XIV

To J. A. C.

FRESH from his fastnesses

Wholesome and spacious,

The North Wind, the mad huntsman, Halloas on his white hounds

Over the grey, roaring

Reaches and ridges,

The forest of ocean,

The chace of the world.

Hark to the peal

Of the pack in full cry,

As he thongs them before him,
Swarming voluminous,

Weltering, wide-wallowing,
Till in a ruining

Chaos of energy,

Hurled on their quarry,

They crash into foam!

Old Indefatigable,

Time's right-hand man, the sea

Laughs as in joy

From his millions of wrinkles:

Laughs that his destiny,

Great with the greatness
Of triumphing order,
Shows as a dwarf

By the strength of his heart
And the might of his hands.

Master of masters,
O maker of heroes,
Thunder the brave,
Irresistible message:-
'Life is worth Living"
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge

Of the cornerstone, death.'

XV

You played and sang a snatch of song,
A song that all-too well we knew;
But whither had flown the ancient wrong;
And was it really I and you?

O, since the end of life's to live

And pay in pence the common debt, What should it cost us to forgive Whose daily task is to forget?

You babbled in the well-known voice— Not new, not new the words you said. You touched me off that famous poise, That old effect, of neck and head. Dear, was it really you and I?

In truth the riddle's ill to read, So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed.

XVI

SPACE and dread and the dark-
Over a livid stretch of sky

Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train
Of huge, primeval presences

Stooping beneath the weight

Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;

While in the haunting loneliness

The far sea waits and wanders with a sound

As of the trailing skirts of Destiny,

Passing unseen

To some immitigable end

With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this
Thrilling the wilderness to life
As with the bodily shape of Fear?
What but a desperate sense,
A strong foreboding of those dim
Interminable continents, forlorn

And many-silenced, in a dusk

Inviolable utterly, and dead

As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life-life-let there be life!

Better a thousand times the roaring hours

When wave and wind,

Like the Arch-Murderer in flight

From the Avenger at his heel,

Storm through the desolate fastnesses
And wild waste places of the world!

Life-give me life until the end,
That at the very top of being,
The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,
Out of the reddest hell of the fight
I may be snatched and flung

Into the everlasting lull,

The immortal, incommunicable dream.