous brink,
    And roofed us from the burning desert stars;
    But, on my couch of hemlock as I lay,
    The Book of Earth still opened in my dreams.
    Below me, only guessed by the slow sound
    Of forests, through unfathomable gulfs
    Of midnight, vaster, more mysterious now,
    Breathed that invisible Presence of deep awe.
    Through the wide open window, once, a moth
    Beat its dark wings, and flew—out—over that,
    Brave little fluttering atheist, unaware
    Of aught beyond the reach of his antennæ,
    Thinking his light quick thoughts; while, under him,
    God opened His immeasurable Abyss.
    All night I heard the insistent whisper rise:
    _One page of Earth’s abysmal Book lies bare._
    _Read—in its awful hieroglyphs of stone—_
    _His own deep scripture. Is its music sealed?_
    _Or is the inscrutable secret growing clearer?_
    Then, like the night-wind, soughing through the pines,
    Another voice replied, cold with despair:
    _It opens, and it opens. By what Power?_
    _A silent river, hastening to the sea,_
    _Age after age, through crumbling desert rocks_
    _Clove the dread chasm. Wild snows that had their birth_
    _In Ocean-mists, and folded their white wings_
    _Among far mountains, fed that sharp-edged stream._
    _Ask Ocean whence it came. Ask Earth. Ask Heaven._
    _I see the manifold instruments as they move,_
    _Remote or near, with intricate inter-play;_
    _But that which moves them, and determines all_
    _Remains in darkness. Man must bow his head_
    _Before the Inscrutable._
                            Then, far off, I heard,
    As from a deeper gulf, the antiphonal voice:
    _It opens, and it opens, and it opens,—_
    _The abyss of Heaven, the rock-leaved Book of Earth,_
    _And that Abyss as dreadful and profound_
    _Locked in each atom._
                          _Under the high stars,_
    _Man creeps, too infinitesimal to be scanned;_
    _And, over all the worlds that dwindle away_
    _Beyond the uttermost microscopic sight,_
    _He towers—a god._
                      _Midway, between the height_
    _That crushes, and the depth that flatters him,_
    _He stands within the little ring of light_
    _He calls his knowledge. Its horizon-line,_
    _The frontier of the dark, was narrow, once;_
    _And he could bear it. But the light is growing;_
    _The ring is widening; and, with each increase,_
    _The frontiers of the night are widening, too._
    _They grow and grow. The very blaze of truth_
    _That drives them back, enlarges the grim coasts_
    _Of utter darkness._
                        _Man must bow his head_
    _Before the Inscrutable._
                            Then, from far within,
    The insistent whisper rose:
                                _Man is himself_
    _The key to all he seeks._
    _He is not exiled from this majesty,_
    _But is himself a part of it. To know_
    _Himself, and read this Book of Earth aright;_
    _Flooding it as his ancient poets, once,_
    _Illumed old legends with their inborn fire,_
    _Were to discover music that out-soars_
    _His plodding thought, and all his fables, too;_
    _A song of truth that deepens, not destroys_
    _The ethereal realm of wonder; and still lures_
    _The spirit of man on more adventurous quests_
    _Into the wildest mystery of all,_
    _The miracle of reality, which he shares._

    But O, what art could guide me through that maze?
    What kingly shade unlock the music sealed
    In that dread volume?
                          Sons of an earlier age,
    Poet and painter stretched no guiding hand.

    Even the gaunt spirit, whom the Mantuan led
    Through the dark chasms and fiery clefts of pain,
    Could set a bound to his own realms of night,
    Enwall then round, build his own stairs to heaven,
    And slept now, prisoned, in his own coiling towers....

    Leonardo—found a shell among the hills,
    A sea-shell, turned to stone, as at the gaze
    Of his own cold Medusa. His dark eyes,
    Hawk-swift to hunt the subtle lines of law
    Through all the forms of beauty, on that wild height
    Saw how the waves of a forgotten world
    Had washed and sculptured every soaring crag,
    Ere Italy was born. He stood alone,—
    His rose-red cloak out-rippling on the breeze,—
    A wondering sun-god. Through the mountain-peaks,
    The rumour of a phantom ocean rolled.
    It tossed a flying rainbow at his feet
    And vanished....
                    Milton—walked in Paradise.
    He saw the golden compasses of God
    Turning through darkness to create the world.
    He saw the creatures of a thousand æons
    Rise, in six days, out of the mire and clay,
    Pawing for freedom. With the great blind power
    Of his own song, he riveted one more clasp,
    Though wrought of fabulous gold, on that dark Book,
    Not to be loosed for centuries.
                                    Nearer yet,
    Goethe, the torch of science in his own hand,
    Poet and seeker, pressed into the dark,
    Caught one mysterious gleam from flower and leaf,
    And one from man’s own frame, of that which binds
    All forms of life together. He turned aside
    And lost it, saying, “I wait for light, more light.”

    And these all towered among celestial glories,
    And wore their legends like prophetic robes;
    But who should teach me, in this deeper night,
    The tale of this despised and wandering house,
    Our lodge among the stars; the song of Earth;
    Her birth in a mist of fire,—a ball of flame,
    Slowly contracting, crusting, cracking and folding
    Into deep valleys and mountains that still changed
    And slowly rose and sank like age-long waves
    On the dark ocean of ever-dissolving forms;
    Earth, a magical globe, an elfin sphere,
    Quietly turning through boundlessness,
    Budding with miracles, burgeoning into life;
    A murmuring forest of ferns, where the misty sun
    Saw wingèd monsters fighting to bring forth men;
    Earth, and her savage youth, her monstrous lusts,
    Mastered and curbed, till these, too, pulsed into music,
    And became for man the fountain of his own power;
    Earth, on her shining way,
    Coloured and warmed by the sun, and quietly spinning
    Her towns and seas to shadow and light in turn;
    Earth, by what brooding Power
    Endowed at birth with those dread potencies
    Which out of her teeming womb at last brought forth
    Creatures that loved and sinned, laughed, wept and prayed,
    Died, and returned to the unknown Power that made them;
    Earth, and that tale of men, the kings of thought,
    Who strove to read her secret in the rocks,
    And turned, amid wild calumny and wrong,
    The lucid sword-like search-beams of the mind
    On the dark passion that through uncounted æons
    Crept, fought, and climbed to the celestial gates,
    Three gates in one, one heavenly gate in three,
    Whose golden names are Beauty, Goodness, Truth.

    Then, without sound, like an unspoken prayer,
    The voice I heard upon the mountain height,
    Out of a deeper gulf of midnight rose,
    Within me, or without, invoking One
    To whom this dust, not of itself, would pray:

    Muse of the World, O terrible, beautiful Spirit,
    Throned in pure light, since all the worlds obey
    Thy golden law which, even here on earth,
    Though followed blindly, leads to thy pure realm,
    Couldst thou deliver me from this night at last,
    Teach me the burning syllables of thy tongue
    That I, even I, out of the mire and clay,
    With face uplifted, and with arms upstretched
    To the Eternal Sun of Truth, might raise
    My song of adoration, not in vain.
    Throned above Time, thou sawest when earth was born
    In darkness, though none else was there to see;
    For there was fury in the dark, and fire,
    And power, and that creative pulse of thine,
    The throb of music, the deep rhythmic throes
    Of That which made and binds all worlds in one.

    ...

    _In the beginning, God made heaven and earth._
    One sentence burned upon the formless dark—
    One sentence, and no more, from that high realm.

    The long-sought consummation of all law,
    Through all this manifold universe, might shine clear
    In those eight words one day; not yet; not yet!
    They would be larger, then;
    Not the glib prelude to a lifeless creed,
    But wide as the unbounded realms of thought,
    The last great simplification of them all,
    The single formula, like an infinite sphere
    Enfolding Space and Time, atoms and suns,
    With all the wild fantastic hosts of life
    And all their generations, through all worlds,
    In one pure phrase of music, like a star
    Seen in a distant sky.
                            I could not reach it.
    All night I waited for the word in vain.


III

THE WINGS

    Night greyed, and up the immeasurable abyss,
    Brimmed with a blacker night than ocean knew,
    The dawn-wind, like a host of spirits, flowed,
    Chanting those airy melodies which, long since,
    The same wild breath, obeying the same law,
    Taught the first pine-woods in the primal world.

            _We are the voices._
              _Could man only_
                _Spell our tongue,_
            _He might learn_
              _The inscrutable secret_
                _And grow young._

            _Young as we are_
              _Who, on shores_
                _Unknown to man,_
            _Long, long since,_
              _In waves and woods_
                _Our song began._

            _Ere his footsteps_
              _Printed earth,_
                _Wild ferns and grass_
            _Breathed it. No man_
              _Heard that whispering_
                _Spirit pass._

            _Not one mortal_
              _Lay and listened._
                _There was none_
            _Even to hear_
              _The sea-wave crumbling_
                _In the sun._

            _None to hear_
              _Our choral pine-woods_
                _Chanting deep,_
            _Even as now_
              _Our solemn cadence_
                _Haunts your sleep._

            _Ear was none_
              _To heed or hear_
                _When earth was young._
            _Even now_
              _Man understands not_
                _Our strange tongue._

    There came a clearer rustle of nearer boughs.
    A bird cried, once, a sharp ecstatic cry
    As if it saw an angel.
                            He stood there
    Against the window’s dusky square of sky,
    Carrying the long curled crosier of a fern,
    My singer of the woods, my Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    The invisible friend with whom I used to talk
    In childhood, and that none but I could see,—
    Shadow-of-a-Leaf, shy whisperer of the songs
    That none could capture, and so few could hear;
    A creature of the misty hills of home,
    Quick as the thought that hides in the deep heart
    When the loud world goes by; vivid to me
    As flesh and blood, yet with an elfin strain
    That set him free of earth, free to run wild
    Through all the ethereal kingdoms of the mind,
    His dark eyes fey with wonder at the world,
    And that profoundest mystery of all,
    The miracle of reality; clear, strange eyes,
    Deep-sighted, joyous, touched with hidden tears.
    Often he left me when I was not worthy;
    And many a time I locked my heart against him,
    Only to find him creeping in again
    Like memory, or a wild vine through a window
    When I most needed that still voice of his
    Which never yet spoke louder than the breath
    Of conscience in my soul. He would return
    Quietly as the rustling of a bough
    After the bird has flown; and, through a rift
    Of evening sky, the shining eyes of a child,
    The cold clear ripple of thrushes after rain,
    The sound of a mountain-brook, or a breaking wave
    Would teach my slumbering soul the ways of love.
    He looked at me, more gently than of late,
    And spoke (O, if this world had ears to hear
    The sound of falling dew, the power that wrote
    The Paradiso might recall that voice!)
    _It is near daybreak. I am faithful still;_
    _And I am here to answer all your need._
    _The hills are old, but not so old as I;_
    _The blackbird’s eyes are young, but not so young_
    _As mine that know the wonder of their sight._
    _Eagles have wings. Mine are too swift to see;_
    _For while I stand and whisper at your side,_
    _Time dwindles to a shadow...._
                                  Like a mist
    The world dissolved around us as he spoke.
    I saw him standing dark against the sky.
    I heard him, murmuring like a spirit in trance,—
    _Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud_....

    Then, slowly emerging from that mist of dreams,
    As at an incantation, a lost world
    Arose, and shone before me in the dawn.




II—THE GREEKS


I

PYTHAGORAS


I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD

    Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud.

    In the still garden that Pythagoras made,
    The Temple of the Muses, firm as truth,
    Lucid as beauty, the white marriage-song
    Made visible, of beauty and truth in one,
    Flushed with the deepening East.
                                      It was no dream.
    The thrush that with his long beak shook and beat
    The dark striped snail-shell on the marble flags
    Between the cool white columns told me this.
    The birds among the silvery olives pealed
    So many jargoning rivulet-throated bells
    That in their golden clashings discord drowned,
    And one wild harmony closed and crowned them all
    And yet, as if the spread wings of a hawk
    Froze in the sky above them, every note
    Died on an instant.
                        Over the sparkling grass
    The long dark shadows of ash and pine began
    To shrink, as though the rising of the sun
    Menaced, not only shadows, but the world.

    A frightened bird flew, crying, and scattering dew
    Blindly away; though, on this dawn of dawns,
    Nothing had changed. The Golden Brotherhood stole
    Up through the drifts of wet rose-laurel bloom
    As on so many a dawn for many a year,
    To make their morning vows.
                        They thronged the porch,
    The lean athletes of truth, trained body and mind,
    For their immortal trial. Among them towered
    Milon, the soldier-wrestler. His brown limbs
    Moved with the panther’s grace, the warrior’s pride;
    Milon, who in the Olympic contests won
    Crown after crown, but wore them on broad brows
    Cut like fine steel for thought; and, in his eyes,
    Carried the light of those deep distances
    That challenge the spirit of man.
                                They entered in;
    And, like the very Muses following them,
    Theano, and her Golden Sisterhood,
    First of that chosen womanhood, by the grace
    Of whose heaven-walking souls the race ascends,
    Passed through the shining porch.
                                It was no dream.
    In the bright marble, under the sandalled feet,
    And in the glimmering columns as they passed,
    The reflex of their flowing vestments glowed
    White, violet, saffron, like another dawn.

    ...

    Before them, through the temple’s fragrant gloom,
    The Muses, in their dim half-circle, towered;
    And, in the midst, over the smouldering myrrh,
    The form of Hestia.
                        In her mighty shadow,
    Pythagoras, with a scroll in his right hand,
    Arose and spoke.
                      “Our work is well-nigh done.
    Our enemies are closing round us now.
    I have given the sacred scrolls into the hands
    Of Lysis; and, though all else be destroyed,
    If but a Golden Verse or two live on
    In other lands, and kindle other souls
    To seek the law, our work is not in vain.
    If it be death that comes to us, we shall lose
    Nothing that could endure. It was not chance
    That sent us on this pilgrimage through time,
    But that which lives within us, the desire
    Of gods, to know what once was dark in heaven.
    Gods were not gods who, in eternal bliss,
    Had never known this wonder—the deep joy
    Of coming home. But we have purchased it,
    And now return, enriched with memories
    Of mortal love, terrestrial grief and pain,
    Into our own lost realm.”
                              His dark eyes flashed.
    He lifted his proud head as one who heard
    Strains of immortal music even now.
    He towered among the Muses in the dusk,
    And then, as though he, too, were carved in stone,
    And all their voices breathed through his own voice,
    “Fear nothing now,” he said. “Our foes can steal
    The burdens we lay down, but nothing more.
    All that we are we keep. They strike at shadows
    And cannot hurt us. Little as we may know,
    We have learned at least to know the abiding Power
    From these poor masks of clay. This dust, this flesh,
    All that we see and touch, are shadows of it,
    And hourly change and perish. Have we not seen
    Cities and nations, all that is built of earth,
    Fleeting into the darkness, like grey clouds,
    And only one thing constant—the great law,
    The eternal order of their march to death?
    Have we not seen it written upon the hills?
    The continents and seas do not endure.
    They change their borders. Where the seas are now
    Mountains will rise; and, where the land was, once,
    The dark Atlantic ends the world for man.
    But all these changes are not wrought by chance.
    They follow a great order. It may be
    That all things are repeated and reborn;
    And, in their mighty periods, men return
    And pass through their forgotten lives anew.
    It may be; for, at times, the mind recalls—
    Or half recalls—the turning of a road,
    A statue on a hill, a passing face....
    It may be; for our universe is bound
    In rhythm; and the setting star will rise.
    This many a cunning ballad-singer knows
    Who haunts the mind of man with dark refrains;
    Or those deep poets who foretell in verse
    The restoration of the world’s great Year.
    Time never fails. Not Tanais, or the Nile
    Can flow for ever. They spring up and perish;
    But, after many changes, it may be
    These, too, return, with Egypt and her kings.”

    He paused a moment; then compassion, grief,
    Wonder and triumph, like one music, spoke
    Farewell to shadows, from his own deep soul
    Rapt, in pure vision, above the vanishing world:
    “The torrents drag the rocks into the sea.
    The great sea smiles, and overflows the land.
    It hollows out the valleys and returns.
    The sea has washed the shining rocks away
    And cleft the headland with its golden fields
    That once bound Sicily to her mother’s breast.
    Pharos, that was an island, far from shore
    When Homer sang, is wedded now and one
    With Egypt. The wild height where Sappho stood,
    The beautiful, white, immortal promontory,
    Crowned with Apollo’s temple, long ago
    The struggling seas have severed from the land.
    And those fair Grecian cities, Helice
    And Buris, wondering fishermen see, far down,
    With snowy walls and columns all aslant,
    Trembling under the unremembering wave.
    The waters of Anigris, that were sweet
    As love, are bitter as death. There was a time
    When Etna did not burn. A time will come
    When it will cease to burn; for all things change;
    And mightier things by far have changed than these
    In the slow lapse of never-ending time.
    I have seen an anchor on the naked hills,
    And ocean-shells among the mountain-tops.
    Continents, oceans, all things pass away;
    But One, One only; for the Eternal Mind
    Enfolds all changes, and can never change.”


II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE

    Night on Crotona, night without a star.
    I heard the mob, outside the Temple, roaring
    _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_

    Before the flushed white columns, in the glare
    Of all those angry torches, Cylon stood
    Wickedly smiling. “They have barred the doors.
    Pythagoras and his forty chosen souls
    Are all within. They are trapped, and they shall die.
    It will be best to whet the people’s rage
    Before we lay the axe, or set the torch
    Against the Muses’ temple. One wild howl
    Of ‘sacrilege’ may defeat us.”—This he called
    “Faith in the people.”
                            He moistened his dry lips,
    And raised his hand. The savage clamouring ceased.
    One breathless moment, ere he spoke, he paused,
    Gathering his thoughts. His thin white weasel face
    Narrowed, his eyes contracted. In their pain
    —Pain pitiable, a torment of the mind—
    A bitter memory burned, of how he sued
    To join that golden brotherhood in vain.
    For when the Master saw him, he discerned
    A spirit in darkness, violent, empty of thought,
    But full of shallow vanity, cunning lies,
    Intense ambition.
                      All now was turned to hate;
    Hate the destroyer of men, the wrecker of cities,
    The last disease of nations; hate, the fire
    That eats away the heart; hate, the lean rat
    That gnaws the brain, till even reason glares
    Like madness through blind eyes; hate, the thin snake
    That coils like whip-cord round the victim’s soul
    And strangles it; hate, that slides up through his throat,
    And with its flat and quivering head usurps
    The function of his tongue,—to sting and sting,
    Till all that poison which is now his life
    Is drained, and he lies dead; hate, that still lives,
    And for the power to strike and sting again,
    May yet destroy this world.
                                So Cylon stood,
    Quivering a moment, in the fiery glare,
    Over the multitude.
    Then, in his right hand,
    He shook a roll of parchment over his head,
    Crying, _The Master said it_!
                                  At that word,
    A snarl, as of a myriad-throated beast,
    Broke out again, and deepened into a roar—
    _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_

    Cylon upheld his hand, as if to bless
    A stormy sea with calm. The howling died
    Into a deadly hush. With twisted lips
    He spoke.

        “This is their Scroll, the Sacred Word,
    The Secret Doctrine of their Golden Order!
    Hear it!”
              Then, interweaving truth with lies,
    Till even the truth struck like a venomed dart
    Into his hearers’ minds, he read aloud
    His cunningly chosen fragments.
                                    At the end,
    He tore the scroll, and trampled it underfoot.
    “Ye have heard,” he said. “Ye are kin to all the beasts!
    And, when ye die, your souls again inhabit
    Bodies of beasts, wild beasts, and beasts of burden.
    Even yet more loathsome—he that will not starve
    His flesh, and tame himself and all mankind
    To bear this golden yoke shall, after death,
    Dwell in the flesh of swine. He that rejects
    This wisdom shall, hereafter, seek the light
    Through endless years, with toads, asps, creeping things.
    Thus would they exile all our happier gods!
    Away with Bacchus and his feasts of joy!
    Back, Aphrodite, to your shameful foam!
    Men must be tamed, like beasts.
                                    The Master said it!
    And wherefore? There are certain lordly souls
    Who rise above the beasts, and talk with gods.
    These are his Golden Brotherhood; these must rule!
    Ye heard that verse from Homer—whom he loves—
    Homer, the sycophant, who could call a prince
    ‘The shepherd of his people.’ What are ye,
    Even in this life, then, but their bleating flocks?
    _The Master said it!_
                          Homer—his demi-god,
    Ye know his kind; ye know whence Homer sprang;
    An old blind beggarman, singing for his food,
    Through every city in Greece”—(This Cylon called
    Honouring the people)—“already he is outworn,
    Forgotten, without a word for this young age;
    And great Pythagoras crowns him!
                                      When they choose
    Their Golden Brotherhood, they lay down their laws,
    Declaring none may rule until he learn,
    Prostrate himself in reverence to the dead,
    And pass, through golden discipline, to power
    Over himself and you; but—mark this well—
    Under Pythagoras! Discipline! Ah, that path
    Is narrow and difficult. Only three hundred souls,
    Aristocrats of knowledge, have attained
    This glory. It is against the people’s will
    To know, or to acknowledge those that know,
    Or let their knowledge lead them for one hour.
    For see—see how the gods have driven them mad,
    Even in their knowledge! In their own Sacred Scroll,
    Pythagoras, who derives you from the beasts,
    Affirms that earth, this earth beneath our feet,
    Spins like a little planet round the sun!”

    A brutal bellowing, as of Asian bulls,
    Boomed from a thousand mouths. (This Cylon called
    The laughter of the people and their gods.)
    He raised his hand. It ceased.
                                  “_This_ is their knowledge,
    And _this_,” he cried, “their charter to obscure
    What all men know, the natural face of things.
    _This_ proves their right to rule us from above.
    They meet here nightly. Nightly they conspire
    Against your rights, your liberties, and mine.
    Was it not they who, when the people rose
    In Sybaris, housed her noble fugitives here?
    And was it not Pythagoras who refused
    To send them back to Sybaris and their death?
    Was it not this that plunged us into war
    With Sybaris; and, when victory crowned our arms,
    Who but Pythagoras robbed us of its fruits?
    We gathered booty, and he called it theft.
    We burned their palaces, and he called it hate.
    We avenged our sons. He called it butchery,
    And said the wild beast wakes again in man.
    What have we gained, then? Nothing but the pride
    Of saving those Pythagoras wished to save;
    Counting gold dross, and serving his pure gods.
    _The Master said it._ What is your judgment, then?”
    He stretched one hand, appealing to the crowd,
    And one to the white still Temple.
                      “_Death! Death! Death!_”
    Under the flaring torches, the long waves
    Of tense hot faces opened a thousand mouths,
    Little blue pits of shadow that raced along them,
    And shook the red smoke with one volleying roar,—
    _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_

    ...

    But, in the Temple, through those massive walls,
    While Cylon spoke, no whisper had been heard;
    Only, at times, a murmur, when he paused,
    As of a ninth wave breaking, far away.

    The half-moon of the Muses, crowned with calm,
    Towered through the dimness. Under their giant knees,
    In their immortal shadow, those who knew
    How little was their knowledge waited death
    Proudly, around their Master. Robed in white,
    Beautiful as Apollo in old age,
    He stood amongst them, laying a gentle hand,
    One last caress, upon that dearest head
    Bowed there before him, his own daughter’s hair.
    Then, tenderly, the god within him moved
    His mortal lips; and, in the darkness there,
    He spoke, as though the music of the spheres
    Welled from his heart, to ease the hurts of death.

    “Not tears, belovèd. Give it welcome, rather!
    Soon, though they spared us, this blind flesh would fail.
    They are saving us the weary mile or two
    That end a dusty journey. The dull stains
    Of travel; the soiled vesture; the sick heart
    That hoped at every turning of the road
    To see the Perfect City, and hoped in vain,
    Shall grieve us now no more. Now, at the last,
    After a stern novitiate, iron test,
    And grinding failures, the great light draws near,
    And we shall pass together, through the Veil.”

    He bowed his head. It was their hour of prayer;
    And, from among the Muses in the dark,
    A woman’s voice, a voice in ecstasy,
    As if a wound should bless the sword that made it,
    Breathed through the night the music of their law:

      _Close not thine eyes in sleep_
    _Till thou hast searched thy memories of the day,_
      _Graved in thy heart the vow thou didst not keep,_
    _And called each wandering thought back to the way._

      _Pray to the gods! Their aid,_
    _Their aid alone can crown thy work aright;_
      _Teach thee that song whereof all worlds were made;_
    _Rend the last veil, and feed thine eyes with light._

      _Naught shall deceive thee, then._
    _All creatures of the sea and earth and air,_
      _The circling stars, the warring tribes of men_
    _Shall make one harmony, and thy soul shall hear._

      _Out of this prison of clay_
    _With lifted face, a mask of struggling fire,_
      _With arms of flesh and bone stretched up to pray,_
    _Dumb, thou shalt hear that Voice of thy desire._

      _Thou that wast brought so low;_
    _And through those lower lives hast risen again,_
      _Kin to the beasts, with power at last to know_
    _Thine own proud banishment and diviner pain;_

      _Courage, O conquering soul!_
    _For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_
      _Though worlds on worlds into that darkness roll,_
    _The gods abide; and of their race art thou!_

    There was a thunder of axes at the doors;
    A glare as of a furnace; and the cry,
    _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_

    Then, over the streaming smoke and the wild light
    That like a stormy sunset sank away
    Into a darker night, the deeper mist
    Rolled down, and of that death I knew no more.


