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1

BOOK THE FIRST. THE SAILOR-STUDENT.

3

Canto the First. The Sea-boy.

1. Ranolf's childhood. 2. He goes to Sea. 3–5. Sea-life. Night-sailing. Trade-winds. A breeze aft. A squall. The whale. 6. Reefing topsails. The sprung jibboom. 7. Observes men of various creeds and climes: India, Canada, etc. 8. Jamaica. 9. Has to leave the sea.

I.

Where hardy Seamen mix with Mountaineers
As hardy at the extreme of Britain's isle;—
Where rugged Capes confront the Arctic sky,
Now faint beneath the pale and tender smile
Of summer's lingering light that sadly cheers;
Now through rent chasms of the storm-cloud's pile
Seen lurking lone in grim obscurity;—
Where whirlpools boil, and eddying currents scar
The tides that sweeping from the Atlantic far
In finest season at their gentlest flow
Swarm up a thousand rocks, shoot high in air—
Columns of cloud a moment towering clear—
Then sink at once plumb-down and disappear;
While all the shining rocksides, black and bare,
4

Are streaked with skeiny streams of hurrying snow
Like stormers beaten back that headlong go;—
Where, sparely bright with scant sheep-speckled grass,
Sleep wastes of purple heather and brown morass;—
There did young Ranolf a glad childhood pass.
For ages had his rough sea-faring race
Hailed from a home, though scarce a dwelling-place,
Where Devon's cliffs show ruddiest red between
Sap-saturated trees of greenest green.
They were indeed an Ocean-haunting brood,
Brine-breasting till it seemed their very blood
Ran pulsing with the spirit of the Sea,
As restless and exuberant and free!
His Father, with that Ocean-love uncloyed,
A lovelier smile than Ocean's had decoyed
From roving raptures of its wide wild life—
Sheet-anchored to the shore by Child and Wife.
Her and this youngling and two born before,
Roaming in quest of means to roam no more,
To that far northern port at last he bore:
There swallowed down his sailor-scorn of trade;
And something more than competence had made
From calcined kelp, and that free-splitting stone
Which in sea-depths or silent cliffs, unknown
Ten thousand centuries, unquarried lay
Stored up and fashioning for the future beat
And ceaseless tramp of busy millions' feet
In that enormous World-Mart far away;
But most from fisheries, filling all the bays
With ruddy shifting sails in sun or haze,
When rippling loud, with myriad gleam and glance
And rustling shiver o'er its wide expanse,
5

The liquid mass of seething Ocean seemed
Quickened to silvery life that one way streamed.

II.

Such sights and sounds inspired the growing Boy
With wondering exultation; and the joy
Of deeper thought and loftier feeling lent
To the mere gladness of temperament.
But books and fancy and old fishers' tales
Of glorious climes beyond these mists and gales
Kept his young heart too restlessly alive
With impulses resistless, such as drive
That insect-dragon scaly-winged to strive
And struggle through his chasmed channel's mud,
And reckless dash into the splendour-flood,
The new wide pool of light he feels and sees;
Such longings, as, when Summer's searching heats
Find out the butterflies in their retreats,
They yearn with, till, unvexed by any breeze,
The velvet-winged ones at her sweet command,
Sole, or in slow-revolving twos and threes,
Float in a crimson flutter through the land.
Thus the Boy fevered till his sire's consent
He gained to gratify his natural bent
Towards sailor life, and follow o'er the main,
Although the favourite son, his brethren twain.
So, freed from schools and tasks, all hopeful glee,
Away he went at twelve years old to Sea.

III.

But what preceptor like the mighty Ocean
To kindle thought and manifold emotion?
6

Majestic in its every form,
Stupendous calm or terror of the storm;
For ever to the dullest sense
A symbol of Omnipotence;
Yet like that Oriental notion,
That Deity of old devotion,
Omnipotence so lightly roused to ire,
And fickle as a flame of fire.
And with this fierce Sublimity, despite
The terrors of its treacherous might,
Its ruthless rage or sleek perfidious play,
As 'twere with some tremendous beast of prey
Half-tamed, the Sailor lives from day to day,
Lives cautiously familiar, hour by watchful hour
For ever in its presence—in its power.
But what a hardy pride his bosom warms
The while he runs the gauntlet through the storms,
Playing with such a foe in wary strife
A match whereof the forfeit is his life,
The gain, more than his own, another's pelf;
With such apparent odds against himself,
The seeming desperation of the game
Hardens the coarser soul it cannot tame
Into a blind oblivion of the morrow,
A stoic mirth that laughs at vice and sorrow.
While he of nobler mind and loftier aim
Is nursed by consciousness of danger, still
Escaped by foresight or subdued by skill,
Into a calm unboastful strength of will,
A sober self-reliance, firm and grave;
And feels as o'er vast Ocean's baffled wave
7

Triumphantly he steers from clime to clime
Elate with something of its own sublime.

IV.

And many a vacant hour, on many a theme,
Our thoughtful Sea-boy found to muse or dream;
Those vigils which the sailor needs must keep
In the sky-girt seclusion of the Deep.
Oft when the playful billows, lightly curled,
Run past the ship, and quiet seems as sleep,
The lone retreat that roams about the world—
That white-winged monastery moving still
Of rugged celibates against their will.
Or when in darkness, towards her goal unseen,
On moonless midnights mournfully serene,
She seems, as by some instinct, self-inspired,
Still pressing on her eager quest untired;
While, the obscurely-branching clouds between,
Crossed stays and braces—silent rocking spars
Seem mingling dimly with the dancing stars!
Or when, if steady-breathing trade-winds blow,
No shift of sails for days required, the crew
About the deck their quiet tasks pursue;
The heavy-dragging sail with rough-skilled hands
They patch, or splice the rope's stiff-plaited strands,
Or twirl with balanced backward steps and slow
The whizzing yarn, still pondering as they go
The long-drawn tale it types of blended joy and woe.
Or when, her topsails squared, with plunging ease,
The ship goes reeling right before the breeze;
And he who has the watch, relaxing now,
May lean and mark, with thoughts far elsewhere, how
8

The bowsprit weaves great circles on the sky—
Down sinks the deck with all its life—up fly
The wide horizon and dark Ocean's plain;
And then the buoyant deck ascends again:
While speeding after, ever and anon,
A huge blue watery hill comes roaring on,
Tiger-like, open-mouthed, in furious chase;
But near the flying stern with slackened pace,
And lowered crest, seems first disposed to see
What the strange winged Leviathan may be
That dares amid these boisterous brawlers stray;
And, fearful the encounter to essay,
Falls back in a broad burst of foam, and hissing slinks away.

V.

No lack of change each feeling to employ!
How his eyes widened with a solemn joy
When on some witching night
The jutting corner of the gibbous Moon—
A golden buoy
That weltered in a sable sea of cloud
(One level mass extending wide,
The firmament all bare beside)—
Shed an obscure and ominous light,
And fitful gusts scarce dared to moan aloud!
How was the heart-leap of his exultation
Sustained—sublimed by thrilled imagination
When, if a storm came veiling all the noon,
Old Ocean, rising in gigantic play,
Marshalled his multitudinous array
Of waves tumultuous into ridges gray,
And sent them whirling on their headlong way,
9

Host after host of crested cavalry
Charging in lines illimitable (urged
By trumpet winds whose deafening bray
Drowned the sharp hiss of myriad-lancing spray)
Into the horrible white gloom profound
That gathered, thickened all around!
And when the dimness of the squall was gone,
Haply, to some far region bound,
The great whale went majestically by—
Plunging along his mighty course alone,
Into the watery waste unknown;
Cleaving with calm, deliberate speed,
The battling waves he would not heed;
While at long intervals upthrown
Successive jets of spouted brine,
Decreasing with the distance, in a line,
Told how he ne'er diverged
An instant from his haughty path
Into the black heart of the tempest's wrath
That like dense smoke before him scowled,
For all the clamorous coil of winds that howled
And waves that leapt around him as he past
And flung his foamy banner to the blast.

