Will dull their comments! Ay, but when the shout Of His descending peals from heaven, and throbs Thro' earth and all her graves, if He should ask, Why left you wife and children? for my sake, According to my word?' and I re plied, 'Nay, Lord, for Art,' why, that would sound so mean Too early blinded by the kiss of That all the dead, who wait the doom death The wife of wives a widow-bride, and | Bards, that the mighty Muses have raised to the heights of the mountain, lost Salvation for a sketch. I am wild again! The coals of fire you heap upon my head Have crazed me. Some one knocking there without? No! Will my Indian brother come ? to find Me or my coffin? Should I know the man? This worn-out Reason dying in her house May leave the windows blinded, and if so, 140 What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain, Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain? On those two known peaks they stand ever spreading and heightening; Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning! Look, in their deep double shadow the crown'd ones all disappearing! Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing! 'Sounding for ever and ever?' pass on the sight confuses — These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses! III If the lips were touch'd with fire from off a pure Pierian altar, Tho' their music here be mortal need the singer greatly care? Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter; Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homèr there. BY AN EVOLUTIONIST THE Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man, And the man said, 'Am I your debtor ?' And the Lord-'Not yet; but make it as clean as you can, And then I will let you a better.' I If my body come from brutes, my soul uncertain or a fable, Why not bask amid the senses while the sun of morning shines, I, the finer brute rejoicing in my hounds, and in my stable, Youth and health, and birth and wealth, and choice of women and of wines ? II What hast thou done for me, grim Old Age, save breaking my bones on the rack? Would I had past in the morning that looks so bright from afar! OLD AGE Done for thee? starved the wild beast that was linkt with thee eighty years back. Less weight now for the ladder-of heaven that hangs on a star. I If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than their own, FAR-FAR-AWAY (FOR MUSIC) WHAT sight so lured him thro' the fields he knew As where earth's green stole into heaven's own hue, Far-far-away? What sound was dearest in his native dells? The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells Far-far-away. What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy, Thro' those three words would haunt him when a boy, Far-far-away? A whisper from his dawn of life? & breath From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death Far-far-away? Far, far, how far? from o'er the gates of birth, The faint horizons, all the bounds of What charm in words, a charm no I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be O dying words, can Music make you mute? No, but if the rebel subject seek to II I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past, Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire, But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last, As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher. C |