II

ARISTOTLE


I. YOUTH AND THE SEA

    The mists unfolded on a sparkling coast
    Washed by a violet sea.
                            It was no dream.
    The clustering irised bubbles in the foam,
    The grinding stir as through the shining pebbles
    The wave ran back; the little drifts of smoke
    Where wet black rocks dried grey in the hot sun;
    The pods of sea-weed, crackling underfoot,
    All told me this.
                      My comrade at my side,
    Moved like a shadow. I turned a promontory,
    And like a memory of my own lost youth,
    Shining and far, across the gulf I saw
    Stagira, like a little city of snow,
    Under the Thracian hills.
                              Nothing had changed.
    I saw the City where that Greek was born
    Who ranged all art, all life, and lit a fire
    That shines yet, after twice a thousand years;
    And strange, but strange as truth, it was to hear
    No slightest change in that old rhythmic sound
    Of waves against the shore.
                                Then, at my side,
    My soul’s companion whispered, all unseen,
    ‘Two thousand years have hidden him from the world,
    Robed him in grey and bearded him with eld,
    Untrue to his warm life. There was a time
    When he was young as truth is; and the sun
    Browned his young body, danced in his young grey eyes;
    And look—the time is now.’
                                There, as he spoke,
    I saw among the rocks on my right hand,
    Lying, face downward, over a deep rock-pool,
    A youth, so still that, till a herring-gull swooped
    And sheered away from him with a startled cry
    And a wild flutter of its brown mottled wings,
    I had not seen him.
                        Quietly we drew near,
    As shadows may, unseen.
                              He pored intent
    Upon a sea-anemone, like a flower
    Opening its disk of blue and crimson rays
    Under the lucid water.
                            He stretched his hand,
    And with a sea-gull’s feather, touched its heart.
    The bright disk shrank, and closed, as though a flower
    Turned instantly to fruit, ripe, soft, and round
    As the pursed lips of a sea-god hiding there.
    They fastened, sucking, on the quill and held it.
    Young Aristotle laughed. He rose to his feet.
    “Come and see this!” he called.
                                    Under the cliff
    Nicomachus arose, and drawing his robe
    More closely round him, crossed the slippery rocks
    To join his son.
                There, side by side, they crouched
    Over the limpid pool,—the grey physician
    And eager boy.
                  “See, how it grips the feather!
    And grips the rock, too. Yet it has no roots.
    Your sea-flowers turn to animals with mouths.
    Take out the quill. Now it turns back again
    Into a flower; look—look—what lovely colours,
    What marvellous artistry.
                        This never was formed
    By chance. It has an aim beyond this pool.
    What does it mean? This unity of design?
    This delicate scale of life that seems to ascend
    Without a break, through all the forms of earth
    From plants to men? The sea-sponge that I found
    Grew like a blind rock-rooted clump of moss
    Dilating in water, shrinking in the sun;
    I know it for a strange sea-animal now,
    Shaped like the brain of a man. Can it be true
    That, as the poets fable in their songs
    Of Aphrodite, life itself was born
    Here, in the sea?”
                      Nicomachus looked at him.
    “That’s a dark riddle, my son. You will not hear
    An answer in the groves of Academe,
    Not even from Plato. When you go to Athens
    Next year, remember, among the loftiest flights
    Of their philosophy, that the living truth
    Is here on earth if we could only see it.
    This, this at least, all true Asclepiads know.
    Remember, always, in that battle of words,
    The truth that father handed down to son
    Through the long line of men that served their kind
    From Æsculapius, father of us all,
    To you his own descendant:—naught avails
    In science, till the light you seize from heaven
    Shines through the clear sharp fact beneath your feet.
    This is the test of both—that, in their wedding,
    The light that was a disembodied dream
    Burns through the fact, and makes a lanthorn of it,
    Transfigures it, confirms it, gives it new
    And deeper meanings; and itself, in turn,
    Is thereby seen more truly.
                                Use your eyes;
    And you, or those that follow you, will outsoar
    Pythagoras.
                He believed the soul descends
    From the pure realm of gods; is clothed with clay;
    And, struggling upward through a myriad forms,
    After a myriad lives and deaths, returns
    Enriched with all those memories, lord of all
    That knowledge, master of all those griefs and pains
    As else it could not be, home to the gods,
    Itself a god, prepared for the full bliss,
    The living consummation of the whole.
    Earth must be old, if all these things are true.
    But take this tale and read it. If it seem
    Only a tale, the light in it has turned
    Dark facts to lanthorns for me. There are tales
    More true than any fragment of the truth.

    One of his homeless clan (who came to me
    Dying), his last disciple’s wandering son,
    Gave me the scroll. I give it now to you,—
    The young swift-footed runner with the fire.
    You’ll find strange thoughts; and, woven into the close,
    His Golden Verses, with a thought more strange.”

    Then, from his breast, the Asclepiad drew a scroll,
    Smooth as old ivory, honey-stained by time,
    A wand of whispering magic; and the boy
    Seized it with brown young hands.
                                      His father smiled
    And turned away, between the shining pools
    To seek Stagira. Under his sandalled feet
    The sea-weeds crackled. His footsteps crunched away
    Along the beach.
                      Upon a sun-warmed rock
    The boy outspread the curled papyrus-roll,
    Keeping each corner in place with a small grey stone.
    There, while the white robe drifting down the coast
    Grew smaller and smaller, till at last it seemed
    A flake of vanishing foam, he lay full length,
    Reading the tale.
                      The salt on his brown skin
    Dried to a faint white powder in the sun.
    Over him, growing bold, the peering gulls
    Wheeled closer, as he lay there, tranced and still;
    Till, through the tale, the golden verses breathed
    Like a returning music, rhythmic tones
    Changed by new voices, coloured by new minds,
    Yet speaking still for one time-conquering soul,
    As on the shore the wandering ripples changed
    And tossed new spray-drops into the sparkling air,
    Yet pulsed with the ancient breathing of the sea:

      _Guard the immortal fire._
    _Honour the glorious line of the great dead._
      _To the new height let all thy soul aspire;_
    _But let those memories be thy wine and bread._

      _Quench not in any shrine_
    _The smouldering storax. In no human heart_
      _Quench what love kindled. Faintly though it shine,_
    _Not till it wholly dies the gods depart._

      _Truth has remembering eyes._
    _The wind-blown throng will clamour at Falsehood’s gate._
      _Has Falsehood triumphed? Let the world despise_
    _Thy constant mind. Stand thou aside, and wait._

      _Write not thy thoughts on snow._
    _Grave them in rock to front the thundering sky._
      _From Time’s proud feast, when it is time to go,_
    _Take the dark road; bid one more world good-bye._

      _The lie may steal an hour._
    _The truth has living roots, and they strike deep._
      _A moment’s glory kills the rootless flower,_
    _While the true stem is gathering strength in sleep._

      _Out of this earth, this dust,_
    _Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;_
      _Out of these cosmic throes of wrath, and lust,_
    _Breaks the lost splendour from the world’s blind womb._

      _Courage, O conquering soul!_
    _For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_
      _Though suns and stars into oblivion roll,_
    _The gods abide, and of their race art thou._


II. THE EXILE

    Time dwindled to a shadow. The grey mist,
    Wreathed with old legends, drifted slowly away
    From the clear hill-top, where the invisible wings
    Had brought me through the years.
                              It was no dream,
    Clearly, as in a picture, at my feet,
    Among dark groves, the columned temples gleamed,
    And I saw Athens, in the sunset, dying.

    Dying; for though her shrines had not yet lost
    One radiant grain of what lies crumbling now
    Like a god’s bones upon the naked hills;
    Though the whole city wound through gate on gate
    Of visionary splendour to one height
    Where, throned above this world, the Parthenon
    Smiled at the thought of Time, her violet crown
    Was woven of shadows from a darker realm,
    And I saw Athens, dying.
                              From that hill—
    The hill of Lycabettus—on our right
    Eridanus flowed, Ilissus on the left,
    Girdling the City like two coils of fire.
    Then, as a spirit sees, I saw, unseen,
    One standing near me on the bare hillside,
    Still as a statue, gazing to the west;
    So still that, till his lengthening shadow crept
    Up to my feet, the wonder of the City
    Withheld my gaze from something more august
    In that one lonely presence.
                                  Earth and sun,
    On their great way, revealed him, with the touch
    Of his long stealing shadow; yet it seemed
    The power that cast it was no mortal power.
    Fie towered against the dying gleams below
    Like Truth in exile.
                        On him, too, at last
    The doom had fallen. Clasping his grey robe
    More closely round him, Aristotle looked
    Long, long, at his proud City. She had lost
    More glories in that sunset than she knew;
    For, though the sun went down in kingly gold
    To westward, on that darkening eastern hill,
    The bearer of a more celestial fire
    Now looked his last on Athens.
                        Changed, how changed,
    Was this grey form from that immortal youth
    Who read the Golden Verses by the sea.
    His brow was furrowed now; and, on his face,
    Life, with her sharp-edged tools of joy and pain,
    Had deeply engraved a legend of her own.

    There, as his lengthening shadow had drawn my gaze,
    He seemed himself a shadow of vaster things,
    A still dark portent of those moving worlds
    Whose huge events, unseen and far away,
    Had led him thither; and, as he once had shaped
    Their course, now shaped his destiny and doom.

    He had ranged all art, all science. He had shaped
    Kingdoms and kings, by virtue of his part
    In the one all-shaping Mind. Had he not lived,
    The world that never knows its noblest powers
    Had moved, with half mankind, another way.
    There, looking backward, through his life, he knew
    That, though the gods conceal their ways from men,
    Yet in their great conjunctures there are gleams
    That show them at their work. Theirs was the word,
    Twenty years back, when Philip of Macedon
    Summoned him, as the uncrowned king of thought,
    To teach his eaglet how to use his wings.
    For, by that thought, and by the disciplined power,
    The sovran power of judgment, swift to seize
    Causes, effects, and laws, and wield the blind
    Unreasoning mass, he had wellnigh brought to birth
    What Plato saw in vision—a State enthroned
    Above the flux of time, Hellas at one,
    A harmony of cities, each a chord
    In an immortal song of Beauty and Truth,
    Freedom and Law. His was the moving power,
    Not wholly aware, that strove to an end unseen;
    And in that power had Alexander reigned.
    Autocrator of the Greek hegemony,
    He had rolled all Asia back into the night.
    Satraps of Persia, the proud kings of Tyre,
    Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, all bowed down;
    And Alexander shaped the conquered world,
    But Aristotle shaped the conqueror’s mind.
    He had shaped that mind to ends not all its own.
    His was the well-thumbed Odyssey that reposed
    Under the conqueror’s pillow; his the love,
    Fragrant with memories of the hills and sea,
    That had rebuilt Stagira; his the voice
    In the night-watches; his the harnessed thoughts
    That, like immortal sentries, mounted guard
    In the dark gates of that world-quelling mind.
    His was the whisper, the dark vanishing hint,
    The clue to the riddle of slowly emerging life
    That, imaged in Egyptian granite, rose
    Before the silent conqueror when he stared
    At that strange shape, half human and half brute,
    The Sphinx, who knew the secret of the world
    And smiled at him, and all his victories,
    Under the desert stars, while the deep night
    Silently deepened round him.
                                  Far away,
    In Athens, towered the bearer of the fire.
    His was the secret harmony of law
    That, while the squadrons wheeled in ordered ranks,
    Each finding its full life only in the whole,
    Flashed light upon the cosmos; his the quest
    That taught the conqueror how to honour truth
    And led him, while he watered his proud steeds
    In all the streams from Danube to the Nile,
    To send another army through the wilds,
    Ten thousand huntsmen, ranging hills and woods
    At Aristotle’s hest, for birds and beasts;
    So that the master-intellect might lay hold
    Upon the ladder of life that mounts through Time,
    From plants to beasts, and up, through man, to God.
    So all the might of Macedon had been turned
    To serve the truth, and to complete his work
    At Athens, for the conquering age to come;
    When Athens, like the very City of Truth,
    Might shine upon all nations, and might wear,
    On her clear brows, his glory as her own.

    Then came a flying rumour through the night.
    Earth’s overlord, the autocrator, his friend,
    Alexander the Great had fallen in Babylon.
    A little cup of poison, subtle drops
    Of Lethe—in a cup of delicate gold,—
    And the world’s victor slept, an iron sleep;
    The conqueror, stricken in his conquered city,
    Cold, in the purple of Babylon, lay dead:
    And the slow tread of his armies as they passed,
    Soldier by soldier, through that chamber of death,
    To look their last upon his marble face,
    Pulsed like a muffled drum across the world.
    Had Aristotle’s cunning mixed the draught
    That murdered tyranny? Let that whispered lie
    Estrange the heart of Macedon.
                              There, in Athens,
    It was enough, now that his friend lay dead,
    To know that, as the body is rent away
    From the immortal soul, his greatness now
    Had lost its earthly stay. His mighty mind
    Walked like a ghost in Athens. It was enough
    To hint that he had taught his king too well;
    Served him too well; and played the spy for him;
    While, for main charge, since he had greatly loved
    The mother who had borne him, since he had poured
    His love out on her tomb, it would suffice
    To snarl that rites like these were meant for gods
    And that this man who had seen behind the world
    The Mover of all things, the eternal God,
    The supreme Good, by these fond rites of love,
    Too simple and too great, too clear, too deep,
    Had robbed the little sophists of their dues
    And so blasphemed against their gods of clay.

    ...

    Hurrying footsteps neared. He turned and saw
    His young adopted son and Tyrtamus.
    “Nicanor! Theophrastus!—nay, lift up
    Your heads. You cannot bring me bitterer news
    Than I foresaw. I must be brought to judgment.
    But on what grounds?”—
                    “Dear father of us all——”
    The youth, Nicanor, answered, “When the crowd
    Grins in the very face of those who ask,
    Or think, or dream that truth should be their guide;
    Nay, grins at truth itself, as at a fool
    Tricked in his grandsire’s rags, a rustic oaf,
    A blundering country simpleton who gapes
    At the great city’s reeling dance of lies,
    How can the grounds be wanting?”
                          “The true grounds,”
    His ‘Theophrastus’ muttered, “we know too well.
    Eurymedon, and the rest, those gnat-like clans,
    The sophists’ buzzing swarms, desire a change.
    They hold with Heraclitus—all things change.”
    His irony stung the youth. His grey eyes gleamed.
    His voice grew harsh with anger. “Ay, all things change!
    So justice and injustice, right and wrong,
    Evil and good, must wear each other’s cloaks;
    And, in that chaos, when all excellence
    And honour are plucked down, and the clear truth
    Trampled into the dirt, themselves may rise.
    Athens is dying.”
                      “They speak truly enough
    Of all that they can know,” the Master said.
    “Change is the rhythm that draws this world along.
    They see the change. Its law they cannot see.
    But man who is mortal in this body of earth
    Has also a part, by virtue of his reason,
    In an enduring realm. Their prophet knew
    And heard what sophists have no souls to hear,—
    The Harmony that includes the pulse of change;
    The divine Reason, past the flux of things;
    The eternal Logos, ordering the whole world.”
    And, as he spoke, I heard, through his own words,
    Tones that were now a part of his own mind,
    The murmur of that old legend which he read
    So long ago, in boyhood, by the sea.
    _Time never fails. Not Tanais or the Nile_
    _Can flow for ever. All things pass away_
    _But One, One only; for the eternal Mind_
    _Enfolds all changes, and can never change._
    Tyrtamus touched his arm. “Time presses now.
    Come with us. All is ready. On the coast,
    In a lonely creek, the quiet keel is rocking.
    Three trusty sailors wait us, and at dawn
    We, too, shall find new life in a new world
    With all that could endure. The voyager knows
    The blindness of the cities. Each believes
    Its narrow wall the boundary of the world;
    And when he puts to sea, their buzzing cries
    Fade out behind him like a wrangle of bees.”—

    “If I remain, what then?”—
                            The hill-top shone
    In the last rays. Athens was growing dark.
    Tyrtamus answered him. “A colder cup
    Of hemlock, and the fate of Socrates.”
    The Master looked at Athens. Far away
    He traced the glimmering aisle of olive-trees
    Where, for so long, with many a youthful friend
    He had walked, and taught, and striven himself to learn.
    Southward, below the Acropolis, he could see
    The shadowy precincts of the Asclepiads,
    Guarding their sacred spring, the natural fount,
    Loved for his father’s memory.
                                  Close beside,
    The Dionysiac theatre, like a moon
    Hewn from the marble of Hymettus, gleamed,
    A silvery crescent, dying into a cloud.
    There, though the shade of Sophocles had fled,
    Long since, he heard even now in his deep soul
    The stately chorus on a ghostly stage
    Chanting the praise of thought that builds the city,
    Hoists the strong sail to cross the hoary sea,
    Ploughs the unwearied earth, yokes the wild steed
    And the untamed mountain-bull; thought that contrives
    Devices that can cure all ills but death:

    _Of all strong things none is more strong than man;_
    _Man that has learned to shield himself from cold_
    _And the sharp rain; and turns his marvellous arts_
    _Awhile to evil; and yet again, to good;_
    _Man that is made all-glorious with his city_
    _When he obeys the inviolable laws_
    _Of earth and heaven; but when, in subtle pride,_
    _He makes a friend of wrong, is driven astray_
    _And broken apart, like dust before the wind._

    All now, except the heights, had died away
    Into the dark. Only the Parthenon raised
    A brow like drifted snow against the west.
    He watched it, melting into the flood of night
    With all those memories.
                      Then he turned and said,
    “If in a moment’s thoughtless greed I grasped
    The prize that Athens offers me to-night,
    She is not so rich but this might make her poor.
    Death wears a gentle smile when we grow old;
    And I could welcome it. But she shall not stain
    Her hands a second time. Let Athens know
    That Aristotle left her, not to save
    His last few lingering days of life on earth
    But to save Athens.
                            I have truly loved her,
    Next to the sea-washed town where I was born,
    Best of all cities built by men on earth.
    But there’s another Athens, pure and white,
    Where Plato walks, a City invisible,
    Whereof this Athens is only a dim shadow;
    And I shall not be exiled from that City.”

    The hilltop darkened. The blind mist rolled down;
    The voices died. I saw and heard no more.




III—MOVING EASTWARD


I

FARABI AND AVICENNA

    _Grey mists enfolded Europe; and I heard_
    _Sounds of bewildered warfare in the gloom._

    _Yet, like a misty star, one lampad moved_
    _Eastward, beyond the mountains where of old_
    _Prometheus, in whose hand the fire first shone,_
    _Was chained in agony. His undying ghost_
    _Beheld the fire returning on its course_
    _Unquenched, and smiled from his dark crag in peace,_
    _Implacable peace, at heaven._
                              _Eastward, the fire_
    _Followed the road Pythagoras trod, to meet_
    _The great new morning._
                        _The grey mists dissolved._
    _And was it I—or Shadow-of-a-Leaf—that saw_
    _And heard, and lived through all he showed me then?_

    I saw a desert blazing in the sun,
    Tufts of tall palm; and then—that City of dreams.
    As though an age went past me in an hour
    I saw the silken Khalifs and their court
    Flowing like orient clouds along the streets
    Of Bagdad. In great Mahmoun’s train I saw
    Nazzam, who from the Stagirite caught his fire.
    Long had he pondered on the Eternal Power
    Who, in the dark palm of His timeless hand
    Rolls the whole cosmos like one gleaming pearl.
    Had he not made, in one pure timeless thought,
    All things at once, the last things with the first,
    The first life with the last; so that mankind,
    Through all its generations, co-exists
    For His eternal eyes? Yet, from our own
    Who in the time-sphere move, the Maker hides
    The full revolving glory, and unfolds
    The glimmering miracles of its loveliness
    Each at its destined moment, one by one,
    In an æonian pageant that returns
    For ever to the night whence it began.
    Thus Nazzam bowed before the inscrutable Power,
    Yet found Him in his own time-conquering soul.

    I saw the hundred scribes of El Mansour
    Making their radiant versions from the Greek.
    I saw Farabi, moving through the throng
    Like a gaunt chieftain. His world-ranging eyes
    Beheld the Cause of causes.
                                  In his mind,
    Lucid and deep, the reasoning of the Greeks
    Flooded the world with new celestial light,
    Golden interpretations that made clear
    To mighty shades the thing they strove to say.

    He carried on their fire, with five-score books
    In Arabic, where the thoughts of Athens, fledged
    With orient colours, towered to the pure realm
    Of Plato; but, returning earthward still,
    Would wheel around his Aristotle’s mind
    Like doves around the cote where they were born.
    Then the dark mists that round the vision flowed
    Like incense-clouds, dividing scene from scene,
    Rolled back from a wide prospect, and I saw,
    As one that mounts upon an eagle’s wing,
    A savage range of mountains, peaked with snow,
    To northward.
                They glowed faintly, for the day
    Was ending, and the shadows of the rocks
    Were stretched out to the very feet of night.
    Yet, far away, to southward, I could see
    The swollen Oxus, like a vanishing snake
    That slid away in slippery streaks and gleams
    Through his grey reed-beds to the setting sun.
    Earthward we moved; and, in the tawny plain,
    Before me, like a lanthorn of dark fire
    Bokhara shone, a city of shadowy towers
    Crimsoned with sunset. In its turreted walls
    I saw eleven gates, and all were closed
    Against the onrushing night.
                                Then, at my side,
    My soul’s companion whispered, “You shall see
    The Gates of Knowledge opening here anew.
    Here Avicenna dwelt in his first youth.”

    At once, as on the very wings of night,
    We entered. In the rustling musky gloom
    Of those hot streets, thousands of falcon eyes
    Were round us; but our shadows passed unseen
    Into the glimmering palace of the Prince
    Whom Avicenna, when all others failed,
    Restored to life, and claimed for all reward
    Freedom to use the Sultan’s library,
    The pride of El Mansour; a wasted joy
    To the new Sultan. Radiances were there
    Imprisoned like the innumerable slaves
    Of one too wealthy even to know their names;
    Beautiful Grecian captives, bought with gold
    From tawny traffickers in the Ionian sea.
    A shadow, with a shadow at my side,
    I saw him reading there, intent and still,
    Under a silver lamp; his dusky brow
    Wreathed with white silk, a goblet close at hand
    Brimmed with a subtle wine that could uncloud
    The closing eyes of Sleep.
                                Along each wall
    Great carven chests of fragrant cedar-wood
    Released the imprisoned magic,—radiant scrolls,
    Inscribed with wisdom’s earliest wonder-cry;
    Dark lore; the secrets of the Asclepiads;
    History wild as legend; legends true
    As history, all being shadows of one light;
    Philosophies of earth and heaven; and rhymes
    That murmured still of their celestial springs.
    He thrust his book aside, as in despair.
    Our shadows followed him through the swarming streets
    Into the glimmering mosque. I saw him bowed
    Prostrate in prayer for light, light on a page
    Of subtle-minded Greek which many a day
    Had baffled him, when he sought therein the mind
    Of his forerunner.
                        I saw him as he rose;
    And, as by chance, at the outer gates he met
    A wandering vendor of old tattered books
    Who, for three dirhems, offered him a prize.
    He bought it, out of gentle heart, and found
    A wonder on every page,—Farabi’s work,
    Flooding his Greek with light.
                                    He could not see
    What intricate law had swept it into his hand;
    But, having more than knowledge, he returned
    Through the dark gates of prayer; and, pouring out
    His alms upon the poor, lifted his heart
    In silent thanks to God.


II

AVICENNA’S DREAM

    But all these books—for him—were living thoughts,
    Clues to the darker Book of Nature’s law;
    For, when he climbed, a goat-foot boy, in Spring
    Up through the savage Hissar range, he saw
    A hundred gorges thundering at his feet
    With snow-fed cataracts; torrents whose fierce flight
    Uprooted forests, tore great boulders down,
    Ground the huge rocks together; and every year
    Channelled raw gullies and swept old scars away;
    So that the wildered eagle beating up
    To seek his last year’s eyry, found that all
    Was new and strange; and even the tuft of pines
    That used to guide him to his last year’s nest
    Had vanished from the crags he knew no more.

    There, pondering on the changes of the world,
    Young Avicenna, with a kinglier eye,
    Saw in the lapse of ages the great hills
    Melting away like waves; and, from the sea,
    New lands arising; and the whole dark earth
    Dissolving, and reshaping all its realms
    Around him, like a dream.
                              Thus of his hills
    And of their high snows flowing through his thoughts
    Was born the tale that afterwards was told
    By golden-tongued Kazwini, and wafted thence
    Through many lands, from Tartary to Pameer.
    For, cross-legged, in the shadow of a palm,
    The hawk-eyed teller of tales, in years unborn
    Holding his wild clan spell-bound, would intone
    The deep melodious legend, flowing thus,
    As all the world flows, through the eternal mind.

    I came one day upon an ancient City.
    I saw the long white crescent of its wall
    Stained with thin peach-blood, blistered by the sun.

    I saw beyond it, clustering in the sky,
    Ethereal throngs of ivory minarets,
    Tall slender towers, each crowned with one bright pearl.

    It was no desert phantom; for it grew
    And sharpened as I neared it, till I saw,
    Under the slim carved windows in the towers,
    The clean-cut shadows, forked and black and small
    Like clinging swallows.
                            In the midst up-swam
    The Sultan’s palace with its faint blue domes,
    The moons of morning.
                          Wreaths of frankincense
    Floated around me as I entered in.
    A thousand thousand warrior faces thronged
    The glimmering streets. Blood-rubies burned like stars
    In shadowy silks and turbans of all hues.

    The markets glowed with costly merchandise.
    I saw proud stallions, pacing to and fro
    Before the rulers of a hundred kings.
    I saw, unrolled beneath the slender feet
    Of slave-girls, white as April’s breathing snow,
    Soft prayer-rugs of a subtler drift of bloom
    Than flows with sunset over the blue and grey
    And opal of the drifting desert sand.

    Princes and thieves, philosophers and fools
    Jostled together, among hot scents of musk.
    Dark eyes were flashing. Blood throbbed darker yet.
    Lean dusky fingers groped for hilts of jade.
    Then, with a roll of drums, through Eastern gates,
    Out of the dawn, and softer than its clouds,
    Tall camels, long tumultuous caravans,
    Like stately ships came slowly stepping in,
    Loaded with shining plunder from Cathay.
    I turned and asked my neighbour in the throng
    Who built that city, and how long ago.
    He stared at me in wonder. “It is old,
    Older than any memory,” he replied.
    “Nor can our fathers’ oldest legend tell
    Who built so great a city.”
                                I went my way.
    And in a thousand ages I returned,
    And found not even a stone of that great City,
    Not even a shadow of all that lust and pride.
    But only an old peasant gathering herbs
    Where once it stood, upon the naked plain.

    “What wars destroyed it, and how long ago?”
    I asked him. Slowly lifting his grey head,
    He stared at me in wonder.
                                “This bleak land
    Was always thus. Our bread was always black
    And our wine harsh. It is a bitter wind
    That scourges us. But where these nettles grew
    Nettles have always grown. Nothing has changed
    In mortal memory here.”
                            “Was there not, once,
    A mighty City?” I said, “with shining streets,
    Here, on this ground?” I spoke with bated breath.
    He shook his head and smiled, the pitying smile
    That wise men use to poets and to fools.—
    “Our fathers never told us of that City.
    Doubtless it was a dream.”
                                I went my way.
    And in a thousand ages I returned;
    And, where the plain was, I beheld the sea.
    The sea-gulls mewed and pounced upon their prey.
    The brown-legged fishermen crouched upon the shore,
    Mending their tarry nets.
                              I asked how long
    That country had been drowned beneath the waves.
    They mocked at me. “His wits are drowned in wine.
    Tides ebb and flow, and fishes leap ashore;
    But all our harvest, since the first wind blew,
    Swam in deep waters. Are not wrecks washed up
    With coins that none can use, because they bear
    The blind old images of forgotten kings?
    The waves have shaped these cliffs, dug out these caves,
    Rounded each agate on this battered beach.
    How long? Ask earth, ask heaven. Nothing has changed.
    The sea was always here.”—
                                I went my way.

