XXI. Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! XXII. Now, who shall arbitrate ? Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? XXIII. Not on the vulgar mass Called 'work,' must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: XXIV. But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account: All instincts immature All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: XXV. Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped: All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. XXVI. Ay, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,- When the wine makes its round, 'Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!' XXVII. Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. XXVIII. He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. XXIX. What though the earlier grooves Which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press ? Scull-things in order grim Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? XXX. Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? XXXI. But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men! And since, not even while the whirl was worst, With shapes and colours rife, Bound dizzily,--mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: XXXII. So, take and use Thy work, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! CONFESSIONS. What is he buzzing in my ears? 'Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?' Ah, reverend sir, not I! II. (1864.) What I viewed there once, what I view again Where the physic bottles stand On the table's edge, is a suburb lane, III. That lane sloped, much as the bottles do, O'er the garden-wall: is the curtain blue IV. To mine, it serves for the old June weather And that farthest bottle labelled 'Ether' V. At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, They watched for me, one June, A girl I know, sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune. Only, there was a way VI. ... you crept Close by the side, to dodge Eyes in the house, two eyes except: They styled their house 'The Lodge.' VII. What right had a lounger up their lane? But, by creeping very close, With the good wall's help,-their eyes might strain And stretch themselves to Oes, VIII. Yet never catch her and me together, As she left the attic, there, By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,' IX. And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas, How sad and bad and mad it was But then, how it was sweet! (1864) THE RING AND THE BOOK. (Dedication.) O lyric love, half angel and half bird To toil for man, to suffer or to die,— This is the same voice: can thy soul know change? In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, (1868.) |