VI.

Two scraps of boyish letters here may be
Thrown in, as roughly written home from sea.
“A noble sport—and my delight
That reefing topsails! just to make all right,
Ere the wind freshens to a gale at night.
10

See! clambering nimbly up the shrouds,
Go, thick as bees, the sailor-crowds;
The smartest for the post of honour vie
That weather yardarm pointing to the sky:
They gather at the topmast-head
And dark against the darkling cloud
Sidling along the foot-ropes spread:
Dim figures o'er the yardarm bowed,
How with the furious Sail, a glorious sight,
Up in the darkness of the Sky they fight!
While by the fierce encounter troubled
The heavy pitching of the Ship is doubled;
The big Sail's swelling, surging volumes, full
Of wind, the strong reef-tackle half restrains;
And like some lasso-tangled bull
Checked in its mid career of savage might
O'er far La Plata's plains,
It raves and tugs and plunges to get free
And flaps and bellows in its agony!
But slowly yielding to its scarce-seen foes
Faint and more faint its frenzied struggling grows;
Till, by its frantic rage at length
Exhausted, like that desert-ranger's strength,
Silent and still, it seems to shrink and close.
Then, tight comprest, the reef-points firmly tied,
Down to the deck again the sailors glide;
And easier now, with calm concentred force,
The Ship bounds forward on her lightened course.”
11

“Once, 'twas my watch below (worse luck!)
A sudden squall the vessel struck:
With half my clothes about me thrown
I rushed on deck; what havoc there!
The topsails from the bolt-ropes blown,
Topgallant-masts and royals gone,
And huddled sails and shattered spars
And tangled tackle everywhere;
While all amazed, our gallant tars
Stood at the sudden wreck aghast,
Nor seemed to heed the swift commands
The Captain shouted through the blast.
The heaving staysail swagged and swung
As from the strained jibboom it hung:
Of course with some sharp words addrest
To two or three, our smartest hands,
Forward I jumped to do my best.
They followed quick;—the lightest, I
The bowsprit's end could safest try;
We grasped the frail spar like grim death,
And shut our eyes and held our breath,
Clinging with tightened arms and knees
When o'er us dashed successive seas
And blinded, ducked, and drenched us, till
Seizing the chance of every lull
To look and lash and tug and pull,
We furled the sail and got it still;
Though no one knew as there we clung
How badly that jibboom was sprung.
But when I 'lighted on the deck
Shaking the water off, the good
White-headed Master, who had stood,
He told me since, in breathless mood
12

(His heart was in his mouth, he said,
While looking on, for very dread)
Threw his old arm about my neck,
‘God bless you!’ cried he, ‘my brave Son!
'Twas nobly, beautifully done!
The safety of my Ship and Crew
This blessed day—I swear 'tis true,
Is owing, under God, to you!’—
Mother! ten times the risk I'd run
To have such praise declared my due—
By such a gallant Seaman too!”

VII.

But with these Ocean-scenes the Sea-boy fed
On others fruitful both for heart and head;
Had glimpses of strange lands and men as strange;
Saw with each clime their minds and manners change:
Learnt how on God by various names they call,
While God's great smile shines equally on all;
Allah, unimaged, One; Brahma, Vishnu,
And Siva—triple-imaged One in Three;
Ormusd—‘Ahuramasda’—name profound—
‘Living I Am’—that Splendour! One of Two
At war—dark Ahriman his throne invading,
Piercing with Evil first the shell so sound,
His cosmic Egg-of-Order's perfect round;—
Manitou, mistlike with-his pipewhiff fading;—
Buddha—prince, mystic, moralist—at last
Made God for teaching that no God can be:—
13

Arab—Hindu—Red Indian—Jew—Parsee;
Chinese Joss-beater, little reverent, too—
That cracker-loving creature of the past—
Blithe spirit—soul a lifeless leaden cast;
Who with high-sublimated Gods, a store
(His Buddha—Fo; Confutzee's Tien; Taou
That pure God-Intellect of Lao-tse),
Breathes blinding fog—Convention-fixed of yore—
Of grossest superstition. With the rest,
The necromancing negro of the West,
The terrorist of Obeah. These he scanned;
And many a charm on each delightful land
Lavished by Art's or liberal Nature's hand:
Inhaled the breath that through dense mist distils
From green spruce woods and all the sea-air fills
With sweet sour odours from Canadian hills:
Dwelt with enraptured gaze on Hindostan's
Umbrageous bowers of spice and spreading fans,
And glistening ribbon-leaves and arching plumes;
Her starry palms and sacred peepuls set
On many-fingered roots, a snaky net;
Or propping their high-roofed magnificence
On pendent pillars; clustering gorgeous glooms
Whence bulbous domes of marble mosques and tombs
From that black-green deep-bosoming defence
Swell snow-white into burning atmosphere;
Or gilt pagodas rise above the shade
Like spires of thick cardoon-leaves closely laid,
All in blue tanks reflected, grave and clear.
14

VIII.

Or else that tropic Isle of Springs entranced
The lad—who revelled in its noonday glare
And silence deep, so tremulously hot—
So gently interrupted when it chanced
A sudden and soft fluttering in the air,
Like silverpaper rumpled, startlingly
Whispered some flying rainbow-fragment nigh
Darting in downy purple golden-shot;
Or, as suspended by its long bill's tip
On viewless wings a-quiver poised to sip
A crimson cactus-bloom—the honied dew
Which from that silky breast, so fit in hue
And texture fine, the airy suckling drew.
Safely that land of merry slaves he saw
Late ruined by a half-completed law;
When thoughtless theorists had flung aside
The evil bonds by ancient Custom tied,
Nor better bonds they wore themselves, supplied;
Had left to tyrannies of grovelling sense
The victims of their vague benevolence;
Left them still basely free from forethought, care,
And loftier loads the self-dependent bear;
Left them untaught to welcome Labour's pains,
More nobly slaves to all a freeman's chains;
To know, the highest freedom all can reach
Is but the highest self-restraint of each;
True freedom a serene and sober thing,
With loyalty to Right crowned inward King;
While laws of Duty made despotic, make
The only freedom mobs nor kings can break.
15

IX.

So four years passed: to him a happy time.
Meanwhile his brothers both in youthful prime
Had perished; one, the pest of that fair clime,
The demon lurking in its loveliness,
The yellow fever's swiftly-withering flame
Had caught up and consumed: and that distress
Scarce over, from the Storm-Cape tidings came
Doubtful, which soon for doubt left little room,
The other must have met as sharp a doom—
Himself, his ship and shipmates whirled away
In Ocean's wild tempestuous embrace
To some unknown unfathomable Tomb.
Then did the anguish-smitten Father pray
The youngest, last remaining of his race
To leave a calling where such risks were rife,
And live at home, his age's staff and stay.
So, with what grace he might, though grieving sore,
The stripling gave his dutiful consent
Henceforth to follow some pursuit ashore,
Where Death, the Shade that dogs the steps of Life,
Upon his prey though equally intent,
Because less startling, seems less imminent.
16

Canto the Second. Will-o'-wisp-chasing.

1, 2. Ranolf a student. Greek tragedians. 3. The Phædo and Socrates. 4. Distaste for narrow creeds. 5. Metaphysics; Locke gets rid of the secondary qualities of Matter; Berkeley of the primary, and Abstract Matter itself; Hume of Abstract Mind. 6. All anticipated by the Hindus—Locke and Berkeley by the Brahmin, Kapila; Hume by the Buddhist, Kasyapa. 7. Kant—makes ‘God’ a necessary inference—real only in the Mind; 8. Fichte (suggesting Carlyle)—a ‘Divine Idea’—the ‘Tendency making for Righteousness.’ Duty of the soul to harmonise with it. 9. This like later Buddhism. 10. Fichte's life a triumph of Soul over Matter.