    And in a thousand ages I returned.
    The sea had vanished. Where the ships had sailed
    Warm vineyards basked, among the enfolding hills.
    I saw, below me, on the winding road,
    Two milk-white oxen, under a wooden yoke,
    Drawing a waggon, loaded black with grapes.
    Beside them walked a slim brown-ankled girl.
    I stood beneath a shadowy wayside oak
    To watch them. They drew near.
                                    It was no dream.
    Blood of the grape upon the wrinkled throats
    And smoking flanks of the oxen told me this.
    I saw the branching veins and satin skin
    Twitch at the flickering touch of a fly. I saw
    The knobs of brass that sheathed their curling horns,
    The moist black muzzles.
                              Like many whose coats are white,
    Their big dark eyes had mists of blue.
                                            Their breath
    Was meadows newly mown.
                            By all the gods
    That ever wrung man’s heart out in the grave
    I did not dream this life into the world.—
    Blood of the grape upon the girl’s brown arms
    And lean, young, bird-like fingers told me this.
    Her smooth feet powdered by the warm grey dust;
    The grape-stalk that she held in her white teeth;
    Her mouth a redder rose than Omar knew;
    Her eyes, dark pools where stars could shine by day;
    These were no dream. And yet,—
                                    “How long ago,”
    I asked her, “did the bitter sea withdraw
    Its foam from all your happy sun-burnt hills?”
    She looked at me in fear. Then, with a smile,
    She answered, “Nothing here has ever changed.
    My father’s father, in his childhood, played
    Among these vines. That oak-tree where you stand
    Had lived a century, then. The parent oak
    From which its acorn dropped had long been dead.
    But hills are hills. I never saw the sea.
    Nothing has ever changed.”
                                I went my way.
    Last, in a thousand ages I returned,
    And found, once more, a City, thronged and tall,
    More rich, more marvellous even than the first;
    A City of pride and lust and gold and grime,
    A City of clustering domes and stately towers,
    And temples where the great new gods might dwell.
    But, turning to a citizen in the gates,
    I asked who built it and how long ago.
    He stared at me as wise men stare at fools;
    Then, pitying the afflicted, he replied
    Gently, as to a child:
                            “The City is old,
    Older than all our histories. Its birth
    Is lost among the impenetrable mists
    That shroud the most remote antiquity.
    None knows, nor can our oldest legends tell
    Who built so great a City.”
                                I went my way.




IV—THE TORCH IN ITALY

LEONARDO DA VINCI


I

HILLS AND THE SEA

    The mists rolled back. I saw the City of Flowers
    Far down, upon the plain; and, on the slope
    Beside us—we were shadows and unseen,—
    Giulio, the painter, sketching rocks and trees.
    We watched him working, till a pine-cone crackled
    On the dark ridge beyond us, and we saw,
    Descending from the summits like a god,
    A deep-eyed stranger with a rose-red cloak
    Fluttering against the blue of the distant hills.

    He stood awhile, above a raw ravine,
    Studying the furrows that the rains had made
    Last winter. Then he searched among the rocks
    As though for buried gold.
                                As he drew near
    Giulio looked up and spoke, and he replied.
    Their voices rose upon the mountain air
    Like a deep river answering a brook,
    While each pursued his work in his own way.

                      _Giulio._

    What are you seeking? Something you have lost?

                   _The Stranger._

    Something I hope to find.

                      _Giulio._

                              You dropped it here?
    Was it of value? Not your purse, I hope.

                   _The Stranger._

    More precious than my purse.

                      _Giulio._

                                  Your lady’s ring?
    A jewel, perhaps?

                   _The Stranger._

                        A jewel of a sort;
    But it may take a thousand years to trace it
    Back to its rightful owner.

                 _Giulio (laughing)._

                                O, you are bitten
    By the prevailing fashion. Since the plough
    Upturned those broken statues, all the world
    Is relic-hunting; but, my friend, you’ll find
    No Aphrodite here.

           _The Stranger (picking up a fossil)._

                          And yet I think
    It was the sea, from which she rose alive,
    That shaped these rocks and left these twisted shells
    Locked up, like stone in stone. They must have lived
    Once, in the sea.

                      _Giulio._

                        Ah, now I understand.
    You’re a philosopher,—one of those who tread
    The dusty road to Nowhere, which they call
    Science.

                   _The Stranger._

              All roads to truth are one to me.

                      _Giulio._

    Sir, you deceive yourself. Your road can lead
    Only to error. The Adriatic lies
    How many miles away? We stand up here
    On these unchanging hills; and yet, to fit
    Your theory, you would roll the seas above
    The peaks of Monte Rosa.

                   _The Stranger._

                              But these shells?
    How did they come here?

                      _Giulio._

                              Obviously enough,
    The sea being where it is, it was the Flood
    That left them here.

                   _The Stranger._

                          Then Noah must have dropped them
    Out of his Ark. They never crept so far;
    And Noah must have dumped his ballast, too,
    Among our hills; for all those rippled rocks
    Up yonder were composed of blue sea-clay.
    I have found sea-weed in them, turned to stone,
    The claws of crabs, the skeletons of fish.
    Think you that, if your Adriatic lay
    Where it now lies, its little sidling crabs
    Could scuttle through the Deluge to the hills?
    Your Deluge must have risen above the tops
    Of all the mountains. If it rose so high,
    Then it embraced the globe, and made our earth
    One smooth blue round of water. When it sank
    What chasm received those monstrous cataracts?
    Or was the sun so hot it sucked them up
    And turned them into a mist?
                                  Is not that tale
    A racial memory, lingering in our blood,
    Of realms that now lie buried in the sea,
    Or isles that heaved up shining from the deep
    In old volcanic throes?

                      _Giulio._

                              I must confess
    I always feel a pang, sir, when I see
    A man of talent wasting his fine powers
    On this blind road.

                   _The Stranger._

                          Show me a better way.

                      _Giulio._

    The way of Art, sir.

                   _The Stranger._

                          Yes. That is a road
    I have wished that I might travel. But are you sure
    Our paths are not eventually the same?
    Why have you climbed up here? To paint the truth,
    As you perceive it, in those rocks and trees.
    Suppose that, with your skill of hand, you saw
    The truth more clearly, saw the lines of growth,
    The bones and structure of the world you paint,
    And the great rhythm of law that runs through all,
    Might you not paint them better even than now?
    Might you not even approach the final cause
    Of all our art and science,—the pure truth
    Which also is pure beauty?

                      _Giulio._

                                  Genius leaps
    Like lightning to that mark, sir, and can waive
    These pains and labours.

                   _The Stranger._

                              O, I have no doubt
    That you are right. I speak with diffidence,
    And as a mere spectator; one who likes
    To know, and seizes on this happy chance
    Of learning what an artist really thinks.

                      _Giulio._

    We artists, sir, are not concerned with laws,
    Except to break them. Genius is a law
    Unto itself.

                   _The Stranger._

                  And that is why you’ve made
    Your wood-smoke blue against that shining cloud?
    Against the darker background of the hill
    It is blue in nature also; but it turns
    To grey against the sky.

                      _Giulio._

                              I am not concerned
    With trivial points.

                   _The Stranger._

                          But if they point to truth
    Beyond themselves, and through that change of colour
    Reveal its cause, and knit your scheme in law;
    Nay, as a single point of light will speak
    To seamen of the land that they desire,
    Transfiguring all the darkness with one spark,
    Would this be trivial? Sir, a touch will do it.
    Lend me your brush a moment. Had you drawn
    Your rocks here in the foreground, thus and thus,
    Following the ribbed lines of those beds of clay
    As the sea laid them, and the fire upheaved
    And cracked them, you’ll forgive me if I say
    That they’d not only indicate the law
    Of their creation; but they’d look like rocks
    Instead of——

                      _Giulio._

                    Pray don’t hesitate.

                   _The Stranger._

                                          I speak
    As a spectator only; but to me—
    Sponges or clouds perhaps——

                      _Giulio._

                                  We artists, sir,
    Aim at this very effect. To us, the fact
    Is nothing. There is a kingdom of the mind,
    Where all things turn to dreams. Nothing is true
    In that great kingdom; and our subtlest work
    Is that which has no basis.

                   _The Stranger._

                                  Then I fear
    My thoughts are all astray; for I believed
    That kingdom to be more substantial far
    Than anything we see; and that the road
    Into that kingdom is the road of law
    Which we discover here,—the Word made Flesh.

                      _Giulio._

    I do not understand you—quite. I fear
    Yours is the popular view—that art requires
    Purposes, meanings, even moralities
    With which we artists, sir, are not concerned.

                   _The Stranger._

    O, no. I merely inquire. I wish to hear
    From one who knows. I am a little puzzled.
    You have dismissed so much—this outer world
    And all its laws; and now this other, too.
    I am no moralist; but I must confess
    That, in the greatest Art, I have always found
    A certain probity, a certain splendour
    Of inner and outer constancy to law.

                      _Giulio._

    All genius is capricious. You’ll admit
    That men who lived like beasts have painted well.

                   _The Stranger._

    Yes; but not greatly, except when their own souls
    Have gripped the beast within them by the throat,
    And risen again to reassert the law.

                      _Giulio._

    Art lives by its technique, a fact the herd
    Will never understand. A noble soul
    Is useless, if it cannot wield a brush.

                   _The Stranger._

    May not technique include control and judgment?
    Alone, they are not enough; but, for the heights,
    More is required, not less. I’d even add
    Some factors you despise.

                      _Giulio._

                                Your shells, for instance?
    And that mysterious and invisible sea?

                   _The Stranger._

    The sea whence Beauty rose.

                      _Giulio._

                                You have an eye
    For Beauty, too. You are a lover of art
    And you are rich. What opportunities
    You throw away! Was it not you I saw
    Yesterday, in the market-place at Florence,
    Buying caged birds and tossing them into the air?

                   _The Stranger._

    It may have been. I like to see them fly.
    The structure of the wing,—I think that men
    Will fly one day.

                      _Giulio._

                        It was not pity, then?

                   _The Stranger._

    I’d not exclude it. As I said before,
    I would include much.

                      _Giulio._

                          You were speaking, sir,
    Of Art. There are so few, so very few
    Who understand what Art is.

                   _The Stranger._

                                Fewer still
    Who know the few to choose.

                      _Giulio._

                                  Perhaps you’d care
    To see some work of mine. I do not live
    In Florence; but I’d like to set your feet
    On the right way. We are a little group
    Known to the few that know. You’d find our works
    Far better worth your buying than caged birds.
    Pray let me know your name, sir.

                   _The Stranger._

                                    Leonardo.


II

AT FLORENCE

    I saw the house at Florence, cool and white
    With violet shadows, drowsing in the sun.
    The fountain splashed and bubbled in the court.
    Beside it, in a space of softened light,
    Under a linen awning, ten feet high,
    Roofing a half-enclosure, where three walls
    Were tinted to a pine-wood’s blue-black shade,
    I saw a woman seated on a throne,
    And Leonardo, with his radiant eyes,
    Glancing from his wet canvas to her face.

    Her face was filled with music. Music swelled
    Above them, from a gallery out of sight;
    And as the soft pulsation of the strings
    Died into infinite distances, he spoke.
    His voice was more than music. It was thought
    Ebbing and flowing, like a strange dark sea.

    “Listen to me; for I have things to say
    That I can only tell the world through you.
    Were you not just a little afraid of me
    At first? You know by popular report
    I dabble in Black Arts, and so I would
    To keep you here, an hour or two each day,
    Until the mystery we have conjured up
    Between us—there again, it came and went—
    Smiles at the centuries in their masquerade
    As you smiled, then, at me.
                                Not mockery—quite—
    Not irony either; something we evoked
    That seems to have caught the ironist off his guard,
    And slyly observes the mocker’s naked heel.
    So we’ll defend humanity, you and I,
    Against the worst of tyrannies,—the blind sneer
    Of intellectual pride. The subtle fool
    And cunning sham at least shall meet one gaze
    More subtle, more secure; not yours or mine,
    But Nature’s own—that calm, inscrutable smile
    Whereby each erring atomy is restored
    To its true place, taught its true worth at last,
    And heaven’s divine simplicity renewed.

    Not yours or mine, Madonna. Could I trust
    To brush and palette or my skill of hand
    For this? Oh, no! We need Black Arts, I think,
    Black Arts and incantations, or you’d grow
    Weary of sitting here.
                            Last night I made
    Five bubbles of glass—you blow them with a pipe
    Over a flame,—and set them there to dance
    Upon the fountain’s feathery crest of spray.
    Piero thought it waste of time. He jeers
    At these mechanical arts of mine. I watched
    That dance and learned a little of the machine
    We call the world. I left them leaping there
    To catch your eyes this morning, and learned more.
    So one thing leads to another. A device,
    Mechanical as the spinning of the stars
    In the Arch-Mechanic’s Cosmos, woke a gleam
    Of wonder; and I lay these Black Arts bare
    To make you wonder more.
                              Black Arts, Madonna;
    For even such trifles may discover depths
    Dark as the pit of death; as when I laid
    Dice on a drum, and by their trembling showed
    Where underneath our armoured city walls
    The enemy dug his mines.
                              And now—you smile,
    To think how wars are won.
                                Catgut and wood
    Have served our wizardry. Yes; that’s why I set
    Musicians in the gallery overhead,
    To pluck their strings; and, while you listened, so
    Painted the living spirit that they bound
    With their bright spells before me, in your face.
    Black Arts, Madonna, and cold-blooded, too.
    O, sheer mechanical, playing upon your mind
    And senses, as they too were instruments,
    Or colours to be ground and mixed and used
    For purposes that were not yours at all,
    Until the living Power that uses me
    Breathes on this fabric, also made by hands,
    The inscrutable face that smiles all arts away.

    How many tales I have told you sitting here
    To make you see, according to my need,
    The comedy of the world, its lights and shades:
    The sensual feast; the mockery of renown;
    Youth and his innocent boastings, unaware
    How swiftly run the sands; Youth that believes
    His own bright scorn for others’ aching faults
    Has crowned him conqueror; Youth so nobly sure
    That plans are all achievements; quite, quite sure
    Of his own victory where all others failed;
    Age, with blind eyes, or staring at defeat,
    Dishonoured; Age, in honour, with a wreath
    Of fading leaves in one old trembling hand,
    And at his feet the dark all-gulfing grave;
    Envy, the lean and wizened witch behind him,
    Riding on death, like his own crooked shadow,
    Snapping at heaven with one contemptuous hand,
    As though she hated God; and, on her face,
    A mask of fairness; Envy, with those barbs
    Of wicked lightning darting from her flesh;
    Envy, whose eyes the palm and olive wound;
    Whose ears the laurel and myrtle pierce with pain;
    A fiery serpent eating at her heart;
    A quiver on her back with tongues for arrows.
    Each of these pictures left its little shadow,
    A little memory in your spellbound face,
    And so your picture smiles at all of these,
    And at one secret never breathed aloud,
    Because I think we knew it all too well.

    Once only, in a riddle, I made you smile
    At our own secret also, when I said
    ‘If liberty be dear to you, Madonna,
    Never discover that your painter’s face
    Is Love’s dark prison.’
                            Sailing to the south
    From our Cilicia, you and I have seen
    Beautiful Cyprus, rising from the wave;
    Cyprus, that island where Queen Venus reigned.
    The blood of men was drawn to that rough coast
    As tides, on other shores, obey the moon.
    Glens of wild dittany, winding through the hills
    From Paphos, her lost harbour, to the peak
    Of old Olympus, where she tamed the gods,
    Enticed how many a wanderer,
                                Odorous winds
    Welcomed us, ruffling, crumpling the smooth brine
    Into a sea of violets. We drew near.
    We heard the muffled thunder of the surf!
    What ships, what fleets, had broken among those rocks!
    We saw a dreadful host of shattered hulls,
    Great splintered masts, innumerable keels
    With naked ribs, like skeletons of whales
    All weltering there, half-buried in the sand.
    The foam rushed through them. On their rotted prows
    And weed-grown poops the sea-gulls perched and screamed;
    And all around them with an eerie cry
    An icy wind was blowing.
                              It would seem
    Like the Last Judgment, should there ever be
    A resurrection of the ships we saw
    Lying there dead. These things we saw and live.
    And now your picture smiles at all of these.
    The secret still evades me everywhere;
    And everywhere I feel it, close at hand.
    Do you remember when Vesuvius flamed
    And the earth shivered and cracked beneath our feet?
    Ten villages were engulfed. I wandered out
    Among the smoking fragments of earth’s crust
    To see if, in that breaking-up of things,
    Nature herself had now perhaps unsealed
    Some of her hidden wonders.
                                On that day,
    I found a monstrous cavern in the hills,
    A rift so black and terrible that it dazed me.
    I stood there, with my back bent to an arch,
    My left hand clutching at my knee, my right
    Shading contracted eyes. I strained to see
    Into that blackness, till the strong desire
    To know what marvellous thing might lurk within
    Conquered my fear. I took a ball of thread
    And tied one end to a lightning-blasted tree.
    I made myself a torch of resinous pine
    And entered, running the thread through my left hand,
    On, on, into the entrails of the world.

    O, not Odysseus, when his halting steps
    Crept through that monstrous hollow to the dead,
    Felt such a fearful loneliness as I;
    For there were voices echoing through _his_ night,
    And shadows of lost friends to welcome him;
    But my fierce road to knowledge clove its way
    Into a silence deeper than the grave,
    Into a darkness where not even a ghost
    Could stretch its hands out, even in farewell.
    And all that I could see around me there
    Was my own smoking torchlight, walls of rock
    And awful rifts where other caverns yawned.
    And all that I could hear was my own steps
    Echoing through endless darkness, on and on.

    My thread ran out. My torch was burning low,
    When, through the darkness, I became aware
    Of something darker, looming up in front;
    Solid as rock, and yet more strange and wild
    Than any shadow. My flesh and blood turned cold
    Before that awful Presence in the dark.
    I left the thread behind me, and crept on;
    Held up the guttering torch; and there, O there,
    I saw it, and I live.
                            A monstrous thing
    With jaws that might have crushed a ship, and bones
    That might upheave a mountain; a Minotaur,
    A dreadful god of beasts, now turned to stone,
    Like a great smoke-bleared idol. The wild light
    Smeared it with blood; a thing that once had lived;
    A thing that once might turn the sea to mist
    With its huge flounderings, and would make a spoil
    For kingdoms with the ships it drove ashore.
    The torchlight flared against it, and went out;
    And I groped back, in darkness....
                                        And you smile.
    O, what a marvel of enginery was there!
    What giant thews and sinews once controlled
    The enormous hinges of the rock-bound bones
    I saw in my dark cavern. Yet it perished,
    And all its monstrous race has perished, too.
    Was it all waste? Did it prepare the way
    For lordlier races? Even, perhaps, for men?

    Only one life to track these wonders home,
    So many roads to follow. Never the light
    Till all be travelled.
                            We will not despise
    Mechanical arts, Madonna, while we use
    These marvellous living instruments of ours.
    Rather we’ll seek to master for ourselves
    The Master’s own devices. Birds can fly,
    And so shall men, when they have learned the law
    Revealed in every wing. Far off, I have seen
    Men flying like eagles over the highest clouds;
    Men that in ships like long grey swordfish glide
    Under the sea; men that in distant lands
    Will speak to men in Italy; men that bring
    The distant near, and bind all worlds in one.
    And yet—I shall not see it. I have explored
    This human instrument, traced its delicate tree
    Of nerves, discovering how the life-blood flows
    Out of the heart, through every branching vein;
    And how, in age, the thickening arteries close
    And the red streams no longer feed this frame,
    And the parched body starves at last and dies.

    I have built bridges. Armies tread them now.
    The rains will come. The torrents will roll down
    And sweep them headlong to the sea, one day.
    I have painted pictures. Let cicalas chirrup
    Of their brief immortality. I know
    How soon these colours fade.
                                  And yet, and yet,
    I do not think the Master of us all
    Would set us in His outer courts at night
    As the Magnificent, once, in the flush of wine,
    Set Angelo, to flatter an idle whim
    And sculpture him a godhead out of snow.

    The work’s not wasted. In my youth I thought
    That I was learning how to live, and now
    I see that I was learning how to die.
    Then comes the crowning wonder. We strip off
    The scaffolding; for the law is learned at last;
    And our reality, Parian then, not snow,
    Dares the full sun of morning, fronts the gaze
    Of its divine Pygmalion; lives and breathes;
    And knows, then, why it passed through all those pains.

    Now—the last touch of all! And, as this face
    Begins to breathe against those ancient rocks,
    Let music breathe these arts of mine away.”

    Music awoke. It throbbed like hidden wings
    Above them. Then a minstrel’s golden voice,
    As from a distance, on those wings arose
    And poured the Master’s passion into song:

    _Burn, Phœnix, burn;_
      _And, in thy burning, take_
    _All that love taught me, all I strove to learn,_
      _All that I made, and all I failed to make._

    _If it be true_
      _That from the fire thou rise_
    _In splendour, as men say dead worlds renew_
      _Their light from their own embers in the skies,_

    _In thy fierce nest_
      _I’d share that death with thee,_
    _To make one shining feather on thy breast_
      _Of all I am, and all I strove to be._

    _The worthless bough_
      _May kindle a rich coal;_
    _And in our mingling ashes, how wilt thou_
      _Know mine from thine, ere both reclothe thy soul?_

    _Now—as thy wings_
      _Arise from this proud fire,_
    _My dust in thy assumption mounts and sings;_
      _And, being a part of thee, I still aspire._




V—IN FRANCE

JEAN GUETTARD


I

THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN

    Who knows the name of Jean Guettard to-day?
    I wrestled with oblivion all night long.
    At times a curtain on a lighted stage
    Would lift a moment, and fall back again.
    Once, in the dark, a sunlit row of vines
    Gleamed through grey mists on his invisible hill.
    The mists rolled down. Then, like a miser, Night
    Caught the brief glory in her blind cloak anew.
    At dawn I heard the voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf
    Breathing a quiet song. It seemed remote
    And yet was near, as when the listener’s heart
    Fills a cold shell with its remembered waves.

    “When I was young,” said Jean Guettard,
      “My comrades and myself would hide
    Beneath a tall and shadowy Rock
      In summer, on the mountain-side.
    The wind and rain had sculptured it—
      Such tricks the rain and wind will play,—
    To likeness of a Mother and Child;
      But wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard,
    “Have worn the rocks for many a day.”

    “The peasants in that quiet valley,
      Among their vineyards bending there,
    Called it the Rock of the Good Virgin,
      And breathed it many an evening prayer.
    When I grew up I left my home
      For dark Auvergne, to seek and know
    How all this wondrous world was made;
      And I have learned,” said Jean Guettard,
    “How rains can beat, and winds can blow.”

    “When I came home,” said Jean Guettard,
      “Not fifty years had fleeted by.
    I looked to see the Form I loved
      With arms outstretched against the sky.
    Flesh and blood as a wraith might go.
      This, at least, was enduring stone.
    I lifted heart and eyes aglow,
      Over the vines,” said Jean Guettard....

    “The rain had beaten, the wind had blown,
      The hill was bare as the sky that day.
    Mother and Child from the height had gone.
      The wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard,
    “Had crumbled even the Rock away.”

    “Shadow-of-a-Leaf,” I whispered, for I saw
    The crosier of a fern against the grey;
    And, as the voice died, he stood dark before me.
    “You sang as though you loved him. Let the mists
    Unfold.”
              He smiled. “See, first, that Rock,” he said,
    “Dividing them.”
                At once, through drifting wreaths
    I saw a hill emerging, a green hill
    Clothed with the dying rainbow of those tears
    The mist had left there. From the rugged crest
    Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away.
    I saw the Rock upstanding on the height
    So closely, and so near me, that I knew
    Its kinship with the rocks of Fontainebleau;
    The sandstone whose red grains for many an age
    Had been laid down, under a vanished sea;
    A Rock, upthrust from darkness into light,
    By buried powers, as power upthrust it now
    In the strong soul, with those remembering hills,
    Till, graven by frost and beaten by wind and rain,
    It slowly assumed the semblance of that Form
    Of Love, the Mother, holding in her arms
    The Child of Earth and Heaven; a shape of stone;
    An image; but it was not made by hands.
    Footsteps drew near. I heard an eager voice
    Naming a flower in Latin.
                              Up they came—
    Each with a bunch of wild flowers in his hand,—
    A lean old man, with snowy wind-blown hair,
    Panting a little; and, lightly at his side,
    Offering a strong young arm, a sun-burnt boy,
    Of eighteen years, with darkly shining eyes.
    It was those eyes, deep, scornful, tender, gay,
    Dark fires at which all falsehood must consume,
    That told me who they were—the young Guettard,
    And his old grandsire.
                            Under the Rock they stood.
    “Good-bye. I’ll leave you here,” the old man said.
    “We’ve had good luck. These are fine specimens.
    The last, perhaps, that we shall find together;
    For when you leave your home to-morrow, Jean,
    I think you are going on a longer journey
    Even than you know. Perhaps, when you are famous,
    You will not be so proud as I should be,
    Were I still living, to recall the days
    When even I, the old apothecary,
    Could teach you something.”
                  Jean caught a wrinkled hand,
    Held it between his own, and laughed away
    That shadow, but old Descurain looked at him,
    Proudly and sadly. “It will not rest with you,
    Or your affection, Jean. The world will see to it.
    The world that knows as much of you and me,
    As you and I of how that creeper grew
    Around your bedroom window.”
                                  As he spoke,
    Along the lower slopes the mists began
    To blow away like smoke. The patch of vines
    Crept out again; and, far below I saw,
    Sparkling with sun, the valley of the Juine,
    The shining river, and the small clear town
    Étampes, the grey old church, the clustering roofs,
    The cobbled square, the gardens, wet and bright
    With blots of colour.
                          “I have lived my life
    Out of the world, down there,” Descurain said,
    “Compounding simples out of herbs and flowers;
    Reading my Virgil in the quiet evenings,
    Alone, for all those years; and, then, with you.
    _O fortunatos_—Do we ever know
    Our happiness till we lose it? You’ll remember
    Those Georgics—the great praise of Science, Jean!
    And that immortal picture of the bees!
    No doubt you have chosen rightly. For myself,
    I know, at least, where healing dittany grows,
    And where earth’s beauty hides in its dark heart
    An anodyne, at last, for all our pain.
    And one thing more I have learned, and see with awe
    On every side, more clearly, that on earth
    There’s not one stone, one leaf, one creeping thing,
    No; nor one act or thought, but plays its part
    In the universal drama.
                            You’ll look back
    One day on this lost bee-like life of mine;
    And find, perhaps, in its obscurest hour
    And lowliest task, the moment when a light
    Began to dawn upon a child’s dark mind.
    The old pestle and mortar, and the shining jars,
    The smell of the grey bunches of dried herbs,
    The little bedroom over the market-square,
    The thrifty little house where you were born,
    The life that all earth’s great ones would despise—
    All these, perhaps, were needed, as the hand
    That led you, first, in childhood to the hills.
    You’ll see strange links, threads of effect and cause,
    In complicated patterns, growing clear
    And binding all these memories, each to each,
    And all in one; how one thing led to another,
    My simples to your love of plants and flowers,
    And this to your new interest in the haunts
    That please them best—the kinds of earth, the rocks,
    And minerals that determine where they grow,
    Foster them, or reject them. You’ll discover
    That all these indirections are not ruled
    By chance, but by dark predetermined laws.
    You’ll grope to find what Power, what Thought, what Will,
    Determined them; till, after many a year,
    At one swift clue, one new-found link, one touch,
    They are flooded with a new transfiguring light,
    Deep as the light our kneeling peasants know
    When, dumbly, at the ringing of a bell
    They adore the sacred elements; a light
    That shows all Nature, of which your life is part,
    Bound to that harmony which alone sets free;
    And every grain of dust upon its way
    As punctual to its purpose as a star.

