University of Virginia Library

The peace of God that passeth understanding!
Ah, mocking dream of Paul, that knew no peace,
Still without cease
Hither and thither blown of hope and doubt,
Driven of all winds of doctrine East and West
Upon Thought's troubled ocean, never landing
On any dreamy isle of palms upstanding
Against the sunset, for an hour of rest,
Still of the rabble rout
Of vain surmises tossed the world about!
Alack, what knewest thou
Of peace, sad soul, thyself that never knew'st,
Thou, on whose thought and doubt-bewrinkled brow
That bird of Heaven's sublimest, farthest blue,
That feedeth but on Paradisal dew,
Might never find a place wherein to roost?
Of peace, indeed,
Thou pratedst but as some forwandred wretch,
Dying in the desert, far from human heed,
Under the passion of the pitiless sun,
Where the hot sand-wastes to the horizon stretch,
Wave after wave, and water is there none,
His thirst to stay,
Prates of the purling wellspring 'neath the palms,
All over-rounded with the radiant calms,
The sunset-silences of dying day,
Hidden in some oasis of far away.
What preachest thou to us of peace, o Paul,
Whose strenuous life,
Forever wrecked upon the rocks of strife,
Had for its music but the battle-blare,
The shrilling stridors of the clarion's call,
For whom, enamoured of the storm-thrilled air,
The mellay hot,
The frenzy of the fight was all in all?

Thou canst not speak for peace, that knewst it not.

The peace of God! What God had ever peace?
Shall any hold
In his one hand the Past and the To-be,
End and beginning, germ and growth and cease,
Earth, sky and sea,
Evil and good, moon-silver and sun-gold,
The Present and the Future, New and Old,
Dearth and increase,
The springs of life and death and heat and cold,
Summer and Spring and Winter, foul and fair,
The keys of flood and thunder, Day and Night,
The fountains of the darkness and the light,
And yet know peace, that is the lack of care?
Nay, of all Gods that were
Throned of our thought upon the heights of blue,
Since first the world with morn and eve was new
And the high lights of heaven were in the air,
Certes, none farther was from peace than He
Who died for men upon the accurséd tree,
Died in despair,
Forsaken of His high unhearkening Sire,
Fate-foiled and baulked of His divine desire,
In His death-agony
Attesting, in the face of earth and sea
And sky, that quaked for pity of His pain,
Having more ruth upon Him than the Lord
To whom He cried in vain,
That He, the would-be Saviour, came to bring,
Being overmastered of Necessity,
— That power of powers beyond the Gods, — a sword
Upon the sorry suffering sons of men,
A sword, and not that balm
Of peace celestial, everywhere and when,
Through every case ensued of churl and king,
So therewithal their sorrows they may calm
And hush to harmony Life's dissonant psalm.

Nay, Thou, the Anointed Son
Of Israel's God, Jehovah's Chosen One,
Thou sweetest soul this earth that ever trod,
Jesus, Thou knewest not the peace of God.

The peace of God! Even the Gods of Greece,
Who, as one saith, to whom these songs of mine
Glad homage yield, “were only men and wine,”
Even these, who took Life lightly, had no peace.
Their own ambrosia held
No spell secure against the birds of care
That winged their way up through the Olympian air,
Earth's murmurings, that knelled
Still in their ears, like passing-bells of doom,
Mingling their menace with the hum of prayer
And sacrifice, and stormed the heavenly stair
With auguries of gloom,
Forebodings dull of thunders drawing nigh
And tones prophetic of the times to be,
When Saturn's sons to a new dynasty
Of Gods must yield the empery of the sky.
Light as their yoke and eath
Lay on the earth, amidst the folk beneath,
In town and country, hamlet, hill and holt,
What was there but revolt
And murmur without end and clamouring
Of the dull, thankless human race, the dolt
Blind populace, that Stork to Log for king,
Still as the usance is of foolish man,
Unthinking, have preferred, since Time began?
Nay, in Heaven's self, within
Jove's very sacred courts Olympian,
Variance ran riot and the air august
Was dizzy with the din
Of strife and overshadowed with the dust
Of discord still among the Thunderer's kin.
Or, if the Gods might for a moment drown
The cares of kingship in the ambrosial cup
And laying down
The sceptre, give themselves to revelling up,
The nobler ones whom they begat than they,
The heroes gendered of the Gods whilere,
The burden of the world for them to bear,
In weariness, in sorrow and affray,
The price of their misrule for them must pay.
For that Prometheus to the folk supine,
When the Gods left the world in darkness dire
To cower and pine,
In gloom and cold, brought down the boon of fire,
Needs he, in Caucasus, his sin divine
Must on his mountain-crucifix of stone,
Saviour Primaeval, to all time atone:
And for that Zeus the earth in toil and wrong,
In turmoil aud in woe,
Let of his lightness wallow, Hercules
His hero-soul in travail and unease
By land and sky and sea must fretting go,
The things life-long,
That, being in wrong forefashioned, to the end
In wrongness must persever, still in vain
Endeavouring to amend,
Must wear his life in weariness and pain
And die, at last, despairing, on the pyre,
What while his heavenly sire
Still drowsed and revelled in Olympus hall,
Yet, for all feasting, might not from his ears
Shut out the accusing cries,
That, from earth surging to the sleeping skies,
Shore through his slumbers like a trumpet's call;
Whilst, floating, Fate-borne, from the Future's ways,
The mounting menace of the coming years
Darkened his dream, phantasmal, with dismays.

