The holy Gods, they must be appeased,
So I pray you tell the truth to me.
They have taken our son,

They will have his life.
Is he your dearest ?

Or I, the wife?'

V

The King bent low, with hand on brow,

He stay'd his arms upon his knee : 'O wife, what use to answer now? For now the Priest has judged for me.'

The King was shaken with holy fear; 'The Gods,' he said, 'would have chosen well;

Yet both are near, and both are dear, And which the dearest I cannot tell!'

But the Priest was happy,
His victim won:

'We have his dearest,
His only son!'

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,

And the ear of man cannot hear, and
the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this
Vision were it not He?

bask in a summer sky;

Give her the wages of going on, and

not to die.

THE HIGHER PANTHEISM

THE Sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,

I

THE Voice and the Peak

Far over summit and lawn, The lone glow and long roar Green-rushing from the rosy thrones of dawn!

II

A void was made in Nature; all het bonds

Crack'd; and I saw the flaring atomstreams

And torrents of her myriad universe, Ruining along the illimitable inane, 40 Fly on to clash together again, and make

Another and another frame of things For ever. That was mine, my dream. I knew it

Of and belonging to me, as the dog With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies

His function of the woodland; but the next!

I thought that all the blood by Sylla shed

Came driving rainlike down again on earth,

And where it dash'd the reddening meadow, sprang

No

dragon warriors from Cadmean teeth,

50

Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm, Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain

Letting his own life go. The Gods, the Gods!

If all be atoms, how then should the Gods

Being atomic not be dissoluble, Not follow the great law? My master held

That Gods there are, for all men so believe.

I prest my footsteps into his, and meant Surely to lead my Memmius in a train

Of flowery clauses onward to the proof That Gods there are, and deathless. Meant? I meant?

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