    This Rock has played its part in many a life.
    We know it, for we see it every day.
    No angelus ever rang, but some one’s eyes
    Were lifted to it; and, returning home,
    The wanderer strains to see it from the road.
    What is it, then? It plays no greater part
    Than any grain of dust beneath our feet,
    Could we discern it. A dumb block of stone,
    A shadow in the mind, a thought of God,
    A little fragment of the eternal order,
    That postulates the whole.
                                If we could see
    The universal Temple in which it stands
    We, too, should bow our heads; for if this Form
    Were shaped by Chance, it was the selfsame Chance
    That gave us love and death. In this the fool
    Descries a reason for denying all
    To which our peasants kneel. The years to come
    (And you will speed them, Jean) will rather make
    This dust the floor of heaven.”
                                    The old man laid
    His bunch of herbs and flowers below the Rock,
    Smiled, nodded, and went his way.
                                      “Was it by chance,”
    Thought Jean Guettard, “that grandad laid them so;
    Or by design; or by some vaster art
    Transcending, yet including, all our thoughts,
    And memories, with those flowers and that dumb stone,
    As chords in its world-music? Why should flowers
    Laid thus”—he laid his own at the feet of the Rock—
    “Transfigure it with such beauty that it stood
    Blessing him, from its arch of soft blue sky
    Above him, like a Figure in a shrine?”

    He touched its glistening grains. “I think that Ray
    Was right,” he murmured. “This was surely made
    Under the sea; sifted and drifted down
    From vanished hills and spread in level beds,
    Under deep waters; compressed by the sea’s weight;
    Upheaved again by fire; and now, once more,
    Wears down by way of the rain and brook and river,
    Back to the sea; but all by roads of law.”
    Then, looking round him furtively, to make sure
    No one was near, he dropped upon his knees.
    The mist closed over him. Rock and hill were lost
    In greyness once again.


II

MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES

                            Moments were years,
    Till, at the quiet whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    Those veils withdrew, and showed another scene.
    I saw two dusty travellers, blithely walking
    With staffs and knapsacks, on a straight white road
    Lined with tall sentinel poplars as to await
    A king’s return; but scarce a bird took heed
    Of those two travel-stained wanderers—Jean Guettard
    And Malesherbes, his old school-friend.
                                            Larks might see
    Two wingless dots that crept along the road.
    The Duke rode by and saw two vagabonds
    With keenly searching eyes, as they jogged on
    To Moulins. Birds and Duke and horse could see,
    Against the sky, that old square prison-tower,
    The tall cathedral, the dark gabled roofs,
    Thronging together behind its moated wall;
    But not one eye in all that wide green land
    Saw what those two could see; and not one soul
    Espied the pilgrim thought upon its way
    To change the world for man.
                                  The pilgrim thought!
    Say rather the swift hunter, tracking down
    More subtly than an Indian the dark spoor
    Of his gigantic prey.
                          I saw them halt
    Where, at the white road’s edge, a milestone rose
    Out of the long grass, like a strange black gnome,
    A gnome that had been dragged from his dark cave
    Under the mountains, and now stood there dumb,
    Striving to speak. But what?
                                “There! There! Again!”
    Cried Jean Guettard. They stood and stared at it,
    But not to read as other travellers use
    How far themselves must journey.
                                      They knelt down
    And looked at it, and felt it with their hands.
    A farmer passed, and wondered were they mad.
    For, when they hailed him, and his tongue prepared
    To talk of that short cut across the fields
    Beside the mill-stream, they desired to know
    Whence the black milestone came. It was the fourth
    That they had passed since noon.
                                      He grinned at them.
    “Black stones?” he said, “you’ll find them all the way
    To Volvic now!”
                    “To Volvic,” cried Guettard,
    “Volcani vicus!”
                      They seized their staffs again;
    Halted at Moulins, only to break a crust
    Of bread and cheese, and drink one bottle of wine,
    Then hastened on, following the giant trail,
    Milestone by milestone, till the scent grew hot;
    For now they saw, in the wayside cottages,
    The black stone under the jasmine’s clustering stars;
    And children, at the half-doors, wondered why
    Those two strange travellers pushed the leaves away
    And tapped upon their walls.
                                  At last they saw,
    Black as a thundercloud anchored to its hill,
    Above the golden orchards of Limagne,
    The town of Riom. All its walls were black.
    Its turreted heights with leering gargoyles crawled
    Above them, like that fortress of old Night
    To which Childe Roland came.
                                  No slughorn’s note
    Challenged it, and they set no lance in rest,
    But dusty and lame, with strangely burning eyes,
    Those footpads, quietly as the ancient Word,
    Stole into that dark lair and sought their prey.
    Surely, they thought, the secret must be known
    To some that live, eat, sleep, in this grim den.
    Have they not guessed what monster lurks behind
    This blackness?
                    In the chattering streets they saw
    The throng around the fruit-stalls, and the priest
    Entering the Sainte Chapelle. With eyes of stone
    The statue of that lover of liberty
    The chancellor, L’Hôpital, from his great dark throne
    Gazed, and saw less than the indifferent sparrow
    That perched upon his hand. Barefooted boys
    Ran shouting round the fountain in the square.
    It was no dream. Along the cobbled street,
    Clattering like ponies in their wooden shoes,
    Three girls went by with baskets full of apples.
    The princely butcher, standing at his door,
    Rosily breathing sawdust and fresh blood,
    Sleeked his moustache and rolled an amorous eye.
    It was no dream. They lived their light-winged lives
    In this prodigious fabric of black stone,
    Slept between walls of lava, drank their wine
    In taverns whose black walls had risen in fire;
    Prayed on the slag of the furnace; roofed their tombs
    With slabs of that slaked wrath; and saw no more
    Than any flock of birds that nightly roost
    On the still quivering Etna.
                                  It was late,
    Ere the two travellers found a wise old host
    Who knew the quarries where that stone was hewn;
    Too far for them that night. His inn could lodge them.
    A young roast fowl? Also he had a wine,
    The Duc de Berry, once.... Enough! they supped
    And talked. Gods, how they talked and questioned him,—
    The strangest guests his inn had ever seen.
    They wished to know the shape of all the hills
    Around those quarries. “There were many,” he said,
    “Shaped at the top like this.” He lifted up
    An old round-bellied wine-cup.
                                    At the word
    He wellnigh lost his guests. They leapt to their feet.
    They wished to pay their quittance and press on
    To see those hills. But, while they raved, the fowl
    Was laid before them, luscious, fragrant, brown.
    He pointed, speechless, to the gathering dusk,
    And poured their wine, and conquered.
                                          “The Bon Dieu
    Who made the sensual part of man be praised,”
    He said to his wife; “for if He had made a world
    Of pure philosophers, every tavern in France
    Might close its shutters, and take down its sign.”

    So Jean Guettard and Malesherbes stayed and supped;
    And, ere they slept, being restless, they went out
    And rambled through the sombre streets again.
    They passed that haunted palace of Auvergne,
    Brooding on its wild memories and grim birth;
    And from the Sainte Chapelle, uplifting all
    That monstrous darkness in one lean black spire
    To heaven, they heard an organ muttering low
    As though the stones once more were stirred to life
    By the deep soul within. Then, arched and tall,
    In the sheer blackness of that lava, shone
    One rich stained window, where the Mother stood,
    In gold and blue and crimson, with the Child.
    They looked at it as men who see the life
    And light of heaven through the Plutonian walls
    Of this material universe. They heard
    The young-voiced choir, in silver-throated peals,
    Filling the night with ecstasy. They stood
    Bareheaded in the dark deserted street,
    Outcasts from all that innocence within,
    And silent; till the last celestial cry,
    Like one great flight of angels, ebbed away.


III

THE SHADOW OF PASCAL

    At daybreak they pressed on. Strange hills arose
    Clustering before them, hills whose fragrant turf,
    Softer than velvet, hid what savage hearts!
    At noon they saw, beside the road, a gash
    Rending the sunlit skin of that green peace;
    An old abandoned quarry, half overgrown
    With ferns, and masked by boughs.
                                      They left the road
    And looked at it. Volcanic rock! A flood
    Of frozen lava!
    They marked its glossy blackness, the rough cords
    And wrinkles where, as the fiery waves congealed,
    It had crept on a little; and strangely there
    New beauty, like the smile on truth’s hard face,
    Gleamed on them. Never did bracken and hart’s tongue ferns
    Whisper a tale like those whose dauntless roots
    Were creviced in that grim rock. They tracked it up
    Through heather and thyme. They saw what human eyes
    Had seen for ages, yet had never seen,—
    The tall green hill, a great truncated cone,
    Robed in wild summer and haunted by the bee,
    But shaped like grey engravings that they knew
    Of Etna and Vesuvius.
                          Near its crest
    They saw the sunlight on a shepherd’s crook,
    Bright as a star. A flock of nibbling sheep
    Flowed round it like a cloud, a rambling cloud
    With drifting edges that broke and formed again
    Before one small black barking speck that flew
    Swift as a bird about a cloud in heaven.
    Thyme underfoot, wild honey in the thyme;
    But, under the thyme and honey, if eyes could see,
    In every runnel and crevice and slip and patch,
    A powdery rubble of pumice, black and red,
    Flakes of cooled lava and stones congealed from fire.
    It was no dream. A butterfly spread its fans
    White, veined with green, on a rock of sunlit slag,
    Slag of the seething furnaces below.
    They reached the summit; and, under them, beheld
    The hollow cup, the crater, whence that flood
    Out of the dreadful molten heart of the earth
    Poured in red fury to create Auvergne.
    But now, instead of smoke and fire, they saw
    Red of the heather in that deep grassy hollow,
    And heard, instead of the hissing of the abyss,
    The small grey locust, stridulent in the sun.
    They came to Clermont. All its dark old streets
    Were built of lava. By the _Place de Jaude_,
    O, strangely in their own swift race for truth,
    They met the phantom of an earlier fire!
    They found the house where Pascal first beheld
    The sunlight, through a window in lava-stone;
    And many a time had passed, a brooding child,
    With all his deep celestial thoughts to come,
    Through that volcanic porch, but never saw
    The wonder of the walls wherein he slept.
    They saw, through mists, as I through mists discerned
    Their own strange drama, that scene within the scene.
    They climbed the very hill that Pascal made
    A beacon-height of truth—the Puy de Dôme,
    Where Florin Périer, at his bidding, took
    His tubes of soft quicksilver; and, at the base,
    And, at the summit, tested, proved, and weighed
    The pressure of that lovely body of light,
    Our globe-engirdling air. On one swift hint,
    One flash of truth that Torricelli caught
    From Galileo, and Pascal caught in turn,
    He weighed that glory.
                            Ever the drama grew.
    The vital fire, in yet more intricate ways
    (As life itself, enkindling point by point
    In the dark formless embryo, grows to power),
    Coursed on, from mind to mind, each working out
    Its separate purpose, yet all linked in one.
    For those two pilgrims, on the cone-shaped hill
    That Pascal knew, and yet had never known,
    Met his great spirit among the scoriac flakes,
    And found themselves, in vision, on that pure height
    Where all the paths to truth shall one day meet.
    They met his brooding spirit as they climbed.
    They passed the dead man’s words from mouth to mouth,
    With new significance, deeper and more strange
    Even than they knew. _“We are on fire to explore_
    _The universe, and build our tower of truth_
    _Into the Infinite. Then the firm earth laughs,_
    _Opens, under its cracked walls, an abyss.”—_
    _Lavoisier! Malesherbes! Friends of Jean Guettard._
    _Was it only the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf that showed me_
    _Gleams of the Terror approaching, a wild storm_
    _Of fiercer, hell-hot lava, and that far sound_
    _Of tumbrils.... The Republic has no need_
    _Of savants!_
                _This dream went by, with the dead man’s words._
    They reached the highest crest. Before their eyes
    The hill-scape opened like a mighty vision
    That, quietly, has come true.
                                  They stood there, dumb,
    To see what they foresaw, the invisible thought
    Grown firm as granite; for, as a man might die
    In faith, yet wake amazed in his new world,
    They saw those chains of dead volcanoes rise,
    Cone behind cone, with green truncated crowns,
    And smokeless craters, on the dazzling blue.
    There, in the very sunlit heart of France,
    They saw what human eyes had daily seen
    Yet never seen till now. They stood and gazed,
    More lonely in that loneliness of thought
    Than wingèd men, alighting on the moon.

    Old as the moon’s own craters were those hills;
    And all their wrath had cooled so long ago
    That as the explorers on their downward path
    Passed by a cup-shaped crater, smooth and green,
    Three hundred feet in depth and breadth, they saw,
    Within it, an old shepherd and his flock
    Quietly wandering over its gentle slopes
    Of short sweet grass, through clumps of saffron broom.
    They asked him by what name that hill was known.
    He answered, _The Hen’s Nest_!
    “Hen’s Nest,” cried Jean Guettard, “the good God grant
    This fowl be not a phœnix and renew
    Its feathers in Auvergne.”
                            They chuckled aloud,
    And left the shepherd wondering, many a day,
    What secret knowledge in the stranger’s eye
    Cast that uncanny light upon the hill,
    A moment, and no more; and yet enough
    To make him feel, even when the north wind blew,
    Less at his ease in that green windless cup;
    And, once or twice, although he knew not why,
    He turned, and drove his flock another way.


IV

AT PARIS

    “Few know the name of Jean Guettard to-day,”
    Said Shadow-of-a-Leaf; for now the mists concealed
    All that clear vision. “I often visited him,
    Between the lights, in after years. He lived
    Alone at Paris then, in two lean rooms,
    A sad old prisoner, at the Palais Royal;
    And many a time, beside a dying fire,
    We talked together. I was only a shadow,
    A creature flickering on the fire-lit wall;
    But, while he bowed his head upon his hands
    And gazed into the flame with misted eyes,
    I could steal nearer and whisper time away.
    And sometimes he would breathe his thoughts aloud;
    And when at night his faithful servant, Claire,
    Stole into the room to lay his frugal meal,
    She’d glance at him with big brown troubled eyes
    To find him talking to himself alone.

    And sometimes when the masters of the hour
    Won easy victories in the light world’s fashion,
    With fables, easily spun in light quick minds,
    He’d leave the Academy thundering its applause,
    And there, in his bare room, with none to see
    But Shadow-of-a-Leaf, he would unfold again
    —Smiling a little grimly to himself—
    Those curious beautiful tinted maps he drew,
    The very first that any man had made
    To show, beneath the kingdoms made by man,
    The truth, that hidden structure, ribbed with rock,
    And track the vanished ages by the lives
    And deaths imprinted there.
                                They had made him rich
    In nothing but the truth.
                              He had mapped the rocks.
    “The time is not yet come,” he used to say,
    “When we can clothe them with a radiant Spring
    Of happy meanings. I have never made
    A theory. That’s for happier men to come;
    It will be time to answer the great riddle
    When we have read the question.
                                Here and there
    Already, I note, they use this work of mine
    And shuffle the old forerunner out of sight.
    No matter. Let the truth live. I shall watch
    Its progress, proudly, from the outer dark;
    More happily, I believe, thus free from self,
    Than if my soul went whoring after fame.
    One thing alone I’ll claim. It is not good
    To let all lies go dancing by on flowers.
    This—what’s his name?—who claims to be the first
    To find a dead volcano in Auvergne,
    And sees, in that, only an easy road
    To glory for himself, shall find, ere long,
    One live volcano in old Jean Guettard.
    The fool has forced me to it; for he thinks
    That I’ll claim nothing. I prefer my peace;
    But truth compels me here. I’ll set my heel
    On him, at least. Malesherbes will bear me out.
    As for the rest—no theory of the earth
    Can live without these rock-ribbed facts of mine,
    The facts that I first mapped, I claim no more.
    These rocks, these bones, these fossil ferns and shells,
    Of which the grinning moon-calf makes a jest,
    A byword for all dotage and decay,
    Shall yet be touched with beauty, and reveal
    The secrets of the book of earth to man.”

    “He made no theory,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    “And yet, I think, he looked on all these things
    Devoutly; on a sea-shell turned to stone
    As on a sacred relic, at whose touch
    Time opened like a gate, and let him pass
    Out of this mocking and ephemeral world
    Through the eternal ages, home to God.
    And so I watched him, growing old and grey,
    In seeking truth; a man with enemies,
    Ten enemies for every truth he told;
    And friends that still, despite his caustic tongue,
    Loved him for his true heart.
                                  Yet even these
    Never quite reached it; never quite discerned
    That even his gruffest words were but the pledge
    Of his own passionate truth; the harsh pained cry
    For truth, for truth, of one who saw the throng
    Bewildered and astray, the ways of love
    Grown tortuous, and the path to heaven grown dim
    Through man’s unheed for truth.
                                I saw him greet
    Condorcet, at the Academy. “We have lost
    Two members. I condole with you, my friend.
    It is their last _éloges_ you’ll speak to-day!
    How will you bury their false theories?
    In irony, or in academic robes?
    No matter. There’ll be only one or two
    Who really know; and I shall not be there
    To vex you, from my corner, with one smile.
    Lord, what a pack of lies you’ll have to tell!
    It is the custom. When my turn arrives—
    ’Twill not be long,—remember, please, I want
    Truth, the whole truth, or nothing.”
                                  I saw one night
    A member walking home with him—to thank him
    For his support that morning. Jean Guettard
    Turned on his threshold, growling like a bear.
    “You owe me nothing. I believed my vote
    Was right, or else you never should have had it.
    Pray do not think I liked you.”
                                    A grim door
    Opened and closed like iron in the face
    Of his late friend and now indignant foe;
    To whom no less, if he had needed it,
    Guettard would still have given his own last sou.
    He came into his lonely room that night,
    And sat and stared into the fluttering fire.
    I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf, was there; and I could see
    More in his eyes than even Condorcet saw,
    Condorcet, who of all his friends remained
    Most faithful to the end.
                              But, at the hour
    When Claire would lay his supper, a light hand tapped
    Timidly on his door. He sat upright
    And turned with startled eyes.
                                “Enter,” he called.
    A wide-eyed, pale-faced child came creeping in.
    “What! Little Claire!” he cried.
    “Your mother is not better!”
                          She stood before him,
    The fire-light faintly colouring her thin face,—
    “M’sieur, she is very ill. You are a doctor.
    Come, quickly.”
          Through the narrow, ill-lighted streets
    Old Jean Guettard went hobbling, a small hand
    Clutching his own, and two small wooden shoes
    Clattering beside him, till the child began
    To droop. He lifted her gently in his arms
    And hobbled on. The thin, white, tear-stained face,
    Pressing against his old grey-bristled cheek,
    Directed him, now to left and now to right.
    “O, quick, M’sieur!” Then, into an alley, dark
    As pitch, they plunged. The third door on the right!
    Into the small sad house they went, and saw
    By the faint guttering candle-light—the mother,
    Shivering and burning on her tattered bed.
    Two smaller children knelt on either side
    Worn out with fear and weeping.
                                  All that night
    Guettard, of all true kings of science then,
    Obscure, yet first in France and all the world,
    Watched, laboured, bathed the brow and raised the head,
    Moistened the thirsting lips, and knew it vain;
    Knew, as I knew, that in a hundred years
    Knowledge might conquer this; but he must fight
    A losing battle, and fight it in the dark
    No better armed than Galen.
                            He closed her eyes
    At dawn. He took the children to his house;
    Prayed with them; dried their tears; and, while they slept,
    Shed tears himself, remembering—a green hill,
    A Rock against the sky.

    He cared for them, as though they were his own.
    Guettard, the founder of two worlds of thought,
    Taught them their letters. “None can tell,” he said,
    “What harvests are enfolded for the world
    In one small grain of this immortal wheat.
    But I, who owe so much to little things
    In childhood; and have seen, among the rocks,
    What vast results may wait upon the path
    Of one blind life, under a vanished sea,
    Bow down in awe before this human life.”


V

THE RETURN

    Ever, as he grew older, life became
    More sacred to him.
                        “In a thousand years
    Man will look back with horror on this world
    Where men could babble about the Lamb of God,
    Then turn and kill for food one living thing
    That looks through two great eyes, so like their own.
    I have had living creatures killed for me;
    But I will have no more.”
                          “Though Nature laughed
    His mood to scorn,” said Shadow-of-a-Leaf, “the day
    Will come (I have seen it come a myriad times)
    When, through one mood like this, Nature will climb
    Out of its nature, and make all things new.
    Who prophesied cities, when the first blind life
    Crawled from the sea, to breathe that strange bright air,
    And conquer its own past?”—
    “I have no theory of this wild strange world,”
    Said Jean Guettard,
    “But, if the God that made it dies with us
    Into immortal life....”
    “There, there’s the meaning,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    “Could we but grasp it. There’s the harmony
    Of life, and death, and all our mortal pain.”
    I heard that old man whispering in the dark,
    “O, little human life, so lost to sight
    Among the eternal ages, I, at least,
    Find in this very darkness the one Fact
    That bows my soul before you.”
                                    Once again
    The mists began to roll away like smoke.
    I saw a patch of vines upon the hill
    Above Étampes; and through the mists I saw
    Old Jean Guettard, with snowy wind-blown hair,
    Nearing the shrouded summit. As he climbed,
    Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away.
    He lifted up his eyes to see the Rock.
    The hill was bare. His facts were well confirmed.
    Sun, wind, and rain, and the sharp chisels of frost
    Had broken it down. The Rock was on its way
    In brook and river, with all the drifting hills,
    And all his life, to the remembering sea.
    He looked around him, furtively. None was near.
    Down, on his knees,
    Among the weather-worn shards of his lost youth,
    Dropt Jean Guettard.
                      The mist closed over him.
    The world dissolved away. The vision died,
    Leaving me only a voice within the heart,
    Far off, yet near, the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf.

    _The rain had beaten. The wind had blown._
      _The hill was bare as the sky that day._
    _Mother and Child from the height had gone._
      _The wind and rain, said Jean Guettard,_
    _Had crumbled even the Rock away._




VI—IN SWEDEN


LINNÆUS

    It was his garden that began it all,
    A magical garden for a changeling child.

    “The garden has bewitched him!
    Carl! Carl! O, Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding?”

    It was the voice of Christina, wife of the Pastor,
    Nils Linnæus, the Man of the Linden-tree.
    Youthful and comely, she stood at her door in the twilight,
    Calling her truant son.
                              Her flaxen hair
    Kerchiefed with crisp white wings; her rose-coloured apron
    And blue-grey gown, like a harebell, yielding a glimpse
    Of the shapeliest ankle and snowiest stocking in Sweden;
    She stood at her door, a picture breathed upon air.

    She called yet again, and tilted her head to listen
    As a faint, flushed, wild anemone turning aside
    From a breeze out of elf-land, teasing her delicate petals,
    The breeze of the warm, white, green-veined wings of her wooer;
    And again, a little more troubled at heart, she called,
    “Supper-time, Carl!”
              But out of the fragrant pinewoods
    Darkening round her, only the wood-pigeon cooed.
    Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap
    Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again.
    Yet, he was there, she knew, though he did not answer.
    The lad was at hand, she knew, though she could not see him.
    Her elf-child, nine years old, was about and around her,
    A queer little presence, invisible, everywhere, nowhere,
    Hiding, intensely still....
                          She listened; the leaves
    All whispered, “Hush!”
    It was just as though Carl had whispered,
    “Hush! I am watching.
    “Hush! I am thinking.
    “Hush! I am listening, too.”

    She tiptoed through the garden, her fair head
    Turning to left and right, with birdlike glances,
    Peeping round lichened boulders and clumps of fern.
    She passed by the little garden his father gave him,
    Elfdom within an elfdom, where he had sown
    Not only flowers that rightly grow in gardens,
    The delicate aristocracies of bloom,
    But hedgerow waifs and ragamuffin strays
    That sprawled across his borders everywhere
    And troubled even the queendom of the rose
    With swarming insurrections.
                            At last she saw him,
    His tousled head a little golden cloud
    Among the dark green reeds at the edge of the lake,
    Bending over the breathless water to watch—
    What?
            She tiptoed nearer, until she saw
    The spell that bound him. Floating upon the lake,
    A yard away, a water-lily closed
    Its petals, as an elfin cygnet smooths
    Its ruffled plumes, composing them for sleep.

    He watched it, rapt, intent.
                              She watched her son,
    Intent and rapt, with a stirring at her heart,
    And beautiful shining wonder in her eyes,
    Feeling a mystery near her.
                            Shadow-of-a-Leaf
    Whispered. The garden died into the dark.
    Mother and child had gone—I knew not whither.
    It seemed as though the dark stream of the years
    Flowed round me.
              Then, as one that walks all night
    Lifts up his head in the early light of dawn,
    I found myself in a long deserted street
    Of little wooden houses, with thatched roofs.
    It was Uppsala.
                    Over the silent town
    I heard a skylark quivering, up and up,
    As though the very dew from its wild wings
    Were shaken to silvery trills of elfin song.
    _Tirile, tirile, tirile_, it arose,
    Praising the Giver of one more shining day.

    Then, with a clatter of doors and a yodelling call
    Of young men’s voices, the Svartbäcken woke;
    And down the ringing street the students came
    In loose blue linen suits, knapsack on back
    And sturdy stick in hand, to rouse old Carl
    For their long ramble through the blossoming fields.
    I saw them clustering round the Master’s door.
    I heard their jolly song—_Papa Linnæus_:

      Linnæus, Papa Linnæus,
        He gave his pipe a rap.
      He donned his gown of crimson.
        He donned his green fur-cap.
      He walked in a meadow at daybreak
        To see what he might see;
      And the linnet cried, “Linnæus!
        O hide! Here comes Linnæus.
      Beware of old Linnæus,
        The Man of the Linden-tree.”