Nay, in Olympus was no peace at all.

Peace, yet they say, in slumber is. — Alack,
Sleep is a boon
Given and withholden of the Gods at will;
Whereof, beneath the lapses of the moon,
How many sorry souls there be that lack
Nor of its flower-dew flood may drink their fill!
Year in, year out,
How many eyes there be that watch the night,
Enrounded of the shifting shadow-rout,
Crawl through the channels of the dark to day,
Nor close until the phantom dawn, crept back
Along the horizon grey,
Lay on their lids its hand of ghostly white!
How many minions of the moon there be
Who, when she rides, must wake perforce to see
Her pearl-car climbing through the pale cloud-pack!
Nay, if sleep come for calling, now and then,
In answer to our plea,
How many of us miserable men, —
How many? Nay, far rather say, how few
There be, who, falling from its heavenly place,
As it were honeydew,
Feel on their longing lids the granted grace
Of consummated slumber, sweet and true,
Of sleep unstirred, consolatory, deep!
How many, stretched on the tormenting rack
Of tortuous dreams, must, hour-long, night-long, lie
And watch the waste years creep,
Phantasmagoric, o'er the background black,
And all the piteous Past troop trembling by,
To Memory reluctant mirroring
Each fain-forgotten thing,
Each noble purpose, only born to die,
Each golden harvest that Time failed to reap,
Each heaven-high hope of youth by age unwon,
Each bygone deed of shame,
That rends the soul, each righteousness undone,
Against the dazzling dark, in traits of flame,
Painting each dear-belovéd face, each form
Once cherished, now from sight of moon and sun,
From sense of good and evil, cold and warm,
Shut in the grave,
Bidding our loves, that lie beneath the grass,
Before us, one by one,
Resurgent on rememorance's wave,
In pale procession, by the corpse-light, pass,
Till the tired eyes have no more tears to weep
And the racked soul cries out for one to save!

Alas!
Alas! Thou bringest us scant peace, o Sleep.

In coelo quies! Peace in Heaven, they say,
Is.

Since to any heaven there is no way
Save by the port of death, still open set
To all who draw Life's breath,
Peace, rather might we say, is but in death.
Surely, in death there should be peace!—And yet,
And yet! Shall then this passionate heart forbear
In death itself to follow on Life's fret,
This boiling teeming brain of ours forswear
Its long accustomed ways of thought and care?
Shall memory cease of pleasure and of pain?
Shall Death benumb,
With its sheer thunderstroke of “Be-no-more!”
The passionate pulses of the heart and brain,
So that the life therein, the senses' store,
The throbbing thought, shall all at once fall dumb
Nor memory at the core
Of the slain Self awaken e'er again?
Alack! We scarce can credit that this strife
Of ours is but a dream,
A vision of the night, to end with death,
As those which vanish with the morning's breath
And are forblotted of the auroral beam.
Uneath it is to deem
That this our many-mingling, strenuous life,
Our great and goodly life, that holds the keys
Of lands and skies and seas,
Our life, that seemed immortal as the light
And as invulnerable in its might
To any power and process of decay
As is the golden glory of the day
Or as the silver splendour of the night,
Should ever own Death's sway
And with the passing body pass away.
Impossible, indeed, to us it seems,
Though, dust, to dust
This flesh return and frittered of Time's rust,
Blood, bones, nerves, sinews mingle with the clay,
That through the brain the old imperious dreams
Should cease to roam, that, in the accustomed track,
From earth to Heaven and down to Hell again,
Memory and phantasy no more should strain
Nor forth and back
Fare through the skies and past the starry plain.
We cannot deem that man that sleep of death,
Wherein remembrance no more entereth,
Should ever sleep or know the blesséd cease
Of torturing thought, that seldom left him here
An hour of calm.

We know not and we fear.

Yet, peradventure, room there were for hope;
Since to the darkling sphere
Of Death's all-puissance who a bound shall set?
Who with His all-permuting might shall cope,
Saying, “Thou shalt fare no farther?”

Nay, He yet,
Belike, of His omnipotence, some spell
May hold in store,
Such as can even thought to cease compel
And charm the sense in slumber evermore;
So, in the ultimate darkness, past the scope
Of Time and Space, deliverance and release
From all Life's travail seeking, when we grope,
God willing, we may yet at last find peace.