I.

To tutors now and long-left tasks restored,
Our sea-emboldened, self-reliant Boy
Soon grew enamoured of his new employ.
And many things those tutors never meant
Into a mind of such inquiring bent
His classics and his metaphysics poured.
But most he loved, could ne'er enough adore
The Godlike spirit of that grand Greek lore
That first taught Man his glorious being's height;
Taught him to stand, the Universe before,
17

Erect in moral, intellectual might,
And brave, in strength of Soul, the adverse infinite.
How would their strains his kindling bosom warm,
Those daring darling Poets, who enshrined
The freest Spirit in the purest Form,
In matchless Beauty such consummate Mind.
How would he triumph with the Theban Maid
Who, in no armour but instinctive sense,
The panoply of conscious right, arrayed,
Her lofty sentiment her sole defence,
Risked all the murderous rage of tyrant force
To snatch a burial for a brother's corse;
Though all the gods—all worldly wisdom's saws,
All cherished loves and all Convention's laws,
Denounced herself and spurned her holy cause.
Antigone could teach him that the test
Of right and wrong lay in his own free breast;
That right was right, despite high-seated wrong
And throned Authority by Custom strong!
That Man of all external aid bereft,
Had still himself and staunch endurance left;
Could stand above all Circumstance elate
And trust high Nature in the fight with Fate.

II.

And when he read the agonizing cries
That vulture-tortured Giant in the skies
Utters in deathless and sublime despair,
Doomed for his love to Man that woe to bear;
And all the sad majestic converse, round
The pinnacles of Caucasus snow-crowned,
Swelling like solemn Music, and again
18

Dying along the illimitable air,
As, one by one, supernal visitants
Come floating up to watch the ghastly pants
And writhings of the Titan, and with vain
Compassion, taunts—temptations vainer still—
Assail his grand unconquerable Will,
And bid him break his voluntary chain,
Abandon Man, scorn that vicarious pain,
And hail the gloomy Tyrant's selfish reign;
When all the student's sense of justice rose,
Stirred by the dauntless Poet's great appeal,
In wrath against the author of such woes,
And his young heart would passionately feel
For the doomed donor of the god-wrung fire;
Think you he ne'er was tempted to inquire,
Was that outworn Olympian rule of Zeus
The only tyranny men called divine?
Was there no other nature-startling use
Of absolute power—no other punishment
Of love, inflicted on the innocent,
At which instinctive Justice would repine?

III.

But most his soul was wonderstruck to see
To what a height humanity could reach
In that divinest hemlock-drinker—he
Who welcomed Death less evil than the breach
Of fealty to his country's laws, or scant
Reliance on the faith he came to teach:
The truths his nature forced him to proclaim;
The necessary outcome of his frame,
Mental and moral—by the innate law
19

Of evolution for its excellence
Provided—as inevitable thence
As from the sap of each peculiar plant
The special blossom earth and air must draw;
Trust absolute in the perfect Power above;
His perfect goodness; and what these must prove
(For with the ill around, what other just
Conclusion could he reach, with such a trust?)
That sole relief of every human want,
Soother and solace of the general sigh—
The Soul's unbodied Immortality!
And where was ever a sublimer page
Than that which paints the God-sent Prophet-Sage
Cheerily urging with his latest breath
This lofty creed upon his weeping band
Of friends—his very gaoler too unmanned;
Then standing forth, and with dilating eyes
That look straightforward—bold and calm—‘bull-wise’
Into the dread Eternity so nigh,
With one libation to the gods on high,
Drinking the Elixir both of Life and Death!
And as the deadly influence upward stole
And sobs broke forth he could no more console,
Lifting the mantle from his failing sight,
Just ere his soaring spirit winged its flight,
To make with accents faint his last bequest—
While haply in those eyes supreme o'er pain
A moment's humorous glimmer shone again—
That votive cock to the medicinal God
Of herbs—his soul's last evidence to be
20

Of joy at shaking off this mortal clod,
And his triumphant gratitude attest
To one whose potent drug had set him free.

IV.

Well, the great Sea-Life; the quick-shifting crowd
Of Sects that showed the human Spirit down-bowed
With equal faith each sect before its Lord,
While each the others' equally ignored:
Then the Greek grandeurs where that Spirit was seen
Erect and self-dependent and serene;
All made the youth still less and less incline
To cramping creeds or any partial shrine.
His heart was but one endless protestation
Against the slightest shackles on free Thought:
Rather than not attain the end he sought,
His strong intolerant love of toleration,
His towering spirit of tyrannous liberty,
Had forced all mental bondslaves to be free.—
Then all for Nature! “She alone for me!”
“What”—he would cry in his impetuous style,
Climbing, perhaps, some mountain-peak the while,
“What need of Temples! All around,
Through Earth's expanse, through Heaven's profound,
A conscious Spirit beauty-crowned,
A visible glory breathes and breaks,
And of these mountains, moors and lakes
A Holiest of the Holies makes!
Above—around—where'er you be,
A true Shekinah shining see!
21

With ever-fuming Incense there
An Altar burns for praise and prayer!
Whence better to your ‘Lord of Love’
Can sorrow waft its wail above
Than from some desert-waste forlorn,
Where sadly, of all splendour shorn,
Creeps in the stilly-dripping Morn?
Where best, ye broken-hearted, groan
On ‘God’ for help but all alone
Where forests make their mighty moan?
Where best exult in heart-hushed praise
If not where hills their great tops raise
Majestic in the silent blaze
Of Sunset over Ocean's haze?
What! shall the Spirit only draw
Near that unknown and nameless Awe
Where, beauteous though it be, there stands
Some puny work of human hands?
But I, O mystic Might! no less
As thy all-hallowed home will bless
Sublimest Nature's loveliness!
But I will dare, O Power Divine!
Revere One true transcendent Shrine,
This flashing Universe of Thine!”

V.

Now with uprooting Metaphysics toyed
The youth—their tangled subtleties enjoyed;
A wary old Professor was his guide,
Who welcomed every light from every side;
Yet most—such sad mistrust experience taught
Of plausibly profoundest human thought—
22

On common sense and mother-wit relied;
One, who—so high seemed Nature—Man so low—
Felt dwarfed to humbleness he scorned to show;
Yet, that their dwarfishness men would not feel,
Moved to fresh scorn he could not quite conceal.
He would have let the learner-lad confine
His tasks to careworn, truth-adoring Locke;
The lad would learn what ‘paying out more line’
Where Locke had cast it, led to,—solid rock,
Mud, quicksand, or the fathomless profound.
The more line ran, more depth there seemed to sound.
It took him, as you know, to that rare creed,
Etherial, beautiful—the fertile seed
Matured by Locke, our goodly Bishop sowed
Afresh, and reared into rich thought that glowed
Heavy with ears of amaranthine gold
That yet may yield their glorious hundred-fold.
Spirit was crowned when Soldier-sage Descartes
Plato's ‘Innate Ideas’ anew sustained;
But Hobbes—Gassendi—proved Ideas in part
Are through the Senses by Experience gained.
Locke to full growth their treacherous sapling trained.
“All possible ideas are mere sensations,
Or our reflections on them,” Locke insists;
“But half the first are Sense's own creations,
No faithful types of what in truth exists;
Not in the rose the red, nor in light-rays
Its texture splits, but in the eyes that gaze;
Not in the fire, but in our frames, the heat;
Not in the honey, but our tongues, the sweet;
Not in the thunder, but our ears, the roar;
These are impressions on the brain—no more:
23