      So beautiful, bright and early
        He brushed away the dews,
      He found the wicked wild-flowers
        All courting there in twos;
      And buzzing loud for pardon,
        Sir Pandarus, the bee:
      “Vincit Amor, Linnæus,
        Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!”
      O, ho, quoth old Linnæus,
        The Man of the Linden-tree.

      Quoth he, ’Tis my conviction
        These innocents must be wed!
      So he murmured a benediction,
        And blessed their fragrant bed;
      And the butterflies fanned their blushes
        And the red-cap whistled in glee,
      _They are married by old Linnæus,_
        _Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!_
      _Vivat, vivat Linnæus,_
        _The Man of the Linden-tree_.

    _Vivat Linnæus!_ And out the old Master came,
    Jauntily as a throstle-cock in Spring,
    His big bright eyes aglow; the fine curved beak,
    The kindly lips, the broad well-sculptured brow,
    All looked as though the wisdom that had shaped them
    Desired that they should always wear a smile
    To teach the world that kindness makes men happy.
    He shook his head at his uproarious troop,
    And chose his officers for the day’s campaign:
    One, for a marksman, with a fowling-piece,
    To bring down bird or beast, if need arose;
    One for a bugler, to recall their lines
    From echoing valley and hill, when something rare
    Lay in the Master’s hand; one to make notes
    Of new discoveries; one for discipline; all
    For seeking out the truth, in youth and joy.
    To-day they made for Jumkil, miles away
    Along the singing river, where that prize
    The _Sceptrum Carolinum_ used to grow.
    And, ever as they went, Linnæus touched
    All that they saw with gleams of new delight.
    As when the sun first rises over the sea
    Myriads of ripples wear a crest of fire;
    And over all the hills a myriad flowers
    Lift each a cup of dew that burns like wine;
    And all these gleams reflect one heavenly light;
    He changed the world around him; filled the woods
    With rapture; made each footpath wind away
    Into new depths of elfin-land. The ferns
    Became its whispering fringe; and every stile
    A faerie bridge into a lovelier world.
    His magic sunlight touched the adventurous plants
    That grew on the thatch of wayside cottages,
    _Crepis_ and _Bromus_, with the straggling brood
    Of flowers he called _tectorum_, dancing there
    Above the heads of mortals, like swart gnomes
    In rusty red and gold.
                          “My Svartbäck Latin,”
    Linnæus laughed, “may make the pedants writhe;
    But I would sooner take three slaps from Priscian
    Than one from Mother Nature.”
                                Ancient books
    Had made their pretty pattern of the world.
    They had named and labelled all their flowers by rote,
    Grouping them in a little man-made scheme
    Empty of true significance as the wheel
    Of stars that Egypt turned for her dead kings.
    His was the very life-stream of the flowers;
    And everywhere in Nature he revealed
    Their subtle kinships; wedded bloom and bloom;
    Traced the proud beauty, flaunting in her garden,
    To gipsy grandsires, camping in a ditch;
    Linked the forgotten wanderers to their clan;
    Grouped many-coloured clans in one great tribe;
    And gathered scores of scattered tribes again
    Into one radiant nation.
                              He revealed
    Mysterious clues to changes wild as those
    That Ovid sang—the dust that rose to a stem,
    The stem that changed to a leaf, the crowning leaf
    That changed to a fruitful flower; and, under all,
    Sustaining, moving, binding all in one,
    One Power that like a Master-Dramatist,
    Through every act and atom of the world
    Advanced the triumph that must crown the
    whole. Unseen by man—that drama—here on earth
    It must be; but could man survey the whole,
    As even now, in flashes, he discerns
    Its gleaming moments, vanishing sharp-etched scenes
    Loaded with strange significance, he would know,
    Like Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that not a cloud can sail
    Across a summer sky, but plays its part.
    There’s not a shadow drifting on the hills,
    Or stain of colour where the sun goes down,
    Or least bright flake upon the hawk-moth’s wing
    But that great drama needs them.
                                The wild thrush,
    The falling petal, the bubble upon the brook,
    Each has its cue, to sing, to fall, to shine,
    And exquisitely responds. The drunken bee
    Blundering and stumbling through a world of flowers
    Has his own tingling entrances, unknown
    To man or to himself; and, though he lives
    In his own bee-world, following his own law,
    He is yet the unweeting shuttle in a loom
    That marries rose to rose in other worlds,
    And shapes the wonder of Springs he cannot see.
    O, little bee-like man, thou shalt not raise
    Thy hand, or close thine eyes, or sigh in sleep;
    But, over all thy freedom, there abides
    The law of this world-drama.
                                Under the stars,
    Between sweet-breathing gardens in the dusk,
    I heard the song of the students marching home.
    I saw their eyes, mad nightingales of joy,
    Shining with youth’s eternal ecstasy.
    I saw them tossing vines entwined with flowers
    Over girls’ necks, and drawing them all along;
    Flags flying, French horns blowing, kettle-drums throbbing,
    And Carl Linnæus marching at their head.
    Up to the great old barn they marched for supper,—
    Four rounds of beef and a cask of ripened ale;
    And, afterwards, each with his own flower-fettered girl,
    They’d dance the rest of the summer night away.

    Greybeards had frowned upon this frolic feast;
    But Carl Linnæus told them “Youth’s a flower,
    And we’re botanic students.”
                                  Many a time,
    In green fur-cap and crimson dressing-gown,
    He sat and smoked his pipe and watched them there
    On winter nights; and when the fiddles played
    His Polish dance, Linné would shuffle it too.
    But now, to-night—they had tramped too many miles.
    The old man was tired. He left them at the door,
    And turned to his own house, as one who leaves
    Much that he loved behind him.
                                    As he went
    They cheered their chief—“Vivat, vivat, Linnæus!”
    And broke into their frolic song again.

    I saw him in the shadowy house alone
    Entering the room, above whose happy door
    The watchword of his youth and his old age
    Was written in gold—_Innocue vivito._
    _Numen adest._
                  I saw him writing there
    His last great joyous testament, to be read
    Only by his own children, as he thought,
    After he’d gone; an ecstasy of praise,
    As though a bird were singing in his mind,
    Praise, praise, to the Giver of life and love and death!

    _God led him with His own Almighty Hand,_
    _And made him grow up like a goodly tree._
    _God filled his heart with such a loving fire_
    _For truth, that truth returned him love for love._
    _God aided him, with all that his own age_
    _Had yet brought forth, to speed him on his way._
    _God set him in a garden, as of old,_
    _And gave him, for his duty and delight,_
    _The task that he loved best in all the world._
    _God gave him for his help-mate, from his youth_
    _Into old age, the wife he most desired._
    _And blessed him with her goodness._
                                  _God revealed_
    _His secrets to him; touched his eyes with light_
    _And let him gaze into His Council Hall._
    _God so determined even his defeats_
    _That they became his greatest victories._
    _God made his enemies as a wind to fill_
    _His homeward-rushing sails. Wherever he went_
    _The Lord was with him, and the Lord upheld him._
    And yet, O yet, one glory was to come;
    One strangest gate into infinitude
    Was yet to be swung back and take him home.
    _I know not how the fields that gave us birth_
    _Draw us with sweetness, never to be forgotten_
    _Back through the dark._
                          I saw him groping out,
    As through a mist, into a shadowy garden;
    And this was not Uppsala any more,
    But the lost garden where his boyhood reigned.
    The little dwindling path at Journey’s End
    Ran through the dark, into a path he knew.

    _Carl! Carl! Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding!_
    Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap
    Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again.

    _Carl! O Carl!_ Her voice, though he could not answer,
    Called him. He knew she was there, though he could not see her.
    He stood and listened. The leaves were listening, too.

    He tiptoed through the garden. His grey head
    Turning to left and right with birdlike glances.
    He passed by the little garden his father gave him.
    He knew its breath in the night.
                            His heart stood still.
    She was there. He saw her at last. Her back was towards him.
    He saw her fair young head, through the deepening shadows,
    Bending, breathlessly, forward to watch a child
    At the edge of the lake, who watched a floating flower.
    He watched her, rapt, intent. She watched her son,
    Intent and rapt.
    Tears in his heart, he waited, dark and still,
    Feeling a mystery near him.




VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION


I

LAMARCK AND BUFFON

    What wars are these? Far off, a bugle blew.
    Out of oblivion rose the vanished world.
    I stood in Amiens, in a narrow street
    Outside a dark old college. I saw a boy,
    A budding Abbé, pallid from his books,
    Beaked like a Roman eagle. He stole out
    Between grim gates; and stripping off his bands,
    Hastened away, a distance in his eyes;
    As though, through an earthly bugle, he had heard
    A deeper bugle, summoning to a war
    Beyond these wars, with enemies yet unknown.
    I saw him bargaining for a starveling horse
    In Picardy and riding to the North,
    Over chalk downs, through fields of poppied wheat.
    A tattered farm lad, sixteen years of age,
    Followed like Sancho at his master’s heel:
    Up to the flaming battle-front he rode;
    Flinging a stubborn “no” at those who’d send him
    Back to learn war among the raw recruits,
    He took his place before the astonished ranks
    Of grenadiers, and faced the enemy’s fire.
    Death swooped upon them, tearing long red lanes
    Through their massed squadrons. His commander fell
    Beside him. One by one his officers died.
    Death placed him in command. The shattered troops
    Of Beaujolais were wavering everywhere.
    “Retreat!” the cry began. In smoke and fire,
    Lamarck, with fourteen grenadiers, held on.
    “This is the post assigned. This post we hold
    Till Life or Death relieve us.”
                                  Who assigned it?
    Who summoned him thither? And when peace returned
    Was it blind chance that garrisoned Lamarck
    Among the radiant gardens of the south,
    Dazzled him with their beauty, and then slipt
    That volume of Chomel into his hand,
    _Traité des Plantes_?
                      Was it blind accident,
    Environment—O, mighty word that masks
    The innumerable potencies of God,—
    When his own comrade, in wild horse-play, wrenched
    And crippled him in body, and he returned
    Discharged to Paris, free to take up arms
    In an immortal army? Was it chance
    That lodged him there, despite his own desire,
    So high above the streets that all he saw
    Out of his window was the drifting clouds
    Flowing and changing, drawing his lonely mind
    In subtle ways to Nature’s pageantry,
    And the great golden laws that governed all?

    Was it blind chance that drew him out to watch
    The sunset clouds o’er Mont Valérien,
    Where the same power, for the same purpose, drew
    Jean Jacques Rousseau? Flowers and the dying clouds
    Drew them together, and mind from mind caught fire?

    What universal Power through all and each
    Was labouring to create when first they met
    And talked and wondered, whether the forms of life
    Through earth’s innumerable ages changed?
    Were species constant? Let the rose run wild,
    How swiftly it returns into the briar!
    Transplant the southern wilding to the north
    And it will change, to suit the harsher sky.
    Nourish it in a garden,—you shall see
    The trailer of the hedgerow stand upright,
    And every blossom with a threefold crown.
    Buffon, upon his hill-top at Montbard
    In his red turret, among his flowers and birds,
    Gazing through all his epochs of the world,
    Had guessed at a long ancestry for man,
    Too long for the upstart kings.
                            He could not prove it;
    And the Sorbonne, with _Genesis_ in its hand,
    Had frowned upon his æons. _In six days_
    _God made the heaven and earth._
                              He had withdrawn,
    Smiling as wise men smile at children’s talk;
    And when Lamarck had visited him alone,
    He smiled again, a little ironically.
    “Six epochs of the world may mean six days;
    But then, my friend, six days must also mean
    Six epochs. Call it compromise, or peace.
    They cannot claim the victory.
                                  There are some
    Think me too—orthodox. O, I know the whine
    That fools will raise hereafter. Buffon quailed;
    Why did not Buffon like our noble selves
    Wear a vicarious halo of martyrdom?
    Strange—that desire of small sadistic eyes
    At ease on the shore to watch a shipwrecked man
    Drowning. Lucretius praised that barbarous pleasure.
    Mine is a subtler savagery. I prefer
    To watch, from a little hill above their world,
    The foes of science, floundering in the waves
    Of their new compromise. Every crooked flash
    Of irony lightening their dark skies to-day
    Shows them more wickedly buffeted, in a sea
    Of wilder contradictions.
                                I had no proof.
    Time was not ripe. The scripture of the rocks
    Must first be read more deeply. But the law
    Pointed to one conclusion everywhere,
    That forms of flesh and bone, in the long lapse
    Of time, were plastic as the sculptor’s clay,
    And born of earlier forms.
                            Under man’s eyes,
    Had not the forms of bird and beast been changed
    Into new species? Children of the wolf,
    Greyhound and mastiff, in their several kinds,
    Fawned on his children, slept upon his hearth.
    The spaniel and the bloodhound owned one sire.
    Man’s own selective artistry had shaped
    New flowers, confirmed the morning glory’s crown,
    And out of the wild briar evoked the rose.
    Like a magician, in a few brief years,
    He had changed the forms and colours of his birds.
    He had whistled the wild pigeons from the rocks;
    And by his choice, and nature’s own deep law,
    Evoked the rustling fan-tails that displayed
    Their splendours on his cottage roof, or bowed
    Like courtiers on his lawn. The pouter swelled
    A rainbow breast to please him. Tumblers played
    Their tricks as for a king. The carrier flew
    From the spy’s window, or the soldiers’ camp,
    The schoolboy’s cage, the lover’s latticed heart,
    And bore his messages over turbulent seas
    And snow-capt mountains, with a sinewy wing
    That raced the falcon, beating stroke for stroke.”


II

LAMARCK, LAVOISIER, AND NINETY-THREE

    So, seizing the pure fire from Buffon’s hand,
    Lamarck pressed on, flinging all else aside,
    To follow all those clues to his own end.
    Ten years he spent among the flowers of France,
    Unravelling, and more truly than Linné,
    The natural orders of their tangled clans;
    Then, in “six months of unremitting toil,”
    As Cuvier subtly sneered, he wrote his book,
    The _Flore Française_; compact, as Cuvier knew,
    And did not care to say, with ten years’ thought.
    But Buffon did not sneer. The great old man,
    A king of men, enthroned there at Montbard,
    Aided Lamarck as Jove might aid his son.
    He sent the book to the king’s own printing press.
    Daubenton wrote his foreword; and Rousseau
    Had long prepared the way.
                            “Linné of France,”
    The stream of praise through every salon flowed.
    _Une science à la mode_, great Cuvier sneered.

    Was it blind chance that crushed Lamarck again
    Back to his lean-ribbed poverty?
                                    Buffon died.
    Lamarck, who had married in his prosperous hour,
    Had five young mouths to feed. With ten long years
    Of toil he had made the great _Jardin du Roi_
    Illustrious through the world. As his reward
    The ministers of the king now granted him
    A keepership at one thousand francs a year;
    And, over him, in Buffon’s place, they set
    The exquisite dilettante, Bernardin
    Saint Pierre, a delicate twitcher of silken strings.
    Lamarck held grimly to the post assigned.
    Under that glittering rose-pink world he heard
    Titanic powers upsurging from the abyss.
    Then, in the blood-red dawn of ninety-three,
    The bright crust cracked. The furious lava rolled
    Through Paris, and a thundercloud of doom
    Pealed over thrones and peoples. Flash on flash,
    Blind lightnings of the guillotine replied.
    Blind throats around the headsman’s basket roared.
    The slippery cobbles were greased with human blood.
    The torch was at the gates of the Bastille.
    Old towers, old creeds, old wrongs, at a Mænad shout,
    Went up in smoke and flame. Earth’s dynasties
    Rocked to their dark foundations. Tyrants died;
    But in that madness of the human soul
    They did not die alone. Innocence died;
    And pity died; and those whose hands upheld
    The torch of knowledge died in the bestial storm.
    Lavoisier had escaped. They lured him back
    Into the Terror’s hot red tiger-mouth,
    Promising, “Face your trial with these your friends,
    And all will be set free. If not, they die.”
    He faced it, and returned. The guillotine
    Flashed down on one and all.
                            Let the wide earth,
    Still echoing its old wrath against the kings
    And priests who exiled, stoned and burned and starved
    The bearers of the fire, remember well
    How the Republic in its red right hand
    Held up Lavoisier’s head, and told mankind
    In mockery, colder than the cynical snarl
    Of Nero, “The Republic has no need
    Of savants. Let the people’s will be done
    On earth, and let the headless trunk of Truth
    Be trampled down by numbers. Tread in the mire
    All excellence and all skill. Daub your raw wounds
    With dirt of the street; elect the sick to health.
    It is the people’s will, and they shall live.
    Nay, crown the eternal Power who rules by law
    With this red cap of your capricious will,
    And ye shall hear His everlasting voice
    More clearly than ye heard it when He spoke
    In stillness, through the souls of lonely men,
    On starry heights. Lift up your heads and hear
    His voice in the whirling multitude’s wild-beast roar,
    _Not these men, but Barabbas_.”
                                  Must the mind
    Turn back to tyranny, then, and trust anew
    To harnessed might? The listening soul still heard
    A more imperative call. Though Evil wore
    A myriad masks and reigned as wickedly
    In peoples as in kings, Truth, Truth alone,
    Whether upheld by many or by few,
    Wore the one absolute crown. Though Pilate flung
    His murderous jest at Truth—the law remained
    That answered his dark question; man’s one clue,
    The law that all true seekers after Truth
    Hold in their hands; the law, a golden thread
    That, loyally followed, leads them to full light,
    Each by his own dark way, till all the world
    Is knit together in harmony that sets free.
    Bridge-builders of the universe, they fling
    Their firm and shining roads from star to star,
    From earth to heaven. At his appointed task,
    Lamarck held grimly on (as once he gripped
    His wavering grenadiers) till Life or Death
    Relieved him. But he knew his cause at last.
    _Jardin du Roi_ became _Jardin des Plantes_;
    And the red tumult surging round his walls
    Died to a whisper of leaves.
                          His mind groped back,
    Back through the inconceivable ages now,
    To terrible revolutions of the globe,
    Huge catastrophic rendings of the hills,
    Red floods of lava; cataracts of fire;
    Monstrous upheavals of the nethermost deep;
    Whereby as Cuvier painted them, in hues
    Of blind disaster, all the hosts of life
    In each æonian period, like a swarm
    Of ants beneath the wheels of Juggernaut,
    Were utterly abolished.
                            Did God create
    After each earth-disaster, then, new hosts
    Of life to range her mountains and her seas;
    New forms, new patterns, fresh from His careless Hand,
    Yet all so closely akin to those destroyed?
    Or did this life-stream, from one fountain-head,
    Through the long changes of unnumbered years
    Flow on, unbroken, slowly branching out
    Into new beauty, as a river winds
    Into new channels? One, singing through the hills,
    Mirrors the hanging precipice and the pine;
    And one through level meadows curves away,
    Turns a dark wheel, or foams along a weir,
    Then, in a pool of shadow, drowns the moon.


III

AN ENGLISH INTERLUDE: ERASMUS DARWIN

    Already in England, bearing the same fire,
    A far companion whom he never knew
    Had long been moving on the same dark quest,
    But through what quiet secluded walks of peace.

    Out of the mist emerged the little City
    Of Lichfield, clustering round its Minster Pool
    That, like a fragment of the sky on earth,
    Reflected its two bridges, gnarled old trees,
    Half-timbered walls; a bare-legged child at play
    Upon its brink; two clouds like floating swans,
    Two swans like small white clouds; a boy that rode
    A big brown cart-horse lazily jingling by;
    And the cathedral, like a three-spired crown,
    Set on its northern bank.
                              Then, from the west,
    Above it, walled away from the steep street,
    I saw Erasmus Darwin’s bluff square house.
    Along its front, above the five stone steps
    That climbed to its high door, strange vines and fronds
    Made a green jungle in their dim prison of glass.
    Behind, its windows overlooked a close
    Of rambling mellow roofs, and coldly stared
    At the cathedral’s three foreshortened spires,
    Which seemed to draw together, as though in doubt
    Of what lay hidden in those bleak staring eyes.

    There dwelt that eager mind, whom fools deride
    For laced and periwigged verses on his flowers;
    Forgetting how he strode before his age,
    And how his grandson caught from his right hand
    A fire that lit the world.
                                I saw him there,
    In his brown-skirted coat, among his plants,
    Pondering the thoughts, at which that dreamer sneered,
    Who, through a haze of opium, saw a star
    Twinkling within the tip of the crescent moon.
    Dispraise no song for tricks that fancy plays,
    Nor for blind gropings after an unknown light,
    But let no echo of Abora praise for this
    The drooping pinion and unseeing eye.
    Seek, poet, on thy sacred height, the strength
    And glory of that true vision which shall grasp,
    In clear imagination, earth and heaven,
    And from the truly seen ascend in power
    To those high realms whereof our heaven and earth
    Are images and shadows, and their law
    Our shining lanthorn and unfailing guide.
    There, if the periwigged numbers failed to fly,
    Let babbling dreamers who have also failed
    Wait for another age. The time will come
    When all he sought and lost shall mount and sing.
    He saw the life-stream branching out before him,
    Its forms and colours changing with their sky:
    Flocks in the south that lost their warm white fleece;
    And, in the north, the stubble-coloured hare
    Growing snow-white against the winter snows.
    The frog that had no jewel in his head,
    Except his eyes, was yet a fairy prince,
    For he could change the colours of his coat
    To match the mud of the stream wherein he reigned;
    And, if he dwelt in trees, his coat was green.
    He saw the green-winged birds of Paraguay
    Hardening their beaks upon the shells they cracked;
    The humming-bird, with beak made needle-fine
    For sucking honey from long-throated blooms;
    Finches with delicate beaks for buds of trees,
    And water-fowl that, in their age-long plashing
    At the lake’s edge, had stretched the films of skin
    Between their claws to webs. Out through the reeds
    They rowed at last, and swam to seek their prey.
    He saw how, in their war against the world,
    Myriads of lives mysteriously assumed
    The hues that hid them best; the butterfly dancing
    With its four petals among so many flowers,
    Itself a wingèd flower; the hedgerow birds
    With greenish backs like leaves, but their soft breasts
    Light as a downy sky, so that the hawk,
    Poised overhead, sees only a vanishing leaf;
    Or, if he swoops along the field below them,
    Loses their silvery flight against the cloud.
    He saw the goldfinch, vivid as the blooms
    Through which it flutters, as though their dews had splashed
    Red of the thistle upon its head and throat,
    And on its wings the dandelion’s gold.
    He saw the skylark coloured like its nest
    In the dry grass; the partridge, grey and brown
    In mottled fields, escaping every eye,
    Till the foot stumbles over it, and the clump
    Of quiet earth takes wing and whirrs away.
    I saw him there, a strange and lonely soul,
    An eagle in the Swan of Lichfield’s pen,
    Stretching clipped wings and staring at the sky.
    He saw the multitudinous hosts of life,
    All creatures of the sea and earth and air,
    Ascending from one living spiral thread,
    Through tracts of time, unreckonable in years.
    He saw them varying as the plastic clay
    Under the Sculptor’s hands.
                            He saw them flowing
    From one Eternal Fount beyond our world,
    The inscrutable and indwelling Primal Power,
    His only _vera causa_; by whose will
    There was no gulf between the first and last.
    There was no break in that long line of law
    Between the first life drifting in the sea,
    And man, proud man, the crowning form of earth,
    Man whose own spine, the framework of his pride,
    The fern-stem of his life, trunk of his tree,
    Sleeps in the fish, the reptile, and the orang,
    As all those lives in his own embryo sleep.

    What deeper revolution, then, must shake
    Those proud ancestral dynasties of earth?
    What little man-made temples must go down?
    And what august new temple must arise,
    One vast cathedral, gargoyled with strange life,
    Surging through darkness, up to the unknown end?


IV

LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_

    Fear nothing, Swan of Lichfield. Tuck thy head
    Beneath thy snowy wing and sleep at ease.
    Drift quietly on thy shadowy Minster Pool.
    No voice comes yet to shake thy placid world.
    Far off—in France—thy wingless angels make
    Strange havoc, but the bearer of this fire,
    The wise physician’s unknown comrade, toils
    Obscurely now, through his more perilous night,
    Seeking his _vera causa_, with blind eyes.
    Blind, blind as Galileo in his age,
    Lamarck embraced his doom and, as in youth,
    Held to the post assigned, till Life or Death
    Relieved him. All those changes of the world
    He had seen more clearly than his unknown friend;
    And traced their natural order.
    He saw the sea-gull like a flake of foam
    Tossed from the waves of that creative sea;
    The fish that like a speckled patch of sand
    Slides over sand upon its broad flat side,
    And twists its head until its nether eye
    Looks upward, too, and what swam upright once
    Is fixed in its new shape, and the wry mouth
    Grimaces like a gnome at its old foes.
    He saw the swarming mackerel shoals that swim
    Near the crisp surface, rippled with blue and green
    Round their dark backs to trick the pouncing gull,
    But silver-bellied to flash like streaks of light
    Over the ravenous mouths that from below
    Snap at the leaping gleams of the upper sea.
    And all these delicate artistries were wrought
    By that strange Something-Else which blind men call
    “Environment,” and the name is all their need;
    A Something-Else that, through the sum of things,
    Labours unseen; and, for its own strange ends,
    Desirous of more swiftness and more strength,
    Will teach the hunted deer to escape and fly,
    Even while it leads the tiger to pursue.

    He saw that sexual war; the stags that fought
    In mating-time; the strong confirmed in power
    By victory. Lust and hunger, pleasure and pain,
    Like instruments in a dread Designer’s hand,
    Lured or dissuaded, tempted and transformed.

    He saw dark monsters in primeval forests
    Tearing the high green branches down for food
    Age after age, till from their ponderous heads
    Out of their own elastic flesh they stretched
    A trunk that, like a long grey muscular snake,
    Could curl up through the bunches of green leaves,
    And pluck their food at ease as cattle browse;
    Life’s own dark effort aiding that strange Power
    Without, and all controlled in one great plan,
    Grotesquely free, and beautifully at one
    With law, upsurging to the unknown end.
    All Nature like a vast chameleon changed;
    And all these forms of life through endless years,
    Changing, developing, from one filament rose.
    Man, on the heights, retravelled in nine moons
    All that long journey in little, never to lose
    What life had learned on its æonian way:
    Man on the heights; but not divided now
    From his own struggling kindred of the night.
    Few dared to think it yet and set him free
    Through knowledge of himself and his own power;
    Few, yet, in France or England. Let him bask
    Where in six days God set him at his ease
    Among His wingless angels; there to hate
    The truth, until he breaks his own vain heart
    And finds the law at last and walks with God,
    Who, not abhorring even the mire and clay
    In the beginning, breathed His life through all.
    This was his _vera causa_. Hate, contempt,
    Ridicule, like a scurrilous wind swooped down
    From every side. Great Cuvier, with the friends
    Of orthodoxy, sneered—could species change
    Their forms at will? Could the lean tiger’s need
    To crouch in hiding stripe his tawny flesh
    With shadows of the cane-break where he lay?
    Could the giraffe, by wishing for the leaves
    Beyond his reach, add to his height one inch?
    Or could the reptile’s fond desire to fly
    Create his wings?
                      Could Cuvier read one line
    Of this blind man, he might have held his peace,
    Found his own _versa causa_, and sunk his pride;
    And even the wiser Darwin, when he came,
    Might have withheld his judgment for an hour,
    And learned from his forerunner. But, in their haste,
    They flung away his fire; and, as he fell,
    They set their heels upon it and stamped it out.
    Not always does the distant age restore
    The balance, or posterity renew
    The laurel on the cold dishonoured brow
    Unjustly robbed and blindly beaten down.
    He laboured on in blindness. At his side
    One faithful daughter, labouring with her pen,
    As he dictated, wrote, month after month,
    Year after year; and, when her father died,
    She saw him tossed into the general grave,
    The pauper’s fosse, where none can trace him now,
    In Montparnasse, but wrapt in deeper peace
    Among the unknown and long-forgotten dead.




