XXI.

I SING to him that rests below,

And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,
And make them pipes whereon to blow.

The traveller hears me now and then,

And sometimes harshly will he speak : "This fellow would make weakness weak, And melt the waxen hearts of men."

Another answers,

"Let him be,

He loves to make parade of pain, That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy."

A third is wroth: "Is this an hour

For private sorrow's barren song,
When more and more the people throng

The chairs and thrones of civil power?

"A time to sicken and to swoon,

When science reaches forth her arms

To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon?

Behold, ye speak an idle thing:

Ye never knew the sacred dust: I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing:

And unto one her note is gay,

For now her little ones have ranged; And unto one her note is changed, Because her brood is stolen away.

XXII.

THE path by which we twain did go,

Which led by tracts that pleased us well,

Through four sweet years arose and fell, From flower to flower, from snow to snow:

And we with singing cheered the way,

And, crowned with all the season lent, From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May:

But where the path we walked began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended, following Hope,
There sat the Shadow feared of man;

Who broke our fair companionship,

And spread his mantle dark and cold ;
And wrapped thee formless in the fold,

And dulled the murmur on thy lip;

And bore thee where I could not see

Nor follow, though I walk in haste;

And think that, somewhere in the waste, The Shadow sits and waits for me.

XXIII.

Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut,
Or breaking into song by fits;
Alone, alone, to where he sits,
The Shadow cloaked from head to foot

Who keeps the keys of all the creeds,
I wander, often falling lame,

And looking back to whence I came,
Or on to where the pathway leads;

And crying, how changed from where it ran Through lands where not a leaf was dumb; But all the lavish hills would hum

The murmur of a happy Pan:

When each by turns was guide to each,

And Fancy light from Fancy caught,

And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought,

Ere thought could wed itself with Speech :