But form, solidity, extension, power
To move or rest, are Matter's genuine dower,
Her real outside existence.” “Nay—pursue
Your doubt,” cries Berkeley; “probe them through and through,
And you will find these qualities you flatter
Yourself you prove essential in this Matter,
No more substantial than its red and blue.”
And then the mighty mitred Analyst,
Silk-aproned subtle-tongued Psychologist,
Thinker by few believed, by all beloved,
With frankest power “unanswerably proved,
What no man in his senses can admit,”
(A phrase of little truth and not much wit)
Proved that all things we hear, see, feel around,
Have no such base as Matter—nay, no base
Or being at all but Spirit—their sole ground.
Forces are they, from Infinite Mind proceeding,
Spiritually active, wheresoe'er it be,
On finite mind to print, in order due,
Sensations, not deceptive nor misleading;
But spiritual coin as spiritual Coiner, true,
And real with Spirit's sole reality.
So Berkeley said and proved his flawless case.
But Hume came sliding in with smiling face,
Veiling the grimmest strength in easy grace;
The pleasant playful Giant—gentle Chief
Of sceptics, dealing blows without a sign
Of effort—slashing with a sword so fine—
Killing with lightning-touches bright and brief;
So wise, so good; whose adversaries found
24

His silken glove a Cestus iron-bound,
When staggering all the gladiator press
He proved—or seemed to prove—to their distress
And ours, that Thought itself and Consciousness
Had no such base as Mind—which only meant
Trains of impressions and ideas that went
And came in nothing—neither more nor less;
For no recipient spirit could be perceived,
And Matter was already gone and shent;
And he had settled to his own content
(To such a dogma, ye who can, consent!)
No Cause did ever yet produce Effect
However Custom may the two connect.
Therefore for pictures we within us find,
No Power without—above—of any kind
Need be, or could be, as their cause assigned.
So must we Matter, Mind, God, Soul, alike—
As metaphysical abstractions scout—
Out of the ranks of real existence strike:
And yet as Mind and Matter both, without
Or spite of Reason, must be still believed—
Nature took care of that—that much achieved—
The only clear conclusion was dim Doubt.

VI.

Thus Locke by Berkeley—Berkeley thus by Hume,
Was pounced on in retributive swift doom,
Hand over hand, as children play, so pat,
Each crushing his great predecessor flat:
So swiftly hurried down the eddying tide
Of speculation which began to flow
In the far East three thousand years ago
25

When doubting dusky Sages threw aside
Their faith in those symbolic wheelspoke arms
And double heads of deities of Ind;
And some mild paddy-fed pale-blooded crew
Of subtle theorists argued nought was true,
Nought real but Brahma—him in whom inhere
All magic-lantern shadows that appear
As living shapes in this illusive sphere.
Then Brahma's essence, subtilised and thinned,
In Kapila's self-styled ‘Perfect Wisdom’ grew
To Absolute Spirit—Thinking Substance pure
And abstract as that pure unworldly Jew,
The spiritual Spinoza, ever drew.
But earlier still, in wild recoil more sure
From Brahmin tyranny of creed and caste,
The o'er-refining Orient fancy passed
To dreams the maddest ever Reasoning spun,
In that high-moralled faith that still has charms
(Because its founder's self, made God, replaced
And vivified so soon for vulgar taste
The No-God he had taught) to sway such swarms
Dusk Aryan and Turanian tawny-skinned;
That fullest-millioned Faith beneath the Sun,
Which Sakya Muni—princely eremite—
First saddened into—sickened with the sight
Of sorrow and pain inseparable seeming
From life—his own a pleasure-sated blight
With high desire forlornly through it gleaming;
So with a proud deliberate despair
Conceived his monstrous method of redeeming,
26

By guiding, souls back to their primal night
Of non-existence; which his pupil and friend
Kas-yapá teaches they already share,
Therein are based—begin—and ought to end;
Nor rests, like Hume, content in doubt to pause,
But from his metaphysic ‘Basket’ draws
Negation of all spirit—God—first cause—
Brahma or Absolute Being; all and each—
Creator and created—matter—mind—
Alike chimeras; wisdom's highest reach
To know this nothingness; the soul's true aim
To lose existence and partake the same;
Extinguished then, with consciousness consigned
To darkness—blown out like a taper's flame,
To enter so ‘Nirvana’—there to be
Absurdly blest with blank Nonentity.

VII.

Air-lording Allemannia! vast and dim
The cloud-racks next our Aeronaut must skim!
Say rather, leave, a Reaper, worn-out fields
Of Thought for golden crops thy culture yields,
Though hedged with worse than Indian orange-thorns—
Sharp subtleties for—Doubt's intrusive horns?—
As Locke's Sensation-creed, worked out, had brought
Matter and Spirit both alike to nought,
Did not those soaring Germans reinstate
Inborn ideas—and hence a Soul innate?
Did not great Kant in pedant's jargon shew
How, paramount within the human Mind—
27

Not from Sensation nor Experience gained—
Ideas, the fruit of the ‘Pure Reason’ reigned?
As, from this fount Truths Mathematic, so
From this—called Conscience—Moral Truths must flow
By mere necessity? while those two facts,
Conditions fixed, wherein ‘Pure Reason’ acts—
The Soul—the Universe—but presuppose
And force you to the grand Idea behind
Whence both must spring, wherein are both combined—
To God—the source of all that thinks or knows,
All Being's boundless origin and close?—
Did not poor Faith, from shift to shift doubt-prest
Find in that ‘Reason Pure’ peace—refuge—rest?
Trusting both scoff and sceptic-proof to be,
In pachydermatous Philosophy
So puzzling, panoplied? and might not she,
Man's deathless Hope, in such a tangle rude
Of prickly briars of Logic hid away,
Rest like the Beauty in the long-charmed wood,
Serene—secure—inviolable? Say,
Did no great Truth obscure and latent lie
In all that chaff of dialectics dry—
A chrysalis (like that with reeled-off floss,
Bared of its dress, all amber gleam and gloss,
The careful schoolboy hides in homely bran)
Whence a new Psyche should emerge for Man?
Like Psyche's self, say,—from blue Italy
Prepared to cross the rude rough-handling sea,
Laid up in wood and iron, sound and safe
In naked beauty from all chance of chafe;
So closely presses round her spiritual face
And limbs of tender marble and white grace,
The hard-caked sawdust of her packing case.
28

But, O conclusion lame and impotent!
O rage of vigorous reasoning vainly spent!
Those fixed Ideas—inseparably blent
With all the rest—Time—Space and Cause—'tis plain,
Though notions connate with the nascent brain,
Have in essential fact no solid ground—
Only within the human soul are found;
Though necessary bases of our thought
Are from no prototypes beyond us brought!
That ‘God’ is but a sort of ghost confined
To haunt the shadowy chambers of the mind!
As if within a glass-roofed palace grew
Some strange grand Tree of mystic shape and hue,
With various virtues wondrously arrayed—
With mighty fronds and majesty of shade,
And towering crest sufficiently sublime;
Within those vitreous walls compelled, no doubt,
By nature's laws luxuriantly to sprout,
But with no fellow—no resemblance known,
Or able to exist in any clime
'Mid the green glories of the world without;
A most magnificent, yet monstrous cheat,
Proud overgrowth of artificial heat,
And that peculiar edifice alone;
No shade or shelter offering when you ply
Your weary way beneath the naked sky!
“Why, if this God's a product of our own,
Which ends in us, though there perforce it breeds,
A doubtful light which but to darkness leads,”
Said Ranolf's Guide—“what waste of toil and time
These more than acrobatic feats to climb
Such crags precipitous, such slippery heights,
29

Where no rewarding view our toil requites;
No vision of the City long-desired,
Though brief as that in Moslem myths—perchance
Seen standing—sudden—silent—sunrise-fired
Before the desert-wanderer's awestruck glance;
Far stretching multitudinous array
Of gilded domes and snowy minarets,
And tiers of long arcades rich-roofed with frets
More delicate than frostwork! then again
Gone—vanished! and a hundred years in vain
Resought, but gladdening nevermore the day.
Not e'en such glimpse, O mighty Kant!—at most
When we have reached your height at so much cost,
In densest fog we see a finger-post
You say directs us to that City fair,
But is no proof of any City there!
Some letters on its arms obscurely seen
Your spectacles discover; what they mean
In worse than three-tongued wedge-rows sealed up fast,
We have to take from you on trust at last.”