VIII—IN GERMANY

GOETHE


I

THE DISCOVERER

    The wreathing mist was quietly breathed away.
    I stood upon a little hill at night;
    The tang of pinewoods and the warbling joy
    Of hidden brooks was round me.
                                    The dark hill
    Sloped to a darker garden. On the crest
    A wooden cabin rose against the stars.
    Its open door, a gap of golden light
    In deep blue gloom, told me that he was there.
    I saw his darkened house asleep below,
    And Weimar clustering round it, a still cloud
    Of shadowy slumbering houses.
                                  Like a shadow,
    Tracking the Sun-god to his midnight lair,
    I climbed to the lighted cabin on the crest,
    And I saw Goethe.
                      At his side a lamp
    On a rude table, out of tumbled waves
    Of manuscript, like an elfin lighthouse rose.
    His bed, a forester’s couch for summer nights,
    Was thrust into a corner. Rows of books
    Lined the rough walls.
                        A letter was in his hand
    From Craigenputtock; and while he looked at it,
    The unuttered thoughts came flowing into the mind
    Of his invisible listener—Shadow-of-a-Leaf.
    All true, my friend; but there’s no halfway house.
    Rid you of Houndsditch, and you’ll not maintain
    This quite ungodlike severance of mankind
    From Nature and its laws; though I should lose
    My Scots apostle, if I called it so.
    What’s an apostle? Is it one who sees
    Just so much of his hero, as reflects
    Himself and his own thoughts? I like him well,
    And yet he makes me lonelier than before.
    Houndsditch may go; but Cuvier will go first;
    With all the rest who isolate mankind
    From its true place in Nature.
                                    Everywhere
    I saw the one remodulated form.
    The leaf ascended to mysterious bliss
    And was assumed, with happy sister-leaves,
    Into the heavenly glory of a flower.
    Pistil and stamen, calyx and bright crown
    Of coloured petals, all were leaves transformed,
    Transfigured, from one type.
                                  I saw in man
    And his wild kinsfolk of the woods and seas,
    In fish and serpent, eagle and orang,
    One knotted spine that curled into a skull.
    It ran through all their patterns everywhere,
    Playing a thousand variants on one theme,
    Branching through all the frame of fins and wings
    And spreading through their jointed hands and feet.

    Throughout this infinite universe I heard
    The music of one law.
                              Is man alone
    Belied by all the signs of his ascent?
    Are men even now so far above the beasts?
    What can the tiger teach them when they kill?
    Are they so vain that they’d deny the bones
    An inch beneath their skin—bones that when stripped
    Of flesh and mixed with those of their dumb kin
    Themselves could not distinguish? How they clung
    To that distinction in the skull of man.
    It lacked the inter-maxillary. They grew angry
    When I foretold it would be found one day.
    What’s truth to a poet? Back to your dainty lies!
    And then—one day—I found it.
                                  Did they say
    Strange work for a poet? Is mankind asleep
    That it can never feel what then I felt,
    To find my faith so quietly confirmed?
    I held it in my hand and stared at it,
    An eyeless hollow skull that once could think
    Its own strange thoughts and stare as well as we;
    A skull that once was rocked upon a breast,
    And looked its deathless love through dying eyes;
    And, in that skull, above the incisor teeth,
    The signs that men denied,—of its ascent
    Through endless ages, in the savage night
    Of jungle-worlds, before mankind was born.

    No thought for poets, and no wonder there?
    No gateway to the kingdoms of the mind?
    No miracle in the miracle that I saw,
    Touched, held.
                My body tingled. All my veins
    Froze with the inconceivable mystery,
    The weirdness and the wonder of it all.
    No vision? And no dream? Let poets play
    At bowls with Yorick’s relic then, for ever;
    Or blow dream-bubbles. I’ve a world to shape;
    A law to guide me, and a God to find.

    That night in sleep I saw—it was no dream!—
    It was too wild, too strange, too darkly true,
    And all too human in its monstrous pangs
    To be a dream. I saw it, and I live.
    I saw, I saw, and closed these eyes to see
    That terrible birth in darkness, the black night
    Of naked agony that first woke the soul.

    Night and the jungle, burning with great stars,
    Rolled all around me. There were steaming pools
    Of darkness, and the smell of the wild beast
    Musky and acrid on the blood-warm air.
    The night was like a tiger’s hot sweet mouth;
    I heard a muffled roar, and a wild cry,
    A shriek, a fall.
                    I saw an uncouth form,
    Matted with hair, stretched on the blood-stained earth;
    And, in the darkness, darker than the night,
    Another form uncouth, with matted hair,
    Long-armed, like a gorilla, stooping low
    Above his mate.
                    She did not move or breathe.
    He felt her body with his long-clawed hands,
    And called to her—a harsh, quick, startled cry.
    She did not hear. One arm was tightly wound
    About her little one. Both were strangely still,
    Stiller than sleep.
                        He squatted down to wait.
    They did not move all night. At dawn he stood
    By that stiff mockery. He stretched up his arms
    And clutched at the red sun that mocked him, too.
    Then, out of his blind heart, with one fierce pang,
    The man-child, Grief, was born.
                            His round dark eyes
    Pricked with strange brine, and his broad twitching mouth
    Quivered. He fell on the dark unanswering earth
    Beside his dead, with inarticulate cries,
    Great gasping sobs that seemed to rend his flesh
    And shook him through and through.
    The night returned and, with the night, a hope,
    Because he could not see their staring eyes.
    He rushed into the jungle and returned
    With fruits and berries, ripe and soft and red.
    He rubbed the dark wet plums against their lips.
    He smeared the juices on their locked white teeth;
    Pleading with little murmurs, while the stars
    Wheeled overhead, and velvet-footed beasts
    Approached and stared with eyes of gold and green;
    And even the little leaves were all alive;
    And tree-toads chirruped; but those dark forms lay still.

    Day followed night. He did not know them now.
    All that had been so swift to answer him
    Was gone. But whither? Every day he saw
    A ball of light arising in the East
    And moving overhead the self-same way
    Into the West....
    The strange new hunger eating at his heart
    Urged him to follow it, stumbling blindly on
    Through endless forests; but it moved so swiftly
    He could not overtake it, could not reach
    The place where it went down, ere darkness came.
    Then—in the dark—a shadow sometimes moved
    Before him, like the shadow he had lost,
    And with a cry, _Yoo! Yoo!_ he would awake
    And, crashing through the forests to the West,
    Would try to steal a march upon the sun,
    And see it rise inexorably behind him,
    And sail above, inexorably, at noon,
    And sink beyond, inexorably, at night.

    Then, after many suns had risen and set,
    He saw at dusk a blaze of crimson light
    Between the thinning tree-trunks and emerged
    Out of the forest into a place of rocks,
    Washed by a water greater than the world.
    He stood, an uncouth image carved in stone,
    Staring into the West. He saw the sun
    Staining the clouds and sinking into the flood.
    His lips were parched with thirst, a deeper thirst
    Than any spring on earth could quench again;
    And when he laid him down upon the shore
    To drink of that deep water, he knew well
    That he was nearer now to what he sought,
    Because it tasted salt as his lost tears.

    He drank. He waded out, and drank again.
    Then a big wave of darkness rushed upon him,
    And rolled him under. He rose, and with great arms
    Swam out into that boundless flood of brine
    Towards the last glimmer of light; a dark, blind brute,
    Sobbing and panting, till the merciful waves,
    Salt in his eyes and salt upon his lips,
    Had drawn the agony out of his labouring limbs
    And gently as the cradling boughs that once
    Rocked him to sleep, embraced and drew him down
    Into oblivion, the first life that caught
    With eyes bewildered by the light they knew,
    A glimpse of the unknown light beyond the world.


II

THE PROPHET

    Before the first wild matins of the thrush
    Had ended, or the sun sucked up the dew,
    I saw him wrestling with his thoughts. He rose,
    Laid down that eagle’s feather in his hand,
    And looked at his own dawn.
                            He did not speak.
    Only the secret music of his mind
    In an enchanted silence flowed to meet
    The listener, as his own great morning flowed
    Through those Æolian pinewoods at his feet.
    Colours and forms of earth and heaven you flow
    Like clouds around a star—the streaming robe
    Of an Eternal Glory. Let the law
    Of Beauty, in your rhythmic folds, by night
    And day, through all the universe, reveal
    The way of the unseen Mover to these eyes.
    Last night I groped into the dark abyss
    Under the feet of man, and saw Thee there
    Ascending, from that depth below all depth.
    O, now, at dawn, as I look up to heaven
    Descend to meet me, on my upward way.
    How shall they grasp Thy glory who despise
    The law that is Thy kingdom here on earth,
    Our way of freedom and our path to Thee?
    How shall they grasp that law, or rightly know
    One truth in Nature, who deny Thy Power,
    Unresting and unhasting, everywhere?
    How shall the seekers, bound to their own tasks,
    Each following his own quest, each spying out
    His fragment of a truth, reintegrate
    Their universe and behold all things in one?
    Be this the task of Song, then, to renew
    That universal vision in the soul.
    Rise, poet, to thy universal height,
    Then stoop, as eagles do from their wide heaven
    On their particular prey. Between the clouds
    They see more widely and truly than the mole
    At work in his dark tunnel, though he cast
    His earth upon the fields they watch afar.
    Work on, inductive mole; but there’s a use
    In that too lightly abandoned way of thought,
    The way of Plato, and the way of Christ,
    That man must find again, ere he can build
    The temple of true knowledge. Those who trust
    To Verulam’s _Novum Organum_ alone,
    Never can build it. Quarriers of the truth,
    They cut the stones, but cannot truly lay them;
    For only he whose deep remembering mind
    Holds the white archetype, can to music build
    His towers, from the pure pattern imprinted there.
    He, and he only, in one timeless flash
    Through all this moving universe discerns
    The inexorable sequences of law,
    And, in the self-same flash, transfiguring all,
    Uniting and transcending all, beholds
    With my Spinoza’s own ecstatic eyes
    God in the hidden law that fools call “chance,”
    God in the star, the flower, the moondrawn wave,
    God in the snake, the bird, and the wild beast,
    God in that long ascension from the dark,
    God in the body and in the soul of man,
    God uttering life, and God receiving death.




IX—IN ENGLAND

DARWIN


I

CHANCE AND DESIGN

    _“I am the whisper that he ceased to hear,”_
    _The quiet voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf began;_
    _And, as he spoke, the flowing air before me_
    _Shone like a crystal sphere, wherein I saw_
    _All that he pictured, through his own deep eyes._

    I waited in his garden there, at Down.
    I peered between the crooklights of a hedge
    Where ragged robins grew.
                              Far off, I heard
    The clocklike rhythm of an ironshod staff
    Clicking on gravel, clanking on a flint.
    Then, round the sand-walk, under his trees he strode,
    A tall lean man, wrapt in a loose dark cloak,
    His big soft hat of battered sun-burnt straw
    Pulled down to shade his face. But I could see,
    For I looked upward, the dim brooding weight
    Of silent thought that soon would shake the world.

    He paused to watch an ant upon its way.
    He bared his head. I saw the shaggy brows
    That like a mountain-fortress overhung
    The deep veracious eyes, the dogged face
    Where kindliness and patience, knowledge, power,
    And pain quiescent under the conquering will,
    In that profound simplicity which marks
    The stature of the mind, the truth of art,
    The majesty of every natural law.
    The child’s wise innocence, and the silent worth
    Of human grief and love, had set their seal.

    I stole behind him, and he did not hear
    Or see me. I was only Shadow-of-a-Leaf;
    And yet—I knew the word was on its way
    That might annul his life-work in an hour.
    I heard the whisper of every passing wing
    Where, wrapt in peace, among the hills of Kent,
    The patient watchful intellect had prepared
    A mightier revolution for mankind
    Even than the world-change of Copernicus
    When the great central earth began to move
    And dwine to a grain of dust among the stars.
    I saw him pondering over a light-winged seed
    That floated, like an elfin aeronaut,
    Across the path. He caught it in his hand
    And looked at it. He touched its delicate hooks
    And set it afloat again. He watched it sailing,
    Carrying its tiny freight of life away
    Over the quick-set hedge, up, into the hills.
    I heard him muttering, “beautiful! Surely this
    Implies design!
                  Design?” Then, from his face
    The wonder faded, and he shook his head;
    But with such reverence and humility
    That his denial almost seemed a prayer.

    A prayer—for, not long after, in his house,
    I saw him bowed, the first mind of his age,
    Bowed, helpless, by the deathbed of his child;
    Pondering, with all that knowledge, all that power,
    Powerless, and ignorant of the means to save;
    A dumb Prometheus, bending his great head
    In silence, as he drank those broken words
    Of thanks, the pitiful thanks of small parched lips,
    For a sip of water, a smile, a cooling hand
    On the hot brow; thanks for his goodness—God!
    Thanks from a dying child, just ten years old!

    And, while he stood in silence by her grave,
    Hearing the ropes creak as they lowered her down
    Into the cold dark hollow, while he breathed
    The smell of the moist earth, those calm strange words—
    _I am the Resurrection and the Life_,
    Echoed and echoed through his lonely mind,
    Only to deepen his agony of farewell
    Into Eternity.
                    Dumbly there he strove
    To understand how accents so divine,
    In words so worthy of eternal power,
    So postulant of it in their calm majesty,
    Could breathe through mortal lips.
                              Madman or God,
    Who else could say them?
                            God it could not be,
    If in his mortal blindness he saw clear;
    And yet, and yet, could madness wring the heart
    Thus, thus, and thus, for nineteen hundred years?
    _Would that she knew, would God that she knew now,_
    _How much we loved her!_
                    The blind world, still ruled
    By shams, and following in hypnotic flocks
    The sheep-bell of an hour, still thought of him
    “The Man of Science” as less or more than man,
    Coldly aloof from love and grief and pain;
    Held that he knew far more, and felt far less
    Than other men, and, even while it praised
    The babblers for their reticence and their strength,
    The shallow for their depth, the blind for sight,
    The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth,
    Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool,
    This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head.

    Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it—
    I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern
    The true gigantic drama of those hours
    Among the quiet hills as, one by one,
    His facts fell into place; their broken edges
    Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic,
    And, slowly, the new picture of the world,
    Emerging in majestic pageantry
    Out of the primal dark, before him grew;
    Grew by its own inevitable law;
    Grew, and earth’s ancient fantasies dwindled down;
    The stately fabric of the old creation
    Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod,
    Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king,
    Captive and conqueror, all must own alike
    Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts
    By the red life that flowed through all their veins
    From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one
    In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms
    Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths
    That saw and heard and hungered like his own,
    His mother Earth reclaimed him.
                                Back and back,
    He traced them, till the last faint clue died out
    In lifeless earth and sea.
                            I watched him striving
    To follow further, bending his great brows
    Over the intense lens....
                                Far off, I heard
    The murmur of human life, laughter and weeping;
    Heard the choked sobbings by a million graves,
    And saw a million faces, wrung with grief,
    Lifted forlornly to the Inscrutable Power.

    I saw him raise his head. I heard his thought
    As others hear a whisper—_Surely this_
    _Implies design!_
                  And worlds on aching worlds
    Of dying hope were wrapped in those four words.
    He stared before him, wellnigh overwhelmed
    For one brief moment, with instinctive awe
    Of Something that ... determined every force
    Directed every atom....
                                Then, in a flash,
    The indwelling vision vanished at the voice
    Of his own blindfold reason. For what mind
    Could so unravel the complicated threads,
    The causes that are caused by the effects
    Of other causes, intricately involved,
    Woven and interwoven, in endless mazes,
    Wandering through infinite time, infinite space,
    And yet, an ordered and mysterious whole,
    Before whose very being all mortal power
    Must abdicate its sovereignty?
                                  A dog
    Might sooner hope to leap beyond the mind
    Of Newton than a man might hope to grasp
    Even in this little whirl of earth and sun
    The Scheme of the All-determining Absolute.
    And yet—if that—the All-moving, were the One
    Reality, and sustained and made all forms,
    Then, by the self-same power in man himself
    Whatever was real in man might understand
    That same Reality, being one substance with it,
    One substance with the essential Soul of all,—
    Might understand, as children understand,
    Even in ignorance, those who love them best;
    Might recognise, as through their innocent eyes,
    The highest, which is Love, though all the worlds
    Of lesser knowledge passed unheeded by.
    What meant those moments else? Moments that came
    And went on wings, wild as these wings of mine,
    The wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    Quick with a light that never could be reached
    By toiling up the mountain-sides of thought;
    Consummate meanings that were never found
    By adding units; moments of strange awe
    When that majestic sequence of events
    We call the cosmos, from its wheeling atoms
    Up to its wheeling suns, all spoke one Power,
    One Presence, One Unknowable, and One Known?

    _In the beginning God made heaven and earth_:
    He, too, believed it, once....


II

THE VOYAGE

                              As if the wings
    Of Shadow-of-a-Leaf had borne me through the West
    So that the sunset changed into the dawn,
    I saw him in his youth.
                            The large salt wind,
    The creak of cordage, the wild swash of waves
    Were round him as he paced the clear white deck,
    An odd loose-tweeded sojourner, in a world
    Of uniforms and guns.
                          The _Beagle_ plunged
    Westward, upon the road that Drake had sailed;
    But this new voyager, on a longer quest,
    Sailed on a stranger sea; and, though I heard
    His ringing laugh, he seemed to live apart
    In his own mind, from all who moved around him.
    I saw him while the _Beagle_ basked at anchor
    Under West Indian palms. He lounged there, tanned
    With sun; tall, lankier in his cool white drill;
    The big slouched straw pulled down to shade his eyes.
    The stirring wharf was one bright haze of colour;
    Kaleidoscopic flakes, orange and green,
    Blood-red and opal, glancing to and fro,
    Through purple shadows. The warm air smelt of fruit.

    He leaned his elbows on the butt of a gun
    And listened, while a red-faced officer, breathing
    Faint whiffs of rum, expounded lazily,
    With loosely stumbling tongue, the cynic’s code
    His easy rule of life, belying the creed
    That both professed.
                      And, in one flash, I caught
    A glimpse of something deeper, missed by both,—
    The subtle touch of the Master-Ironist
    Unfolding his world-drama, point by point,
    In every sight and sound and word and thought,
    Packed with significance.
                        Out of its myriad scenes
    All moving swiftly on, unguessed by man,
    To close in one great climax of clear light,
    This vivid moment flashed.
                              The cynic ceased;
    And Darwin, slowly knitting his puzzled brows,
    Answered, “_But it is wrong!_”
    “Wrong?” chuckled the other. “Why should it be wrong?”
    And Darwin, Darwin,—he that was to grasp
    The crumbling pillars of their infidel Temple
    And bring them headlong down to the honest earth,
    Answered again, naïvely as a child,
    “_Does not the Bible say so?_”
                                  A broad grin
    Wreathed the red face that stared into his own;
    And, later, when the wardroom heard the jest,
    The same wide grin from Christian mouth to mouth
    Spread like the ripples on a single pool
    Quietly enough! They liked him. They’d not hurt him!
    And Darwin, strange, observant, simple soul,
    Saw clearly enough; had eyes behind his back
    For every smile; though in his big slow mind
    He now revolved a thought that greatly puzzled him,
    A thought that, in their light sophistication,
    These humorists had not guessed.
                              Once, in his cabin,
    His red-faced cynic had picked up a book
    By one whose life was like a constant light
    On the high altar of Truth.
                            He had read a page,
    Then flung it down, with a contemptuous oath,
    Muttering, “These damned atheists! Why d’you read them?”
    Could pagan minds be stirred, then, to such wrath
    Because the man they called an “atheist” smiled
    At dates assigned by bland ecclesiasts
    To God for His creation?
                                  _Man was made_
    _On March the ninth, at ten o’clock in the morning_
    _(A Tuesday), just six thousand years ago_:
    A legend of a somewhat different cast
    From that deep music of the first great phrase
    In _Genesis_. The strange irony here struck home.
    For Darwin, here, was with the soul-bowed throng
    Of prophets, while the ecclesiasts blandly toyed
    With little calendars, which his “atheist’s book,”
    In its irreverence, whispered quite away;
    Whispered (for all such atheists bend their heads
    Doubtless in shame) that, in the Book of Earth,
    Six thousand years were but as yesterday,
    A flying cloud, a shadow, a breaking wave.
    Million of years were written upon the rocks
    That told its history. To upheave one range
    Of mountains, out of the sea that had submerged
    So many a continent, ere mankind was born,
    The harnessed forces, governed all by law,
    Had laboured, dragging down and building up,
    Through distances of Time, unthinkable
    As those of starry space.
                              It dared to say
    (This book so empty of mystery and awe!)
    That, searching the dark scripture of the rocks,
    It found therein no sign of a beginning,
    No prospect of an end.
                          Strange that the Truth,
    Whether upheld by the pure law within
    Or by the power of reason, thus dismayed
    These worshippers of a little man-made code.
    Alone there in his cabin, with the books
    Of Humboldt, Lyell, Herschel, spread before him.
    He made his great decision.
                                If the realm
    Beyond the bounds of human knowledge gave
    So large a sanctuary to mortal lies,
    Henceforth his Bible should be one inscribed
    Directly with the law—the Book of Earth.


III

THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS

    I saw him climbing like a small dark speck
    —Fraught with what vast significance to the world—
    Among the snow-capt Andes, a dark point
    Of travelling thought, alone upon the heights,
    To watch the terrible craters as they breathed
    Their smouldering wrath against the sky.
                                      I saw him,
    Pausing above Portillo’s pass to hear
    The sea-like tumult, where brown torrents rolled
    Innumerable thousands of rough stones,
    Jarring together, and hurrying all one way.
    He stood there, spellbound, listening to the voice
    Of Time itself, the moments hurrying by
    For ever irrecoverably. I heard
    His very thought. The stones were on their way
    To the ocean that had made them; every note
    In their wild music was a prophecy
    Of continents unborn.
                            When he had seen
    Those continents in embryo, beds of sand
    And shingle, cumulant on the coastwise plains,
    Thousands of feet in thickness, he had doubted
    Whether the river of time itself could grind
    And pile such masses there. But when he heard
    The mountain-torrents rattling, he recalled
    How races had been born and passed away,
    And night and day, through years unreckonable,
    These grinding stones had never ceased to roll
    On their steep course. Not even the Cordilleras,
    Had they been ribbed with adamant, could withstand
    That slow sure waste. Even those majestic heights
    Would vanish. Nothing—not the wind that blows
    Was more unstable than the crust of the earth.

    He landed at Valdivia, on the day
    When the great earthquake shuddered through the hills
    From Valparaiso, southward to Cape Horn.
    I saw him wandering through a ruined city
    Of Paraguay, and measuring on the coast
    The upheaval of new land, discovering rocks
    Ten feet above high-water, rocks with shells
    For which the dark-eyed panic-stricken throngs
    Had dived at ebb, a few short days ago.
    I saw him—strange discoverer—as he sailed
    Through isles, not only uncharted, but newborn,
    Isles newly arisen and glistening in the sun,
    And atolls where he thought an older height
    Had sunk below the smooth Pacific sea.

    He explored the Pampas; and before him passed
    The centuries that had made them; the great streams
    Gathering the red earth at their estuaries
    In soft rich deltas, till new plains of loam
    Over the Banda granite slowly spread,
    And seeds took root and mightier forests towered,
    Forests that human foot could never tread,
    Forests that human eye could never see;
    But by the all-conquering human mind at last
    Trodden and seen, waving their leaves in air
    As at an incantation,
    And filled once more with monstrous forms of life.

    He found their monstrous bones embedded there,
    And, as he found them, all those dry bones lived.
    I stole beside him in the dark, and heard,
    In the unfathomable forest deeps, the crash
    Of distant boughs, a wild and lonely sound,
    Where Megatherium, the gigantic Sloth
    Whose thigh was thrice an elephant’s in girth,
    Rose, blindly groping, and with armoured hands
    Tore down the trees to reach their tender crests
    And strip them of their more delicious green.
    I saw him pondering on the secret bond
    Between the living creatures that he found
    On the main coast, and those on lonely isles;
    Forms that diverged, and yet were closely akin.
    One key, one only, unlocked the mystery there.

    Unless God made, for every separate isle
    As it arose, new tribes of plants, birds, beasts,
    In variant images of the tribes He set
    Upon their nearest continent, grading all
    By time, and place, and distance from the shore,
    The bond between them was the bond of blood.
    All, all had branched from one original tree.

    I saw him off the Patagonian coast
    Staring at something stranger than a dream.
    There, on a rocky point above the ship
    With its world-voyaging thoughts, he first beheld
    Primeval man. There, clustering on the crags,
    Backed by their echoing forests of dark beech,
    The naked savages yelled at the white sails,
    Like wolves that bay the moon. They tossed their arms
    Wildly through their long manes of streaming hair,
    Like troubled spirits from an alien world.
    Whence had they risen? From what ancestral night?
    What bond of blood was there? What dreadful Power
    Begot them—fallen or risen—from heaven or hell?

