Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light; Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone; Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery gilding the rift in a throne; Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate; Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurel'd graves of the Great; Love for the maiden, crown'd with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been, Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean; National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire; Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire; He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind; He that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind; Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth; All new-old revolutions of Empire-change of the tide -what is all of it worth? What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer? All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair? Jiriczek, Englische Dichter. 14 What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last, Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past? What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees in their hive?— Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive. THE SILENT VOICES. [The Death of Oenone etc. 1892.] WHEN the dumb Hour, clothed in black, Silent Voices of the dead, DOUBT AND PRAYER. [The Death of Oenone etc. 1892.] THO' Sin too oft, when smitten by Thy rod, And let not Reason fail me, nor the sod My prison, not my fortress, fall away! GOD AND THE UNIVERSE. [The Death of Oenone etc. 1892.] WILL my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights? Must my day be dark by reason, O ye Heavens, of your boundless nights, Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites? "Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state, Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great, Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of the Gate." FAITH. [The Death of Oenone etc. 1892.] DOUBT no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best, Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope or break thy rest, Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest! Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart's desire! Thro' the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher. Wait till Death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker Dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of deathless fire! CROSSING THE BAR. [Gedichtet und veröffentlicht 1889 (Demeter etc.).] SUNSET and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Twilight and evening bell, |