VIII.

Whose reveries then could our vexed Student lure?
Whom sought he next?—
That lofty Spirit and pure
The march majestic and the genuine ring
Of whose high eloquence on one high theme,
How best aloft the expanded Soul may wing
Her way, and best sustain her flight supreme—
Had all the warranty a life could bring,
30

The faithful mirror of his faith—sublime
In self-dependent stateliness severe,
And steadfast single eminence of aim;—
Fichte—whose name recalls a dearer Fame—
A Power intenser—trenchant—towering—true;
In Custom's ocean-strata prompt and prime
Impassioned insight's dynamite-mines to spring;
Of Spirits in unspiritual days who cling
To Spirit—stanchest if the most austere;
Right sympathiser though to satire wedded;
Rich lode of gold in rugged quartz imbedded!—
He whose capacious soul's ascending Sphere
Oft looms obscure while flashing brightness through
Dull mists it kindles till they disappear;
Who, rolling back the ponderous stone of Time,
Makes the dead Past, upstarting clear in fine
Fork-lightnings of Truth's poesy, outshine
The living Present, whose loud shams—with might
And hammer like his own white-knuckled Thor's,
And scorn that pities while it most abhors,
And humour laughing at his scorn's wild flight,—
His rough right hand was ever clenched to smite!—
Fichte—great voice to rouse, great heart to cheer!
This greater could not hear it and not leap
In unison, ‘Deep calling unto Deep;’
Could not from such a credence and career
Withhold the dower of his undying praise;
Which saw therein the far-reflected gleam
Of high-endeavouring old illustrious days;
Heard solemn echoes or the etherial flow
Of Attic pacings of the Portico
And whispers from the groves of Academe,
31

Where Truth alone by sages world-renowned
Was sought, and made Life's rule at once when found;—
Fichte struck out once more for truths that shine
Instinctive and immediately divine.
In consciousness is all of God we know;
But consciousness proclaims Him; neither dim
Nor doubtful He; all Being's source and stream;
Nature exists in us, and we in Him.
For ‘Me’ and ‘Not-Me’—Universe and Soul
Are one—not two—and Consciousness the whole:
Nature its passive, Soul its active side;
In Consciousness are both contained—allied;
Nature—a picture by that ‘Me’ supplied—
A glorious web which from fine stuff within
Itself the Spider Consciousness can spin.
So all is Spirit—Matter there is none
But part and product of the Soul alone.
And what ideal does Consciousness proclaim
As all we know of Him whom ‘God’ we name?—
That active principle, which clearly seen
Is working out, whatever intervene,
The triumph in the Universe and Man,
Of all that's useful, beautiful, and good;
That Force which forwards its consummate plan
Of progress endless towards the perfect Day
Of moral Order's universal sway;
And to the Soul above all tumult cries
Of one high Duty still to be pursued,—
With that ‘Divine Idea’ to harmonise
The Will, and all its faculties subdued
Into devout co-operative mood,
Press forward freely to the ennobling prize.
32

IX.

High thoughts! yet haply Hindu still; so like
The course—nor much unlike the goal—to those
The later Buddhists for the soul propose,
Dropping the dreary nihilistic phases
Of Sakya's faith too purely insane to strike
The fancy of the myriads, else its foes;
Backsliding into healthier dreams and brighter,
In Burmah or Nepaul; or such as lie
Obscurely hidden in the mystic cry,
The shaveling in red robes and yellow mitre,
In snowy Thibetan devoutly raises
At Lama-ridden Lhassa, when he phrases
In one short shibboleth his prayers and praises:
“Gem in the Lotus-flower, Amen!” whereby
He breathes his soul's desire to wing its flight
Through Æons of blest Being—height o'er height,
Till evermore suffused with purer light
It merge—from death, disease, old age and need,
And all the griefs of gross existence freed,—
Perfect, in Buddha's Soul—its boundless meed—
Absorbed in that All-perfect Infinite!—
A heterodox ‘Nirvana,’ worthier far
By ages of vast virtue to be won;
No ‘taper-flame blown out’—a blissful star
Lost in the splendour of the noonday sun.

X.

“True,” thought our friends, “this Man was true, indeed;
A noble Teacher of a noble Creed!
33

Yet, to persuade us how the Soul may climb
Triumphant o'er material Space and Time,
Stronger than all that dialectic strife,
His most convincing logic was his life.
Of truths the stern Philosopher had taught
Proof most profound, perhaps, the Patriot brought,
When, finishing his last great fight for God,
And many a rapt impassioned period,
Down from his desk the mighty Master came,
Unmoved by murmur low, or plaudit loud,
Or fervent blessing from the student-crowd;
And left the loved arena of his fame
With shouldered musket in the ranks to stand,
And fall or conquer for his Father Land.”
34

Canto the Third. From Wisp to Morass.

1. Schelling's ‘Absolute’—a blind power working in Nature, conscious only in Man. 2. Panatheistic and Buddhist. 3. Hegel makes the ‘Absolute,’ a Unity being evolved from contradictory principles existing as the ‘Conditioned.’ 4. A glimpse of his alleged meaning.

5. Result of Metaphysics based on Abstract Thought alone. Behind the ‘Apparent’ must be a ‘Real,’ and (6) as wondrous. The Universe—why to be limited to or by our perceptions of it? 7. The transcendentalists throw no light on this ‘Real;’ only prove it exists; and that we cannot fathom it. 8. So to Comte and Positivism. Denial of all Immaterial Existence. 9. Comte's new Religion.

I.

Then Schelling plies the metaphysic ball,
Which Reason's racket still will strike aloft
To overfly Sensation's bounding wall,
Though to the ground a thousand times it fall.
Those two Ideas we prate about so oft,
The Soul—the Universe—are really two,
And are identified—O, not in you,
35

Nor any finite Consciousness so small,
But only in the Absolute—the All.
Spirit is Matter that itself surveys;
And Matter, Spirit's undiscerning phase;
They are the magnet's two opposing poles,
And each the other balances—controls:
Both in a centre of indifference rest,
Which their essential being is confest:
As in the magnet's every point—we see
In all the works of Nature just these three;
But that which bounds them all and each degree,
The Absolute—the Magnet's self—must be,
Except at Being's most exalted height—
Impersonal—unconscious—infinite;
For God—that Absolute—still strives in vain,
In Nature's blind inferior works; nor can
In any form Self-Consciousness attain,
Save in the highest reasoning power of Man,
That central point, which Soul and Nature gain;—
Unconscious else the Universal Pan.

II.