    I saw him hunting everywhere for light
    On life’s dark mystery; gathering everywhere
    Armies of fact, that pointed all one way,
    And yet—what _vera causa_ could he find
    In blindfold Nature?
                          Even had he found it,
    What æons would be needed! Earth was old;
    But could the unresting loom of infinite time
    Weave this wild miracle, or evolve one nerve
    Of all this intricate network in the brain,
    This exquisite machine that looked through heaven,
    Revelled in colours of a sunset sky,
    Or met love’s eyes on earth?
                                  Everywhere, now,
    He found new clues that led him all one way.
    And, everywhere, in the record of the rocks,
    Time and to spare for all that Time could do,
    But not his _vera causa_.
                            Earth grew strange.
    Even in the ghostly gleam that told the watch
    One daybreak that the ship was nearing home
    He saw those endless distances again....
    He saw through mist, over the struggling waves
    That run between the white-chalk cliffs of France
    And England, sundered coasts that once were joined
    And clothed with one wide forest.
                                      The deep sea
    Had made the strange white body of that broad land,
    Beautifully establishing it on death,
    Building it, inch by inch, through endless years
    Out of innumerable little gleaming bones,
    The midget skeletons of the twinkling tribes
    That swarmed above in the more lucid green
    Ten thousand fathoms nearer to the sun.
    There they lived out their gleam of life and died,
    Then slowly drifted down into the dark,
    And spread in layers upon the cold sea-bed
    The invisible grains and flakes that were their bones.
    Layer on layer of flakes and grains of lime,
    Where life could never build, they built it up
    By their incessant death. Though but an inch
    In every thousand years, they built it up,
    Inch upon inch, age after endless age;
    And the dark weight of the incumbent Deep
    Compressed them (Power determined by what Will?)
    Out of the night that dim creation rose
    The seas withdrew. The bright new land appeared.
    Then Gaul and Albion, nameless yet, were one;
    And the wind brought a myriad wingèd seeds,
    And the birds carried them, and the forests grew,
    And through their tangled ways the tall elk roared.
    But sun and frost and rain, the grinding streams
    And rhythmic tides (the tools of what dread Hand?)
    Still laboured on; till, after many a change,
    The great moon-harnessed energies of the sea
    Came swinging back, the way of the southwest wind,
    And, æon after æon, hammering there,
    Rechannelled through that land their shining way.
    There all those little bones now greet the sun
    In gleaming cliffs of chalk; and, in their chines
    The chattering jackdaw builds, while overhead
    On the soft mantle of turf the violet wakes
    In March, and young-eyed lovers look for Spring.
    What of the Cause? O, no more rounded creeds
    Framed in a realm where no man could refute them!
    Honesty, honesty, honesty, first of all.
    And so he turned upon the world around him,
    The same grave eyes of deep simplicity
    With which he had faced his pagan-christian friends
    And quoted them their Bible....
    Slowly he marshalled his worldwide hosts of fact,
    Legions new-found, or first assembled now,
    In their due order. Lyell had not dared
    To tell the truth he knew. He found in earth
    The records of its vanished worlds of life,
    Each with its own strange forms, in its own age,
    Sealed in its own rock-system.
                                    In the first,
    The rocks congealed from fire, no sign of life;
    And, through the rest, in order as they were made,
    From oldest up to youngest, first the signs
    Of life’s first gropings; then, in gathering power,
    Strange fishes, lizards, birds, and uncouth beasts,
    Worlds of strange life, but all in ordered grades,
    World over world, each tombed in its own age
    Or merging into the next with subtle changes,
    Delicate modulations of one form,
    (Urged by what force? Impelled by what dark power?)
    Progressing upward, into subtler forms
    Through all the buried strata, till there came
    Forms that still live, still fight for life on earth,
    Tiger and wolf and ape; and, last of all,
    The form of man; the child of yesterday.
    Of yesterday! For none had ever found
    Among the myriad forms of older worlds,
    Locked in those older rocks through tracts of time
    Out-spanning thought, one vestige of mankind.
    There was no human footprint on the shores
    Whose old compacted sand, now turned to stone,
    Still showed the ripples where a summer sea
    Once whispered, ere the mastodon was born.
    There were the pitted marks, all driven one way,
    That showed how raindrops fell, and the west wind blew.
    There on the naked stone remained the tracks
    Where first the sea-beasts crawled out of the sea,
    A few salt yards upon the long dark trail
    That led through æons to the tidal roar
    Of lighted cities and this world of tears.
    The shell, the fern, the bird’s foot, the beast’s claw,
    Had left their myriad signs. Their forms remained,
    Their delicate whorls, their branching fronds, their bones,
    Age after age, like jewels in the rocks;
    But, till the dawning of an age so late,
    It seemed like yesterday, no sign, no trace,
    No relic of mankind!
                          Then, in that age
    Among the skulls, made equal in the grave,
    Of ape and wolf, last of them all, looked up
    That naked shrine with its receding brows,
    And its two sightless holes, the skull of man.
    Round it, his tools and weapons, the chipped flints,
    The first beginnings of his fight for power,
    The first results of his first groping thought
    Proclaimed his birth, the youngest child of time.
    _Born, and not made?_ Born—of what lesser life?
    Was man so arrogant that he could disdain
    The words he used so glibly of his God—
    _Born, and not made?_
                            Could Lyell, who believed
    That, in the world around us, we should find
    The self-same causes and the self-same laws
    To-day as yesterday; and throughout all time;
    And that the Power behind all changes works
    By law alone; law that includes all heights,
    All depths, of reason, harmony, and love;
    Could Lyell hold that all those realms of life,
    Each sealed apart in its own separate age,
    With its own separate species, had been called
    Suddenly, by a special Act of God,
    Out of the void and formless? Could he think
    Even that mankind, this last emergent form,
    After so many æons of ordered law,
    Was by miraculous Hands in one wild hour,
    Suddenly kneaded out of the formless clay?
    And was the formless clay more noble, then,
    Than this that breathed, this that had eyes to see,
    This whose dark heart could beat, this that could die?
    No! Lyell knew that this wild house of flesh
    Was never made by hands, not even those Hands;
    And that to think so were to discrown God,
    And not to crown Him, as the blind believed.
    The miracle was a vaster than they knew.
    The law by which He worked was all unknown;
    Subtler than music, quieter than light,
    The mighty process that through countless
    changes,
    Delicate grades and tones and semi-tones,
    Out of the formless slowly brought forth
    forms,
    Lifeless as crystals, or translucent globes
    Drifting in water; till, through endless years,
    Out of their myriad changes, one or two
    More subtle in combination, at the touch
    Of light began to move, began to attract
    Substances that could feed them; blindly at
    first;
    But as an artist, with all heaven for prize,
    Pores over every syllable, tests each thread
    Of his most tenuous thought, the moving
    Power
    Spent endless æons of that which men call
    Time,
    To form one floating tendril that could close
    On what it touched.
                        Who whispered in his ear
    That fleeting thought?
                        We must suppose a Power
    Intently watching—through all the universe—
    Each slightest variant, seizing on the best,
    Selecting them, as men by conscious choice
    In their small realm selected and reshaped
    Their birds and flowers.
                        We must suppose a Power
    In that immense night-cleaving pageantry
    Which men call Nature, a selective Power,
    Choosing through æons as men choose through years.

    _Many are called, few chosen_, quietly breathed
    Shadow-of-a-Leaf, in exquisite undertone
    One phrase of the secret music....
                                He did not hear.
    Lamarck—all too impatiently he flung
    Lamarck aside; forgetting how in days
    When the dark Book of Earth was darker yet
    Lamarck had spelled gigantic secrets out,
    And left an easier task for the age to come;
    Forgetting more than this; for Darwin’s mind,
    Working at ease in Nature, lost its way
    In history, and the thoughts of other men.
    For him Lamarck had failed, and he misread
    His own forerunner’s mind. Blindfold desires
    Had never shaped a wing. The grapevine’s need
    To cling and climb could thrust no tendrils out.
    The environing snows of Greenland could not cloak
    Its little foxes with their whiter fur.
    Nor could the wing-shut butterfly’s inner will
    Mimic the shrivelled leaf on the withered bough
    So cunningly that the bird might perch beside it
    And never see its prey.
                            Was it blind chance
    That flashed his own great fragment of the truth
    Into his mind? What _vera causa_, then,
    What leap of Nature brought that truth to birth,
    Illumining all the world?
                            It flashed upon him
    As at a sudden contact of two wires
    The current flashes through; or, when through space,
    A meteorite for endless ages rolls
    In darkness, and its world of night appears
    Unchangeable for ever, till, all at once,
    It plunges into a soft resisting sea
    Of planet-girdling air, and burns with heat,
    And bursts into a blaze, while far below,
    Two lovers, in a world beyond its ken,
    Look from a little window into the night
    And see a falling star.
                            By such wild light,
    An image of his own ambiguous “chance,”
    Which was not “chance,” but governed by a law
    Unknown, too vast for men to comprehend
    (Too vast for any to comprehend but One,
    Breathed Shadow-of-a-Leaf, who in each part discerns
    Its harmony with the whole), at last the clue
    Flashed on him....
                In the strange ironical scheme
    Wherein he moved, of the Master-Dramatist,
    It was his own ambiguous “chance” that slipt
    A book of Malthus into his drowsy hand
    And drew his drowsy eyes down to that law
    Of struggling men and nations.
                                Was it “chance”
    That in this intricate torch-race tossed him there
    Light from one struggling on an alien track
    And yet not alien, since all roads to truth
    Meet in one goal at last?
                            Was it blind chance
    That even in this triumphant flash prepared
    The downfall of his human pride, and slipt
    The self-same volume into another hand;
    And, in the lonely islands of Malay,
    Drew Wallace to the self-same page, and said
    —Though only Shadow-of-a-Leaf could hear that voice,—
    _Whose is the kingdom, whose the glory and power?_

    O, exquisite irony of the Master, there
    Unseen by both, their generous rivalry
    Evolved, perfected, the new thought for man;
    And, over both, and all their thoughts, a Power
    Intently watching, made of their struggle for truth
    An image of the law that they illumed.

    So all that wasting of a myriad seeds
    In Nature’s wild profusion was not waste,
    Not even such waste as drives the flying grains
    Under the sculptor’s chisel, but was itself
    A cause of that unending struggle of life
    Through which all life ascends.
                            The conqueror there
    Was chosen by laws inexorably precise,
    As though to infinite Reason infinite Art
    Were wedded, and had found in infinite “chance”
    Full scope for their consummate certainties,—
    Choice and caprice, freedom and law in one.
    Each slightest variant, in a myriad ways,
    That armed or shielded or could help its kind,
    Would lead to a new triumph; would reveal,
    In varying, subtler ways of varying still;
    New strokes of that divinest “chance” of all
    Which poet and sculptor count as unforeseen,
    And unforeseeable; yet, when once achieved,
    They recognise as crowning law with law,
    And witnessing to infinitudes of Power
    In that creative Will which shapes the world.
    O, in that widening splendour of the mind,
    Blinder than Buffon, blinder than Lamarck,
    His eyes amazed with all that leapt to light,
    Dazed with a myriad details, lost the whole.
    He saw the law whereby the few were chosen
    From forms already at variance. Back and back
    He traced his law, and every step was true.
    And yet his _vera causa_ was no Cause,
    For it determined nothing. It revealed,
    In part, how subtler variants had arisen
    From earliest simpler variants, but no more.

    ...

    Subtler than music, quieter than light,
    The Power that wrought those changes; and the last
    Were all implied and folded in the first,
    As the gnarled oak-tree with its thousand boughs
    Writhing to heaven and striking its grim roots
    Like monstrous talons into the mountain’s heart
    Is pent in one smooth acorn. So each life,
    In little, retold the tale; each separate man
    Was, in himself, the world’s epitome,
    A microcosm, wherein who runs may read
    The history of the whole; from the first seed
    Enclosed in the blind womb, until life wake
    Through moons or æons of embryonic change
    To human thought and love, and those desires
    Which still grope upward, into the unknown realms
    As far beyond us now as Europe lay
    From the first life that crawled out of the sea.

    There lies our hope; but O, the endless way!
    And the lost road of knowledge, endless, too!
    That infinite hope was not for him. One life
    Hardly sufficed for his appointed task,
    To find on earth his clues to the unknown law,
    Out-miracling all miracles had he known,
    Whereby this lifeless earth, so clearly seen
    Across the abyss of time, this lifeless earth
    Washed by a lifeless ocean, by no power
    But that which moves within the things we see,
    Swept the blind rocks into the cities of men,
    With great cathedrals towering to the sky,
    And little ant-like swarms in their dark aisles
    Kneeling to that Unknowable.
                                  His to trace
    The way by inches, never to see the whole,
    Never to grasp the miracle in the law,
    And wrestling with it, to be written by light
    As by an Angel’s finger in the dark.
    Could he have stood on that first lifeless coast
    With Shadow-of-a-Leaf, and seen that lifeless brine,
    Rocks where no mollusc clung, nor seaweed grew;
    Could he have heard a whisper,—_Only wait._
    _Be patient. On one sure and certain day,_
    _Out of the natural changes of these rocks_
    _And seas, at last, a great ship will go by;_
    _Cities will dusk that heaven; and you shall see_
    _Two lovers pass, reading one printed book,_
    _The Paradiso_....
                    Would he have been so sure
    That Nature had no miracles in her heart
    More inconceivably shattering to the mind
    Than madness ever dreamed? For this, this, this,
    Had happened, though the part obscured the whole;
    And his own labour, in a myriad ways,
    Endlessly linking part to part, had lost
    The _vera causa_ that Lamarck had known,
    The one determining Cause that moved through all.


IV

THE PROTAGONISTS

    The mist cleared. As an airman flying, I saw,
    Between the quiet wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    Far down, a coiling glitter of willowy streams,
    Then grey remembered battlements that enclosed
    Gardens, like nests of nightingales; a bridge;
    An airy tower; a shadowy dome; the High;
    St Mary’s delicate spire.
                              A sound of bells
    Rose like a spray of melody from the far
    Diminished fountains of the City of Youth.
    I heard and almost wept.
                          The walls grew large
    And soared to meet me. As the patterned streets
    Break into new dimensions, passing from sight
    While the airman glides and circles down, they rose,
    And the outer City, vanishing, revealed
    The secret life within. At once I passed
    Through walls of stone on those ethereal wings;
    And, as an unseen spirit might survey
    A crowded theatre from above, I saw
    A packed assembly, gazing, hushed and still,
    At certain famous leaders of that hour
    On their raised daïs. Henslow in the midst,
    Their president, gentle, tolerant, reverent, kind,
    Darwin’s old tutor, scientist and half-saint;
    Owen beside him, crabbèd as John Knox,
    And dry as his dead bones; bland Wilberforce,
    The great smooth Bishop of Oxford, pledged and primed
    To make an end of Darwin, once for all.
    Not far away, a little in shadow, sat
    A strange young man, tall, slight, with keen dark eyes,
    Who might, in the irresponsible way of youth,
    Defend an absent thinker. Let him beware.
    There was a balance of power in science, too,
    Which would resent disturbance. He’d be crushed
    By sheer weight of authority, then set,
    Duly submissive, in his proper place.
    His name was Huxley.
                  A square close-crowded room,
    It held, in little, a concentrated world,
    Imaging, on a microcosmic stage,
    The doubts, the fears, the jealousies, and dull hates
    That now beset one lonely soul at Down;
    But imaging, also, dauntless love of truth
    In two or three, the bearers of the fire.

    Henslow, subdued, with twenty reticent words
    That, in their mere formality, seemed aware
    Of silent dark momentous currents flowing
    Under the trivial ripple of use and wont,
    Called on Daubeny, first, for his discourse
    On Sex in Flowers, and their descent through time.
    Daubeny, glancing over his glasses, bowed
    And twinkled a wise physician’s rosy smile,
    As one of his many parts; an all-round man,
    Sound Latinist and an excellent judge of wine,
    Humanist and geologist, who had tracked
    Guettard through all his craters in Auvergne,
    And, afterwards, with a map in his right hand,
    And Ovid’s ‘Ars Amoris’ in his left,
    Traced the volcanic chains through Hungary,
    Italy, Transylvania, and returned
    To Oxford, as her botanist at the last,
    With silvery hair, but otherwise unchanged,
    Oxford in bloom and Oxford to the core.
    Swimming serene in academic air,
    With open mind and non-committal phrase
    He proved he knew how little all men know;
    And whoso kept that little to himself
    Could never be caught tripping.
                                Then he smiled,
    And so remained the wisest of them all.

    For half an hour the sexes of the flowers
    Danced from his learned discourse, through the minds
    Of half his feminine hearers, like a troop
    Of Bacchanals, blowing kisses.
                                    In the crowd
    I saw, at the whimsical chuckle of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    The large-eyed spinster with the small pursed mouth,
    Eliza Pym of Woodstock, who desired
    To know about the wild flowers that she drew
    In delicate water-colours for her friends.
    She sat bolt upright, innocently amazed
    And vaguely trepidant in her hooped green gown.
    What? Even the flowers? How startling was the sound
    Of pistil! Awed, intent, she caught at clues;
    Meticulously quivering at the thought
    Of bees; and blushing deeply when he spoke
    In baritone of male virtue in the rose.
    Through all, the evasive academic phrase,
    Putting out vaguely sensitive tentacles
    That instantly withdrew from what they touched,
    Implied that he could view, quite unperturbed,
    All theories, and remain detached, aloft
    Among the gods, in philosophic calm;
    Nay, by his critical logic was endowed
    With something loftier.
                        What were gods to him,
    Who, being ephemeral, mortal, born to die,
    Could, over the port of Corpus and All Souls
    Mellowed in classic cellars, quiz the powers
    That doomed him, as the aristocrat of thought
    Looks through ironical lorgnettes at the might
    Of Demos round his tumbril. They lived on,
    Wasting their nectar, wrecking worlds on worlds.
    He had risen, at least, superior to all that.
    He held it somewhat barbarous, vulgar, crude
    To wallow in such profusion as the gods.
    All this implied, not spoken; for he found
    His final causes in his dry pressed flowers;
    Proved that he knew—none better—all the tribe
    Who had dragged a net of Latin through the fields;
    Proved that some flowers, at least, had never changed
    Through many centuries. The black-seeded poppy
    Was known to Homer. He rolled out the lines.
    Almonds, the bitter-kernelled and the sweet,
    Were tasted by the prophets; and he found
    White-seeded sesamum, in the night of time,
    Among the old Egyptians....
    He showed that, while his library was vast,
    Fragrant with leather, crested, tooled, and gilt,
    He had closed the Book of Nature, and, on the whole,
    Despite his open mind, dismissed the views
    Of this—er—new philosopher, with a smile
    That, don-wise, almost seemed to ask aloud,
    “Who is he, after all?” Not one of _us_.
    Why weigh his facts, then, further, since we hold
    The official seals of truth in this our time.
    Such men are always wrong. They come and go.
    The breeze would soon blow over.
                              All this implied,
    Not spoken, in that small dry steady smile,
    Doctor Daubeny gathered up his tails
    And made one definite and emphatic point
    By sitting down, while some eight hundred hands
    Acclaimed his perfect don-hood.
                                  Henslow rose,
    A little nervously. Had much pleasure, though....
    And turned to Mr. Huxley. Would he speak?
    A whisper passed, a queer new stillness gripped
    The expectant crowd. The clock ticked audibly
    _Not yet, not yet!_ A sense of change at hand
    Stole through the silence, like the first cool breath
    That, over a great ship’s company at night,
    Steals through the port-holes from the open sea.
    Then, with sure foresight, seeing the clash to come,
    The strange young man with the determined mouth
    And quick dark eyes rose grimly, and flung down
    A single sentence, like a gyve of steel
    Wrenched from the wrists to set the strong hands free
    For whatsoever need might rise, if clock
    And _Zeitgeist_ changed their quiet _Not Yet_ to _Now_.
    “_A general audience, sir, where sentiment_
    _May interfere, unduly interfere,_
    _With intellect_”—as a thin steel wire drawn tight
    By an iron winch, the hush grew tense and rang
    Low, hard, clear, cold—“_is not a fitting place_
    _For this discussion_.”
                            Silence, and the clock,
    Two great allies, the surest of them all,
    Dead silence, and the voice _Not Yet, Not Yet_,
    A cough, the creak of the chair as he sat down,
    A shuffle of feet, the chairman’s baffled face,
    Then little indignant mutterings round the hall,
    Turning to gasps of mockery. Insolence?—no,—
    Sheer weakness, full retreat!
                                The Bishop raised
    His eye-brows, looked at the dense disflattered crowds,
    And had no further fear. The battle was won.
    Victory, of the only kind he knew,
    Was in his hands. Retreat must now be turned
    Into full rout. He glanced at Owen,—met
    His little sardonic smile with a wise nod,
    As if to say, “Ah, just as we foresaw.”
    Excited clerics caught the flying hint
    And whispered, eyes agog—“You noticed that?
    He’s a great man, the Bishop? What a brow!
    And Owen, too. Of course, they know; they know;
    And understand each other, thick as thieves.”
    Then Owen rose; waved Huxley’s empty excuse
    Remorselessly aside; and plunged right on,
    Declaring there were facts, whereby the crowd
    Could very fitly judge.
                            The crowd’s own feet
    Tapped a benign applause.
                            Then came the facts,
    Facts from a realm that Huxley had made his own.
    _The brain of the gorilla_—some one turned
    A faint hysterical laugh into a sneeze—
    _Linked it more closely to the lowest groups_
    _Of QUADRUMANA_.
                  “Quadru—what-did-he-say?”
    Whispered Miss Pym unconsciously to herself,
    “Mana, four-handed,” clerical whiskers breathed,
    With Evangelical titillance in her ear,
    “Apes, monkeys, all the things that climb up trees.
    Says the gorilla’s more like them than us.”
    “Thank you.” Eliza Pym inclined her head
    A little stiffly.
                      Had the world gone mad?
    Was some one in the background trying to find
    A pedigree for mankind among the brutes?
    Absurd, of course, and yet—one must confess
    How like they were in some things. Unto each
    A mouth, a nose, two eyes, flesh, blood, and bones
    Of the same pattern.
                        Comic enough, and weird;
    But what became of Genesis, then, and God?
    If all these whiskered men but one or two
    So utterly disbelieved it, why discuss
    Degrees of kinship? Surely the gulf was fixed
    Wide as the severance between heaven and hell.
    Then, in one dreadful gleam, she seemed to see
    The rows of whiskered listeners, darkly perched,
    Herself among them, on long swaying boughs,
    Mesmerised, and all dumbly staring down
    With horrible fascination at great eyes,
    Green moons of cruelty, steadily smouldering,
    In depths that—smelt of tigers; or the salts
    Unstoppered by the vicar’s wife in front.

    Smile at Eliza Pym with Shadow-of-a-Leaf;
    But only if your inward sight can see
    Her memories, too—a child’s uplifted face,
    The clean white cot, the fluttering nursery fire;
    Old days, old faces, teaching her those lines
    From Blake, about a Lamb. Yet that—why that
    Might be the clue they lacked in all this talk
    Of our dumb kinsfolk. If she could but speak
    And—hint it! Why don’t Bishops think of things
    Like that, she wondered.
                        Owen resumed his chair
    With loud applause.
                    That grim young man again,
    Huxley, was on his feet, his dark eyes lit
    With thrice the vital power of all the rest.
    In one cool sentence, like a shining lance,
    He touched the centre of his opponent’s shield,
    And ended all the shuffling, all the doubts
    Of where he stood, how far he dared to go,
    If truth required it. He could not accept
    Those facts from any authority; gave direct
    Unqualified contradiction to those facts;
    And pledged himself to justify this course,
    Unusual as it seemed perhaps—elsewhere.
    “Elsewhere,” and as he said it, came a gleam
    Into his face, reflected from the heights
    Where a tribunal sits whose judgment holds
    Not for the fleeting moment, but all time.

    “Elsewhere”—the Bishop smiled. He had not caught
    That gleam. “Elsewhere” was only another sign
    Of weakness, even timidity perhaps,
    And certainly retreat, not from the truth
    (He felt so sure of that) but from the might
    And deep resources of the established powers
    Whose influence ruled the world.
                            “Elsewhere” for him
    Meant Saturday, and here. The lists were set,
    The battle joined, and the great issue plain,—
    Whether the human race came straight from God,
    Or traced its dark descent back to the brute,
    And left his creed a wreck of hollow towers,
    The haunt of bats and owls. His time to strike
    Would come on Saturday. Pleadings of “elsewhere”
    Would not avail. He set his jaw. Please God,
    He meant to drive this victory crashing home,
    And make an end of Darwin once for all.
    So closed the first strange scene.
                                The rumour spread
    Everywhere, of the Bishop’s grim intent.
    Saturday’s crowd, an hour before its time
    Choked all the doors, and crammed the long west hall.
    Black-coated members of all shades of thought,
    Knowledge and doubt and bigotry, crushed their sides
    In chair-packed rows together (Eliza Pym
    Among them, with her startled innocent eyes).
    A bevy of undergraduates at the back,
    Quietly thoughtful, held their watching brief
    For youth and for the future. Fame to come
    Already touched the brows of a rare few
    With faint leaf-shadows of her invisible wreath:
    Green, the philosopher, gazing at the world
    With youth’s aloofness, and that inward light
    Which shines from Oxford still; not far away
    The young historian of the coloured stream
    Of outward life, the ancestral pageantry
    Of England, and its tributary rills
    Flowing in dawn-gleams out of the mists of time.
    There, too, in front, with atavistic face
    And Vandyke beard, so oddly like the king
    Who loved Nell Gwynne, sat Admiral FitzRoy,
    Late captain of the _Beagle_, quite prick-eared
    With personal curiosity. Twice he told
    His neighbour that, by George, he wouldn’t ha’ missed
    This Donnybrook Fair for anything. He had sailed
    With Darwin round the world. They used to call him
    The old philosopher. Heard the bosun once,
    Pointing the officers out—damned funny it was!—
    “That’s Captain FitzRoy. That’s the second mate;
    And _that_”—pointing a thumb at Darwin’s back—
    “_That’s_ our Fly-Catcher!”
                                  Best of fellows, too,
    But queer. He’d tell you, in the simplest way
    —As if it meant no more than pass the salt,—
    Something that knocked you endways; calmly shift
    A mountain-range, in half a dozen words,
    And sink it in the sea.
                            In fact, FitzRoy
    Felt it his duty more than once, by George,
    To expostulate; told him plainly he’d upset
    _Genesis_ and the Church; and then there’d be
    The devil and all to pay. And now, by George,
    He’d done it; and her Majesty’s Admiral
    Had come on purpose, all the way from town,
    To hear and see the end of it.
                                    So he said,
    Not wholly understanding why he came,—
    The memory of a figure rapt and bowed
    Over a shell, or finding in the rocks,
    As though by wizardry, relics of lost worlds;
    Moments that, by a hardly noticed phrase,
    Had touched with orderly meaning and new light
    The giant flaws and foldings in the hills;
    Moments when, in the cabin, he had stared
    Into the “old philosopher’s” microscope,
    And seen the invisible speck in a water-drop
    Grow to a great rose-window of radiant life
    In an immense cathedral.
                              Vaguely enough,
    Perhaps in the dimmest hinterland of his mind,
    There lurked a quiet suspicion that, after all,
    His queer old friend _had_ hit on something queer.
    Three places off, his face a twinkling mask
    Of keen Scots humour, Robert Chambers glanced
    Quietly at his watch, to hide a smile
    When some one who had “written the Vestiges,”
    And only half denied it, met his eye.