Short comment made that old Idoloclast:
“Behold, then, three-and-twenty centuries passed,
The stately Ship of Western Thought at last,
Striking and stranded on the barren shore
Where struck that Buddhist bark so long before,
Left high and dry with all its phantom freight;
Thither impelled by that satiric fate
That dogs our intellectual pride, and brings
Shipwreck with its conviction shallow and vain,
That 'tis a storm-proof Cruiser, this poor brain,
36

Built, rigged, and manned to circumnavigate
The rondure vast of all existing things.
So Schelling digs where Kas-yapá had dug;
Magniloquent, yet microscopic elf,
So makes all Nature but the high-plumed hearse
Of God gone dead; so, whipping out his cord,
O metaphysical and monstrous Thug!
Strangles Creation's soul out; in a word,
Makes, while he feigns to flout Man's pride of Self,
That Self sole Mind-Life in the Universe.
“Alas! my Ranolf, were it wrong to call
This the most drear of metaphysic dreams—
The most revolting, mean result of all?
The Being, then, of highest worth it seems,
Which that World-ghost, that blind and senseless force
Evolves in its uncaused unconscious course,
Is but this inefficient soul of ours—
The one God, Man! for all his boasted powers,
Dubbed truly by that wanton wittiest Greek,
‘Clay-puppet, poor—ephemeral—wingless—weak!’
Is He the sole Intelligence? can he
The crown and climax of all Being be
Throughout that million-starred immensity?
Prove it by demonstration flawless, strong;
The wild conclusion proves some premiss wrong;
Absurd, as if those dwellers by old Nile
Had, in unsymbolled Scarab-worship vile,
Crowned with a beetle their great Pyramid—
The Monarch Builder out of sight and hid.”
37

III.

To mystic depths and mistier. Hegel shrouds
Himself and Truth in denselier-rolling clouds,
Like Arab genie sore opprest in fight;
His splendour flashes through redoubled night.
Thoughts are the same as Things; and what is true
Of one must be so of the other too.
No base but Thought the Mind's conceptions claim,
And your ‘external Objects’ have the same;
In Thought what proves consistent, rational, sound,
Must then in Things be Real and Actual found.
But Reason says: Your Absolute enfolds
All Actuals; cannot be at all, or holds
Good—Evil—utter contraries in one—
Mutual destructives in Its union.
Therein encounter, coexist, embrace,
Flat contradictions which whene'er you trace
The bounds of Being, stare you in the face!
Nay, Being's self therein, a balance lies
Of yoked yet suicidal contraries:
For Non-Existence, as a Thought, must be
Like pure Existence, a Reality:
While of pure abstract Being, uncombined
With qualities of any form or kind,
Nought can we know or predicate aright:
So Being falls into Non-Being's plight;
Each dies—revives—becomes its opposite.—
The positive and negative descried
In all things are such discords so allied.
For each Idea or Object (which you please,
Both are the same) evolves itself like these;
38

But these destroy and shut each other out;
A negative is all they bring about;
Still as the Idea is there and must remain,
That negative must be denied again.
As Abstract Space, for instance, cannot be
Conceived as bounded or as boundless either;
Yet must be one to be at all, you see,
Then cannot be at all, because 'tis neither;
A negative which meets denial clear,
For Space is something after all—and here.
That last negation, then, the Idea revives,
And subtler complex Being to it gives
In the ‘Conditioned’ where alone it lives.
Those magnet-poles, the two extremes, are gone,
And in the central point survive alone;
Object and Subject, Universe and Soul,
Are in that centre, one and real, and whole;
Each in itself a nothing we may call,
But their relation to each other—all.
Like alkali and acid, they attract
Each other, meet, and perish in the act—
The effervescence rests the only fact.
So the ‘Becoming’—the immediate spring
From Nought to Somewhat, is the vital thing;—
“Well, well!” broke out our student here, “at least
It cannot be denied this great High Priest
Of metaphysic Mysteries, has the wit,
The ant-lion boasts who scoops his cone-shaped pit
In subtlest sand, and there securely hides;
And when into the trap the victim slides,
And strives in vain to climb the slipping sides,
Down, deeper down, the crafty digger goes,
And o'er his prey such blinding dust-showers throws,
39

He triumphs quickly, and the intruder draws
Bewildered into those remorseless jaws.”
But when unflinching Hegel flatly laid
The axiom down he would not have gainsaid,
Disdaining compromise—dispute—or flout
(Settling so coolly Hamlet's staggering doubt)
“To Be is Not-to-be—and Not-to-be
To Be—agree to that, or disagree,
'Tis Logic's first great axiom, and most true!”
What could a youth with risible organs do,
At this, Philosophy's last grand exploit,
But ‘ding the book the distance of a quoit’
Away—and with a shout of laughter loud,
Light a cigar, and blow—as clear a cloud?—

IV.

“Bide a wee!” cried his Tutor, “my lad!”—with his cautious, sarcastic old tongue—
“There's a question I'd have you to ask, as you hirple these mystics among,
When certain, quite certain you're right, ‘But suppose after all I am wrong?’—
Say that Matter is nothing but Spirit, as Berkeley has best of all taught,
All the ‘Things’ we call ‘outward’—Ideas; why, the Universe then is all Thought;
And its Laws are but forms of our Thinking; then surely Itself may be nought
But the image and reflex of Mind; and the Two may be held to keep pace
40

In their manifestations and march—all their movements in Time and in Space—
And as One run together their changeful, developing, infinite race!
Say the Universe still is in growth; still for Æons on Æons must beat
Its great wings towards an Eyrie afar; that a Cosmos as yet incomplete,
Towards a Perfect as yet unconceived must the whirling Infinitude fleet!
Then the Mind that conception would reach when the Universe reaches the fact.—
Now through Being, organic, unorganised,—mark how one Law may be tracked:
In its innermost depths internecine two absolute contraries act—
Two principles, neither allowing the other alone to exist,
Into either the other still shifting, alternately sighted and missed,
(Like the eyes at once open and shut in that trick-begot face of the Christ)
But for ever evolving a third—a Unity yet unattained.—
Well, this ‘Notion’ of Being's high working, a Thought by abstraction though gained
From Actual Things, was the Thought from the first that causatively reigned
In the Absolute Essence; compelled their concretion; still sways them all through;
Nay, by Hegel on high dialectic is throned in such royalty true,
All progressions of Nature and Mind must precisely accord with it too!
'Tis the mystical tune they must dance to; like sunny-haired rows
41

Of Hamelin children must follow wherever its melody flows,
And our Hegel—our Piper sublime, transcendentally capering goes!
Then, as one vast Idea there may be which our present conception transcends,
And to realise, organise which the whole Universe struggles and tends;
Of Ideas that are swarming subordinate, each its own contraries blends
In the group it forms round it as central true type and Ideal designed
To be reached by their organisation when perfect, each after its kind:
Which type through their points the most opposite, not the most like, we must find.
And as Life-groups from balancing discords must physical concords contrive,
So may Moral antagonist Forces be destined to struggle and strive,
Till exalted, transfigured at last in a higher new nature they thrive!
Do not Passion and Principle, Impulse and Duty, so act in the soul?—
May not Matter and Spirit, Good—Ill, so be working—all parts as the whole—
Nay, our Infinite-Finite at war have some Peace unimagined for goal?—
—What! the Actual then, the ‘perceived,’ will not to accordance be brought
With what Hegel conceives! nor the Universe show itself working or wrought
On a ‘Notion’ so subtle, you say!—Well, 'tis some consolation—it ought!
42

For with ‘Thought’ for First Cause, 'tis a bolder and grander conception at least
Than the harmony clashed out by Atoms, that gift from the primitive East;
The Concordia discors, how mystic! which haply the sadness increased
Of the cheeriness forced and forlorn so cherished by Horace of old,
As—his head early grey—the sleek sensitive Poet, close-wrapping the fold
Of his toga with sunset blood-stained, down the Appian dreamily strolled.
And though Hegel affirm contradictions in terms that each other repel,
Since their high reconciling Idea no Reason at present can tell,
When the last is discovered, why—Logic and Language may reach it as well.
And suppose, in his ‘Immanent Reason,’ as Cause all these wonders behind,
But ‘Intelligent Infinite Will,’—may not Hegel and . . . much he opined
Ages hence be a Lord and a Law to maturer and mightier Mind?

V.

“But now consider. What at last remains
From all that toil of transcendental brains?
If, like the bristled monster-minims seen
To jerk and writhe and wriggle goggle-eyed
43

Within the lighted circle on the wall
Thrown from the water-drop compressed between
Glass plates by microscopic lantern-sheen,
These crabbed and cribbed philosophers go near
To craze, because the Apparent's magic sphere
So hems them in; and Hegel above all
Seemed, like the fabled Scorpion girt with fire,
With his own logic-nippers to inflict
A bite that killed himself, in mad desire
And effort to escape from bonds so strict—
That radiant round of the ‘Phenomenal,’
And dive into the depths that lie beyond;—
What then?—that grand mysterious Outside,
That Ocean of their soundings frantic, fond,
Is there—there still, and cannot be denied:
Howe'er the Thing we may define or name,
Whatever dim solutions we disclaim,
The ‘Unapparent’ still exists the same!
“For granting it be made by reasoning plain
That all the fair impressions on the brain
Are not mere pictures of such things around
Where no real types precisely like are found,
But from those decorating Senses gain,
In passing through them, all the dædal dress
Of qualities we fancy they possess,—
‘Not in the rose the red—nor in light-rays
Its texture splits, but in the eyes that gaze;
Not in the thunder—honey—fire, the roar,
The heat or sweetness we perceive; all these
Lie in the Sense that hears, tastes, feels or sees;
Well, it remains as certain as before
The causes of these feelings lie without,
44

Beyond us still; for who pretends to doubt
We do not, cannot of ourselves excite
All these sensations? and still less the play
Of keen impressions that by night and day
In selfsame order, sequence, and array
Reach other minds by millions? There must be
A something causing all we feel and see.
What Things are in Themselves, though none can say,
They still have in themselves—for base and stay,
Some pure, essential, true Reality.”

VI.

“But tell me now,” said Ranolf, “by what right
Can they assert that unimagined sphere
Of Causes is not varied, powerful, bright
And beautiful as aught we see or hear
Or any way perceive within the Mind?
‘Nature in her insentient solitude
Must as eternal Darkness be defined,
Eternal Silence.’ Wherefore thus conclude?
The Light and Sound are in ourselves, say you;
The Darkness—Silence then should be so too!
The last should our alternatives alone
Be held—not Nature's—when the first are gone.
Say Sound and Light are hers, but only heard
Or seen by us when certain nerves are stirred.
'Tis hard to think, were all Mankind destroyed,
This glorious World would be a dumb black void!—
But those mysterious Agents that can start
Sensations thus in human consciousness,
45

Would still, if that had vanished, be no less
Active, impulsive, wonderful, divine;
And might at least convey, somehow impart
To other Souls whom other organs bless,
Say (for their nature none of course can guess)
Lights gorgeous, jewel-tinted, more than shine
For us—for our beholding all too fine;
And melodies of such entrancing tone
As would outravish all to mortal music known!
“Surely no sober reason would pretend
To make the wondrous Universe depend
On our perceptions—there begin and end?
Must Senses like our own exhaust its powers?
May there not be more Senses too than ours?
Does the Sun cease to be a Sun, and die,
Hurled from his throne in yon majestic Sky,
Whene'er the Worm that grooves the flowery fret
Of pulpit-work—or Spider at his net
On some rose-knotted oak-carved canopy
Within a great Cathedral's gloom and grace—
May lose the few faint rays it feels through panes
That serve to bound, e'en while they brighten, all
Its tiny being's scant-accorded space;
Dim rays half quenched in that transparent pall,
Yet rainbow-rich with saintly blazonry
And dusky with a wealth of Angel-stains?”

VII.

Said that old hoary Candour, “Haply true
Your notion there! Yet what have we to do
With possible Souls you guess at, not our own,
46

Or powers of Nature wholly hid from view?
Who can assent to or deny what you
May dream of in the Utterly Unknown?—
But do they open—these Idealists—
Any grand oriel, loop or sight-hole new,
That Unapparent Realm may shine into;
Through which the Eternal Radiance may be seen
Behind the glory-dusked Phantasmal Screen,
Our heavenly-stained Cathedral Universe?—
Well, I must hold their chance thereof the worse
From their inveterate resolve to find
That Universe—all Being that exists—
Wrapt in and rounded by the human Mind.
“Yet at lowest their gossamer frail filligree
Of Abstractions but half comprehensible serves
To prove—though this visible Universe be
But ‘sensations,’—mere pictures impressed on the nerves
Through the Consciousness flitting in shadow and sheen;
Yet beyond or behind it must still be implied
A Something, more real and as wondrous, Unseen,
Where the Causes that call up the pictures abide:
And to prove, by their failure, a limited brain
Like the human—the Finite—can never expound
That Reality fully, but struggles in vain
Either Infinite Nature or Being to sound;
Either Matter or Spirit to reach through—to round,
Or their Essence or Origin fathom—explain!”

VIII.

So Ranolf leaves the crew who strive to rear
Truth's Palace on the clouds of Abstract Thought;
47

Tries those who on the concrete base have wrought
Of solid Fact we see and feel and hear:
“Come France the fine-idealled! a Wanderer aid!
Surely in any faith in France essayed
For Man's high wants provision will be made!
Did not, to God's great glory—or his own—
Pious Voltaire erect a church of stone?
Pious Rousseau foredamn or save his soul
As he might hit or miss a cork-tree's bole?
Pious pure tiger-monkey, Robespierre,
Most tender-conscienced bloodhound, slavering there,
Find soulless Man no workable machine,
And bay for ‘God’ to back his guillotine?
Elijah-mantled in silk-coat sky-blue,
The powdered Prophet ostrich-plumed anew,
Upholding to his sanctimonious nose,
So keen to scent out blood, a fullblown rose,
Proclaimed his condescending cool decree
Which deigned to bid his ‘Supreme Being’ be!—
Surely this novel nostrum, all the rage,
Of Comte, sleek-hatted and sleek-coated Mage,
Cherry-cheeked, dapper-souled, most dainty Sage,
The human heart's deep yearnings will assuage,
And steep in light and truth a woeworn Age!
“But O, what champion for the eternal fray
Is this, whose tactics are to run away,
Ignore the fight or yield without a blow!
Is this ‘Philosophy’—to shirk—forego
All—best worth knowing—men most burn to know—
This all we gain, O dapper One—from thee?
‘Appearances—the facts we feel and see—
48

Sensuous impressions—these we know alone;
Know even of these but the relations shown
Between them; where they are alike, indeed,
And in what settled order they proceed.
Such sequences—resemblances—we call,
When constant,—Laws of Things Phenomenal.
As for the Cause directing each event,
'Tis but the one that next before it went;
Like antecedent brings like consequent;
And nothing supernatural ever breaks
The natural course the ordered current takes;
The endless train of pictures backward goes.
But their essential nature—whence they rose—
How first were caused or wherefore—no one knows,
Has means or powers for knowing. Hence we deem
All supersensuous notions a mere dream!
And all religious dogmas, darkly bred
From mumbo-jumbo worship—Fetish dread;
And all Theologies that thence were spun
From Gods the Many up to God the One;
Expanding by the creature's natural law
Of growth, still checked by less and less of awe,
To subtler metaphysical conceits,
(The grown-up Child's still self-deluding cheats)—
All these are shadows of the cruder brain,
Fancies the fullgrown Man must needs disdain;
Gods—God—or Spirit—Nature's Abstract Whole—
Her Plastic Force, or Vegetative Soul,
All but ingenious whims of minds half-taught;
All First or Final Causes—simply nought;
To seek them, wanton waste of time and thought
49

IX.