    The vacant platform glared expectancy,
    And held the gaze now of the impatient crowd.

    Then Henslow led the conquering Bishop in.
    Two rows of clerics, halfway down the hall,
    Drummed for their doughty champion with their heels.
    Above, in each recessed high window-seat,
    Bishop-adoring ladies clapped their hands.

    The rest filed in, mere adjuncts, modest foils.
    Hooker and Lubbock and Huxley took their chairs
    On Henslow’s left. The beautiful gaitered legs,
    By their divine prerogative, on his right,
    So carelessly crossed, more eloquently than words
    Assured the world that everything was well,
    And their translation into forms of speech
    A mere formality. Next to the Bishop sat
    A Transatlantic visitor with a twang,
    One Doctor Draper, his hard wrinkled skin
    Tinged by the infinite coffee he absorbed,
    A gaunt bone-coloured desert, unassuaged.
    He was a grim diplomatist, as befits
    A pilgrim of the cosmos; ready at Rome
    To tickle the Romans; and, if bishops ruled,
    And found themselves at odds with freeborn souls
    Outside the Land of Freedom, he’d befriend
    Bishops, bring in the New World, stars and all,
    To rectify that balance, and take home
    For souvenir, with a chip of the pyramids,
    The last odd homages of the obsequious Old.
    The president called him for his opening speech.
    He stood and beamed, enjoying to the full
    The sense that, with his mighty manuscript,
    He could delay the antagonists for an hour.
    He cleared his throat. He took from a little box
    A small black lozenge, popped it into his mouth,
    Leisurely rolled it under a ruminant tongue,
    Then placidly drawled his most momentous words:
    _“Proh-fessur Henslow, Bishop Wilbur-force,_
    _Members, AND friends, in this historic hall,_
    _I assk first, AIR we a fortooitous_
    _Con-course of atoms?”_ Half unconsciously,
    He struck at once to the single central heart
    Of all the questions asked by every age;
    As though he saw what only Shadow-of-a-Leaf
    Had watched last night, as in a crystal globe,
    That scene preparing, the interweaving clues
    Whose inconceivable intricacy at length,
    By “chance,” as blind men call it, through the maze
    Of life and time, at the one right juncture brought
    Two shadows, face to face, in an Oxford Street,
    Chambers and Huxley. “You’ll be there to-morrow.”—
    “No, I leave Oxford now.”—
                              “The enemy means
    To annihilate Darwin. You will not desert us?”—
    “If you say that, I stay.”
                              Each to his place
    Had moved in his own orbit, like a star,
    Or like an atom, free-will at one with law,
    In the unplanned plan of the Master-Dramatist,
    Where Doctor Draper blindly played his part
    And asked his pregnant question. He droned on,
    For one enormous hour, starkly maintained
    That Europe, in its intellectual life,
    By mere “fortooity,” never could have flowered
    To such results as blushed before him there
    In that historic hall of halls to-night.
    If Darwin thought so, he took leave to stand
    Beside them, and to smile the vast calm smile
    Of Arizona’s desert distances,
    Till all such dragon thoughts had coiled away.
    He took his chair. The great debate began.
    For prelude came a menacing growl of storm.
    A furious figure rose, like a sperm-whale,
    Out of the seething audience. A huge man,
    With small, hot, wicked eyes and cavernous mouth,
    Bellowed his own ferocious claim to speak
    On economic grounds. He had subscribed
    His guineas, ringing guineas of red gold,
    Ungrudgingly for years; but prophesied
    Withdrawal of all such guineas, on all sides,
    From this Association, if it failed
    To brand these most abominable views
    As blasphemous, bearing on their devilish brows,
    Between their horns, the birth-mark of the Beast.
    This last word hissed, he sank again. At once,
    Ere Henslow found his feet or spoke a word,
    Up leapt a raw-boned parson from the North,
    To seize his moment’s fame. With sawing arm
    The Reverend Dingle, like a windmill, vowed
    He’d prove upon the blackboard, in white chalk,
    By diagram—and the chalk was in his hand—
    “That mawnkey and mahn had separate pedigrees.
    Let A here be the mawnkey, and B the mahn.”
    Loud laughter; shouts of “mawnkey!” and “sit down”
    Extinguished him. He sat; and Henslow quelled
    The hubbub with one clarion-clear demand,
    Dictated, surely, by the ironic powers
    Who had primed the Bishop and prepared his fall:
    _“Gentlemen, this discussion now must rest_
    _On scientific grounds.”_
                            At once there came
    Calls for the Bishop, who, rising from his chair,
    Urged by the same invisible ironies,
    Remarked that his old friend, Professor Beale,
    Had something to say _first_. That weighty first
    Conveyed the weight of his own words to come.
    Urged still by those invisible ones, his friend
    Dug the pit deeper; modestly declared,
    Despite his keen worn face and shoulders bowed
    In histologic vigils, that he felt
    His knowledge quite inadequate; and the way
    Was made straight—for the Bishop.
    The Bishop rose, mellifluous, bland, adroit.

    A gesture, lacking only the lawn sleeves
    To make it perfect, delicately conveyed
    His comfortable thought—that what amazed
    The sheepfold must be folly.
                                Half the throng,
    His own experience told him, had not grasped
    The world-inweaving argument, could not think
    In æons. Æons, then, would be dismissed
    As vague and airy fantasies. He might choose
    His facts at will, unchallenged. He stood there
    Secure that his traditions could not fail,
    Basing his faith on schemes of thought designed
    By authorised “thinkers” in pure artistry,
    As free from Nature’s law as coloured blocks
    That children play with on the nursery hearth,
    And puzzle about and shift and twist and turn
    Until the beautiful picture, as ordained,
    Comes out, exact to the pattern, and reveals
    The artificer’s plan, the pattern, as arranged,
    By bishops, politic statesmen, teachers, guides,
    Who hold it in reserve, their final test
    Of truth, for times like this. He had been so sure
    Of something deeper than all schemes of thought
    That he had all too lightly primed himself
    With “facts” to match their fables; hastily crammed
    Into his mind’s convenient travelling bag
    (Sound leather, British) all that he required,—
    Not truth, but “a good argument.” He had asked
    Owen, who hated Huxley, to provide it;
    And he had brought it with him,—not the truth,
    Not even facts, those unrelated crumbs
    Of truth, the abiding consecrated whole.
    He had brought his borrowed “facts,” misunderstood,
    To meet, for the first time in all his life,
    Stark earnest thought, wrestling for truth alone,
    As men on earth discerned it. He had prayed,
    With something deeper than blind make-believe,
    _Thy will be done on earth_; and yet, and yet,
    The law wherein that will might be discerned,
    The law wherein that unity of heaven
    And earth might yet be found (could he but trust
    The truth, could he believe that his own God
    Lived in the living truth), he waved aside.
    These others had not found it, but they kept
    One faith that he had lost. Though it should slay them,
    They trusted in the truth. They could not see
    Where it might lead them. Only at times they felt
    As they deciphered the dark Book of Earth
    That, following its majestic rhythm of law,
    They followed the true path, the eternal way
    Of That which reigns. Prophetic flashes came.
    Words that the priest mechanically intoned
    Burned upon Huxley’s keen ironical page
    Like sudden sapphires, drawing their deeper light
    From that celestial City which endures
    Because it hath foundations: _Shall I come_
    _Before the Eternal with burnt offerings?_
    _Hath not the Eternal showed thee what is good,_
    _That thou do justly and mercifully, and walk_
    _Humbly with the Eternal?_

    O, irony of the Master-dramatist,
    Who set once more those lists; and sent His truth
    Unrecognised, as of old, to fight for life
    And prove itself in struggle and raise once more
    A nobler world above the world out-worn,
    Crushing all easy sophistry, though it stood
    Garbed as the priest of God.
                              The Bishop seized
    His diplomatic vantage. The blunt truth
    Of Huxley’s warning offered itself to him
    As a rash gambit in their game of—tact.
    He seized it; gracefully smoothed the ruffled pride
    Of that great audience, trained in a sound school
    To judge by common-sense.
                              His mobile face
    Revealed much that his politic words concealed.
    His strength was in that sound old British way—
    Derision of all things that transcend its codes
    In life, thought, art; the moon-calf’s happy creed
    That, if a moon-calf only sees the moon
    In thoughts that range the cosmos, his broad grin
    Sums the whole question; there’s no more to see.
    In all these aids, an innocent infidel,
    The Bishop put his trust; and, more than all,
    In vanity, the vacant self-conceit
    That, when it meets the masters of the mind
    And finds them bowed before the Inscrutable Power,
    Accepts their reverence and humility
    As tribute, due acknowledgment of fool’s right
    To give the final judgment, and annul
    The labour of a life-time in an hour.
    Dulcetly, first, he scoffed at Darwin’s facts.
    “Rock-pigeons now were what they had always been.
    Species had never changed. What were the proofs
    Even of the variation they required
    To make this theory possible? We had heard
    Mysterious rumours of a long-legged sheep
    Somewhere in Yorkshire (laughter). Let me ask
    Professor Huxley, here upon the left
    (All eyes on Huxley), who believes himself
    Descended from an ape (chuckles of glee),
    How recently this happened.”
                            The Bishop turned,
    All smiling insolence, “May I beg to know
    If this descent is on your father’s side,
    Or on your mother’s?”
                      He paused, to let the crowd
    Bellow its laughter. The unseen ironies
    Had trapped him and his flock; and neither knew.
    But Huxley knew. He turned, with a grim smile,
    And while the opposing triumph rocked and pealed,
    Struck one decisive palm upon his knee,
    And muttered low—“_The Lord hath delivered him_
    _Into my hands._”
              His neighbour stared and thought
    His wits were wandering. Yet that undertone
    Sounded more deadly, had more victory in it,
    Than all the loud-mouthed minute’s dying roar.

    It died to a tense hush. The Bishop closed
    In solemn diapason. Darwin’s views
    Degraded woman. They debased mankind,
    And contradicted God’s most Holy Word.
    Applause! Applause! The hall a quivering mist
    Of clapping hands. From every windowseat
    A flutter of ladies’ handkerchiefs and shrill cries
    As of white swarming sea-gulls. The black rows
    Of clerics all exchanging red-faced nods,
    And drumming with their feet, as though to fill
    A hundred-pedalled organ with fresh wind.
    The Bishop, like a _Gloire de Dijon_ rose
    With many-petalled smiles, his plump right hand
    Clasped in a firm congratulatory grip
    Of hickory-bones by Draper of New York;
    Who had small faith in what the Bishop said
    But heard the cheers, and gripped him as a man
    Who never means to let this good thing go.
    Motionless, on the left, the observant few,
    The silent delegates of a sterner power,
    With grave set faces, quietly looking on.
    At last the tumult, as all tumult must,
    Sank back to that deep silence. Henslow turned
    To Huxley without speaking. Once again
    The clock ticked audibly, but its old “Not Yet”
    Had somehow, in that uproar, in the face
    Of that tumultuous mockery, changed to _Now!_

    The lean tall figure of Huxley quietly rose.
    He looked for a moment thoughtfully at the crowd;
    Saw rows of hostile faces; caught the grin
    Of ignorant curiosity; here and there,
    A hopeful gleam of friendship; and, far back,
    The young, swift-footed, waiting for the fire.
    He fixed his eyes on these—then, in low tones,
    Clear, cool, incisive, “_I have come here_,” he said,
    “_In the cause of Science only_.”
                              He paused again.
    Then, striking the mockery out of the mocker’s face,
    His voice rang out like steel—
                          “I have heard nothing
    To prejudice the case of my august
    Client, who, as I told you, is not here.”
    At once a threefold picture flashed upon me,
    A glimpse, far off, through eyes of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    First, of a human seeker, there at Down,
    Gathering his endless cloud of witnesses
    From rocks, from stones, from trees; and from the signs
    In man’s own body of life’s æonian way;
    But, far above him, clothed with purer light,
    The stern, majestic Spirit of living Truth;
    And, more august than even his prophets knew,
    Through that eternal Spirit, the primal Power
    Returning into a world of faiths out-worn.

    Once more, as he spoke on, a thousand years
    Were but as yesterday. If these truths were true,
    This theory flooded the whole world with light.
    Could we believe that the Creator set
    In mockery all these birth-signs in the world,
    Or once in a million years had wrecked His work
    And shaped, in a flash, a myriad lives anew,
    Bearing in their own bodies all the signs
    Of their descent from those that He destroyed?
    Who left that ancient leaf within the flower?
    Who hid within the reptile those lost fins,
    And under the skin of the sea-floundering whale
    The bones of the lost thigh? Who dusked the foal
    With shadowy stripes, and under its hoof concealed
    Those ancient birdlike feet of its lost kin?
    Who matched that hoof with a rosy fingernail,
    Or furled that point within the human ear?
    Who had imprinted in the body of man,
    And in his embryo, all those intricate signs
    Of his forgotten lineage, even those gills
    Through which he drew his breath once in the sea?

    The speaker glanced at his antagonist.
    “You think all this too marvellous to be true;
    Yet you believe in miracles. You think
    The unfolding of this complicated life
    Around us, out of a simple primal form,
    Impossible; yet you know that every man
    Before his birth, a few brief years ago,
    Was once no more than a single living cell.
    You think it ends your theory of creation.
    You say that God made _you_; and yet you know
    —And reconcile your creed with what you know—
    That you yourself originally”—he held up
    A gleaming pencil-case—“were a little piece
    Of matter, not so large as the end of this.
                        But if you ask, in fine,
    Whether I’d be ashamed to claim descent
    From that poor animal with the stooping gait
    And low intelligence, who can only grin
    And chatter as we pass by, or from a _man_
    Who could use high position and great gifts
    To crush one humble seeker after truth—
    I hesitate, but”—an outburst of applause
    From all who understood him drowned the words.
    He paused. The clock ticked audibly again.
    Then, quietly measuring every word, he drove
    The sentence home. “I asserted and repeat
    A man would have no cause to feel ashamed
    Of being descended through vast tracts of time
    From that poor ape.
                        Were there an ancestor
    Whom I could not recall without a sense
    Of shame, it were a _man_, so placed, so gifted,
    Who sought to sway his hearers from the truth
    By aimless eloquence and by skilled appeals
    To their religious prejudice.”
                                  Was it the truth
    That conquered, or the blind sense of the blow
    Justly considered, delivered, and driven home,
    That brought a crash of applause from half the house?
    And more (for even the outright enemy
    Joined in that hubbub), though indignant cries,
    Protested vainly, “Abominable to treat
    The Bishop so!”
                    The Bishop sat there dumb.
    Eliza Pym, adding her own quaint touch
    Of comedy, saw that pencil shine again
    In Huxley’s hand; compared it, at a glance
    Of fawn-like eyes, with the portentous form
    In gaiters; felt the whole world growing strange;
    Drew one hysterical breath, and swooned away.


V

THE _VERA CAUSA_

    And yet, and yet, the victor knew too well
    His victory had a relish of the dust.
    Even while the plaudits echoed in his ears,
    It troubled him. When he pondered it that night,
    A finer shame had touched him. He had used
    The weapons of his enemy at the last;
    And, if he had struck his enemy down for truth,
    He had struck him down with weapons he despised.
    He had used them with a swifter hand and eye,
    A subtler cunning; and he had set his heel
    On those who took too simply to their hearts
    A tale, whose ancient imagery enshrined
    A mystery that endured. He had proclaimed
    A fragment of a truth which, he knew well,
    Left the true Cause in darkness. Did he know
    More of that Cause than _Genesis_? Could he see
    Farther into that darkness than the child
    Folding its hands in prayer?
                              More clearly far
    Than Darwin, whom he had warned of it, he knew
    The bounds of this new law; bade him beware
    Of his repeated dogma—_Nature makes_
    _No leap._ He pointed always to the Abyss
    Of darkness round the flickering spark of light
    Upheld by Science. Had Wilberforce been armed
    With knowledge and the spiritual steel
    Of Saint Augustine, who had also seen,
    Even in his age, a ladder of life to heaven,
    There had been a victory of another kind
    To lighten through the world.
                        And Darwin knew it;
    But, while he marshalled his unnumbered truths,
    He lost the Truth; as one who takes command
    Of multitudinous armies in the night,
    And strives to envisage, in one sweep of the mind,
    Each squadron and each regiment of the whole,
    Ever the host that swept through his mind’s eye,
    Though all in ordered ranks and files, obscured
    Army on army the infinite truth beyond.
    The gates of Beauty closed against his mind,
    And barred him out from that eternal realm,
    Whose lucid harmonies on our night bestow
    Glimpses of absolute knowledge from above;
    Unravelling and ennobling, making clear
    Much that had baffled us, much that else was dark;
    So that the laws of Nature shine like roads,
    Firm roads that lead through a significant world
    Not downward, from the greater to the less,
    But up to the consummate soul of all.
    He could not follow them now. Back, back and back,
    He groped along the dark diminishing road.
    The ecstasy of music died away.
    The poet’s vision melted into a dream.
    He knew his loss, and mourned it; but it marred
    Not only his own happiness, as he thought.
    It blurred his vision, even of his own truths.

    He looked long at the butterfly’s radiant wings,
    Pondered their blaze of colour, and believed
    That butterfly wooers choosing their bright mates
    Through centuries of attraction and desire
    Evolved this loveliness. For he only saw
    The blaze of colour, the flash that lured the eye.
    He did not see the exquisite pattern there,
    The diamonded fans of the under-wing,
    Inlaid with intricate harmonies of design;
    The delicate little octagons of pearl,
    The moons like infinitesimal fairy flowers,
    The lozenges of gold, and grey, and blue
    All ordered in an intellectual scheme,
    Where form to form responded and faint lights
    Echoed faint lights, and shadowy fringes ran
    Like Elfin curtains on a silvery thread,
    Shadow replying to shadow through the whole.

    Did eyes of the butterfly wooer mark all this,—
    A subtlety too fine for half mankind?
    He tossed a shred of paper on to his lawn;
    He saw the white wings blindly fluttering round it.
    He did not hear the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
    _Was this their exquisite artistry of choice?_
    _Had wooers like these evolved this loveliness?_

    He groped into the orchestral universe
    As one who strives to trace a symphony
    Back to its cause, and with laborious care
    Feels with his hand the wood of the violins,
    And bids you mark—O good, bleak, honest soul,
    So fearful of false hopes!—that all is hollow.
    He tells you on what tree the wood was grown.
    He plucks the catgut, tells you whence it came,
    Gives you the name and pedigree of the cat;
    Nay, even affirms a mystery, and will talk
    Of sundry dark vibrations that affect
    The fleshly instrument of the human ear;
    And so, with a world-excluding accuracy—
    O, never doubt that every step was true!—
    Melts the great music into less than air
    And misses everything.
                      Everything! On one side
    The music soaring endlessly through heavens
    Within the human soul; on the other side,
    The unseen Composed of whose transcendent life
    The music speaks in souls made still to hear.
    He clung to his _vera causa_. In that law
    He saw the way of the Power, but not the Power
    Determining the way. Did men reject
    The laws of Newton, binding all the worlds,
    Because they still knew nothing of the Power
    That bound them? The stone fell. He knew not why.
    The sun controlled the planets, and the law
    Was constant; but the mystery of it was masked
    Under a name; and no man knew the Power
    That gripped the worlds in that unchanging bond,
    Or whether, in the twinkling of an eye,
    The Power might not release them from that bond,
    As a hand opens, and the wide universe
    Change in a flash, and vanish like a shadow,
    As prophets had foretold.
                            He could not think
    That chance decreed the boundless march of law
    He saw in the starry heavens. Yet he could think
    Of “chance” on earth; and, while he thought, declare
    “Chance” was not “chance” but law unrecognised;
    Then, even while he said it, he would use
    The ambiguous word, base his own law on “chance”;
    And, even while he used it, there would move
    Before his eyes in every flake of colour,
    Inlaid upon the butterfly’s patterned wing,
    Legions of atoms wheeling each to its place
    In ever constant law; and he knew well
    That, even in the living eye that saw them,
    The self-same Power that bound the starry worlds
    Controlled a myriad atoms, every one
    An ordered system; and in every cloud
    Of wind-blown dust and every breaking wave
    Upon the storm-tossed sea, an infinite host
    Of infinitesimal systems moved by law
    Each to its place; and, in each growing flower,
    Myriads of atoms like concentred suns
    And planets, these to the leaf and those to the crown,
    Moved in unerring order, and by a law
    That bound all heights and depths of the universe,
    In an unbroken unity. By what Power?
    There was one Power, one only known to man,
    That could determine action. Herschel knew it;
    The power whereby the mind uplifts the hand
    And lets it fall, the living personal Will.

    Ah, but his task, his endless task on earth,
    Bent his head earthward. He must find the way
    Before he claimed the heights. No Newton he;
    Though men began to acclaim him and his law
    As though they solved all mysteries and annulled
    All former creeds, and changed the heart of heaven.
    No Newton he; not even a Galileo;
    But one who patiently, doggedly laboured on,
    As Tycho Brahe laboured in old days,
    Numbering the stars, recording fact on fact,
    For those, who, after centuries, might discern
    The meaning and the cause of what he saw.
    Visions of God and Heaven were not for him,
    Unless his “facts” revealed them, as the crown
    Of his own fight for knowledge.
                                    It might be
    The final test of man, the narrow way
    Proving him worthy of immortal life,
    That he should face this darkness and this death
    Worthily and renounce all easy hope,
    All consolation, all but the wintry smile
    Upon the face of Truth as he discerns it,
    Here upon earth, his only glimmer of light,
    Leading him onward to an end unknown.
    Faith! Faith! O patient, inarticulate soul,
    If this were faithlessness, there was a Power,
    So whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that shared it with him;
    The Power that bowed His glory into darkness
    To make a world in suffering and in death,
    The passionate price that even the Omnipotent
    Must pay for love, and love’s undying crown.

    He hardly heard the whisper; could not hear it
    And keep his own resolve. He bowed his head
    In darkness; and, henceforth, those inward gates
    Into the realms of the supernal light
    Began to close.
                He knew that they were closing;
    And yet—was this the dark key to Creation?—
    He shared the ecstasy also; shared that sense
    Of triumph; broke the Bread and drank the Wine
    In sacred drops and morsels of the truth;
    Shared, in renouncement of all else but truth,
    A sense that he could never breathe in words
    To any one else, a sense that in this age
    It was expedient that a man should lose
    The glory, and die this darker new-found death,
    To save the people from their rounded creeds,
    Their faithless faith, and crowns too lightly won.

    ...

    O, yet the memory of one midnight hour!
    _Would that she knew. Would God that she knew now...._
    Truer than all his knowledge was that cry;
    The cry of the blind life struggling through the dark,
    Upward ... the blind brow lifted to the unseen.

    He groped along the dark unending way
    And saw, although he knew not what he saw,
    Out of the struggle of life, a mightier law
    Emerging; and, when man could rise no higher
    By the fierce law of Nature, he beheld
    Nature herself at war against herself.
    He heard, although he knew not what he heard,
    A Voice that, triumphing over her clashing chords,
    Resolved them into an infinite harmony.
    Whose was that Voice? What Power within the flesh
    Cast off the flesh for a glory in the mind,
    And leapt to victory in self-conquering love?
    What Voice, whose Power, cast Nature underfoot
    In Bruno, when the flames gnawed at his flesh;
    In Socrates; and, in those obscure Christs
    Who daily die; and, though none other sees,
    Lay hands upon the wheel of the universe
    And master it; and the sun stands dark at noon?
    These things he saw but dimly. All his life
    He moved along the steep and difficult way
    Of Truth in darkness; but the Voice of Truth
    Whispered in darkness, out of the mire and day,
    And through the blood-stained agony of the world,
    “Fear nothing. Follow Me. I _am_ the Way.”
    So, when Death touched him also, and England bore
    His dust into her deepening innermost shrine,
    The Voice he heard long since, and could not hear,
    Rose like the fuller knowledge, given by Death
    To one that could best lead him upward now,
    Rose like a child’s voice, opening up the heavens,
    _I am the Resurrection and the Life_.




X—EPILOGUE


    Up the Grand Canyon the full morning flowed.
    I heard the voices moving through the abyss
    With the deep sound of pine-woods, league on league
    Of singing boughs, each separate, each a voice,
    Yet all one music;
                        _The Eternal Mind_
    _Enfolds all changes, and can never change._

    _Man is not exiled from this Majesty,_
    _The inscrutable Reality, which he shares_
    _In his immortal essence. Man that doubts_
    _All but the sensuous veils of colour and sound,_
    _The appearances that he can measure and weigh,_
    _Trusts, as the very fashioner of his doubt,_
    _The imponderable thought that weighs the worlds,_
    _The invisible thought that sees; thought that reveals_
    _The miracle of the eternal paradox—_
    _The pure unsearchable Being that cannot be_
    _Yet IS, and still creates and governs all;_
    _A Power that, being unknowable, is best known;_
    _For this transcendent Being can reply_
    _To every agony, “I am that which waits_
    _Beyond the last horizon of your pain,_
    _Beyond your wildest hope, your last despair,_
    _Above your heaven, and deeper than your hell._
    _There is not room on earth for what ye seek._
    _Is there not room in Me?”_
                          _Time is a shadow_
    _Of man’s own thought. Things past and things to come_
    _Are closed in that full circle. He lives and reigns;_
    _Dies with the dying bird; and, in its death_
    _Receives it to His heart. No leaf can fall_
    _Without Him; who, for ever pouring out_
    _His passion into worlds that shall attain_
    _Love in the highest at last, returns for ever_
    _Along these roads of suffering and of death,_
    _With all their lives upgathered to His heart_
    _Into the heaven of heavens. How else could life_
    _Lay hold on its infinitude, or win_
    _The strength to walk with Love in complete light?_
    _For, as a child that learns to walk on earth,_
    _Life learns these little rhythms of earthly law,_
    _Listens to simple seas that ebb and flow,_
    _And spells the large bright order of the stars_
    _Wherein the moving Reason is revealed_
    _To mans up-struggling mind, or breathed like song_
    _Into the quiet heart, as love to love._
    _So, step by step, the spirit of man ascends_
    _Through joy and grief; and is withdrawn by death_
    _From the sweet dust that might content it here_
    _Into His kingdom, the one central goal_
    _Of the universal agony. He lives._
    _He lives and reigns, throned above Space and Time;_
    _And, in that realm, freedom and law are one;_
    _Fore-knowledge and all-knowledge and free-will,_
    _Make everlasting music._
                            Far away
    Along the unfathomable abyss it flowed,
    A harmony so consummate that it shared
    The silence of the sky; a song so deep
    That only the still soul could hear it now:
    _New every morning the creative Word_
    _Moves upon chaos. Yea, our God grows young._
    _Here, now, the eternal miracle is renewed_
    _Now, and for ever, God makes heaven and earth._