“Nay, but”—drily hints his Mentor here, “What faults are you imputing!
'Tis a devotee, this dapper One! most reverent while uprooting!
‘Man must have a Faith,’ he cries, ‘some fine Ideal loved and followed!
Hear then Heavens, O Earth give ear! Mankind and you shall still be hallowed
With a spick-and-span new Creed, complete from Paradise to Tophet!
Soft now! . . . There's no God but Abstract Man, and Comte's his Concrete Prophet!
And to keep this compound Allah through his myriad parts progressing,
There's in Fame a Life Immortal for each hero's goal and blessing;
Blest or curst a Life Eternal for each soul of lowlier breeding,
In the good effects or evil of each life on lives succeeding!’
Then he flaunts you his fantastic God—great—sad—perplexed Humanity!
And, O sanguine sweet simplicity, most amiable Insanity!
Thinks devotion to a Deity so wayward, weak and airy
(Dying out behind for ever like a fire that scours a prairie)
Will seduce poor Man to fling away his one brief chance of pleasure—
Turn mere steel to ecstasies of sense, in Stoic over-measure;
Spurn the Syren Vice for Virtue's pale and perishable treasure!
All his joy the joy of healing by his pain the pain of others;
50

Pebble vile for Self to smile the Pearl of price for Self-like brothers;
Altar-flame when blown for them the hell-fire spark in Self he smothers!
So his bubble-doom he shall sky-tinge; dog-futured—dog-like dutiful,
Slave to make his firefly flash of life look solemn, grand and beautiful!
So his brother dim Automatons of like ephemeral quality,
Shall enshrine him, as in mockery of his wormy grave's reality,
Crowned in catacombs of Memory with most mortal Immortality!
Nay, for feigning Life so farcical,—grand, beautiful, and solemn,
Soothe his dust, his dry bones tickle, with a statue, bust or column!
‘Were not this,’ the sleek one simpers, ‘guerdon great and prospect glorious?
We are rotten, not forgotten! O the prize for pangs notorious!
Nothingness our doom, no less we'll make believe 'tis tempting—winning;
Life a skeleton—what then?—we'll pull a string and set it grinning!’”
51

Canto the Fourth. Terra Firma.

1. Universe-solutions. 2, 3. The Atomic Theory and Evolution (4) tell nothing as to First Causes—of Motion or powers of Atoms; 5, or of Life, whose orderly Evolution required; in organisms Impulses towards it; and a World arranged for it—both provided beforehand: clear proof of ‘Mind.’ 6. Nature, as by her general system, so in her smallest works, proves this foresight. 7. Could Chance effect this?—theory too improbable.

8. Other considerations as to First Cause and Final Results; Means and Ends. What makes Law resemble Chance; and Necessity. 9. The fancy of ‘Mind-Stuff’ merely assumes Mind is Matter, which is inconceivable. 10. All these are Second Causes; make them First—you make them Divine.

11. All existence, then, originates in what we must call ‘Mind.’ 12. This Power more probably perfect than imperfect. 13. So Ranolf sticks to his ‘Theism.’

I.

How many a sage has solved the Universe
Yet left the wondrous Mystery none the worse!
52

Hast seen a Lioness and Cubs at play?
Look! she is down upon her side and they
With noisy growl and harmless bite
Are worrying her in their small way,
Triumphant ramping o'er the creature dread;
But on the least alarm or impulse slight,
Lifting her haughty head,
With easy paw she puts them all aside,
And glares out fierce in majesty and pride!—
The mighty Mother, Nature, in such sort
Does with her philosophic children sport:
O! they have got her wholly at their feet,
Her mystery known, their mastery complete!
Then, with some little fact or newer light,
Quiet—disdaining even disdain—
She throws them all abroad again;
Reveals fresh depths to their astonished sight,
Resumes her sacred secrecy and might,
And reasserts her ancient reign.

II.

See Ranolf now with curious wonder whist,
Listening a Sage high-towering, wiry-witted,
German—a prime profound Materialist!—
“O lynx-eyes lightening through each Logic-mist—
Eyebrows with vehement fierce enquiry knitted—
Nose wide-upturned, importunate; comprest
Yet wistful working lips that never rest!
He looks an intellectual Corkscrew—fitted
To worm his wriggling and resistless way
To Nature's tightest-bottled secrets! Play—
53

Child's play, with that most penetrative muzzle
Were his, to ferret out her mysteries—take
The Universe to pieces, and remake—
Put it together like a Chinese puzzle!”

III.

And what did this Machine, this Logic-Mill
Grinding of mere necessity, not will,
Turn out as flour the hungry Soul to fill?
What drops of Truth did this Retort distil?
“Atoms! you build the Universe, with Gravity and Motion!
All Force is Force Mechanical; in Earth or Air or Ocean
Or depths of Space, of Spirit-Force we have no need or notion!
From Ether springs in Vortex-rings your being—your beginning;
By knot or clot therein begot, you spirally go spinning!
You clash, vibrate and generate Heat—your elastic quiver;
For Light—you smite through Ether's night a billion-league-long shiver!
You shrink and swell, attract—repel; heap single kinds in gases;
Or in proportions rare—exact, combine your varied classes
In molecules that join compact in elemental masses.
But restless Chance forced some of you, now mutually repelling,
In Æons past to mix and make one Molecule excelling
Whose myriads formed a tissue fine with plastic powers indwelling—
54

That ‘Protoplasm’ Light and Heat from their Sun-hidden sluices
Streamed on and stung into self-multiplying cells and juices—
Coaxed into creatures organised for simplest wants and uses.
These Molecules, impelled at first by just that Force mechanic
Which lifelike works in falling stones and crystals inorganic
We christen ‘Plastidules’—such plastic vivid stuff providing;—”
“O nothing like hard names in Greek, their weaker points for hiding
When to foregone conclusions Wits o'er cracking ice are gliding!
Here, crept in somehow while fine words our senses were beguiling,
See Life, mysterious Stranger, stands beside us blandly smiling!”—
A hint from Ranolf's Tutor this—his lecture-notes compiling.
“Then Chance and outward Nature's force compelled slow variation
In organs dowered with inward power of happy adaptation;
And creatures owning these endured; the rest died out neglected;
Defects from Sire to Son increased, or organs new perfected;
Thus for survival in the end the fittest were selected;
And Being's glorious cycle thus through all its grades unfolded,
The lower still advanced to higher,—lured, fostered, fed and moulded,
55

Or checked—killed off, as things around might well or badly suit them,
And favouring Chance or frowning chose to ruin or recruit them,
Till Monads grew to Man!—And whence his mighty Soul's resources?
Sunclear!—Each Atom has a Soul—the sum of all its forces—
Immutable—immortal—One—through all its myriad courses:
Each kind through chance-alliances, vicissitudes, convulsions,
Still true to its peculiar powers, attractions and repulsions.
And Plastidules have Souls as well—each Soul an aggregation
Of Souls of all the Atoms that it holds in combination;
But fickle, complex, varied, ever changeable and changing;
Through tangled files and piles on piles of finest fibre ranging,—
Till Man's great Soul at last their whole complexities embraces!
For Motion and Sensation are of all Soul-Life the bases;
(Touch a mimosa-leaf—it shrinks, a crab—it slinks off sideways;
To move—to feel, with Will—without, how close are their allied ways!)
Brain-molecules of course have both; and when, like church-bells ringing,
When stimulants, with nerves of sense for bell-ropes, set them swinging
Up in the belfry-brain, their subtle shiftings and vibrations
56

Are Consciousness and Thought, with all their endless commutations;—”
“Hoho! but here methinks the Ice with thundering cracks is starry!”—
“Down motor-nerves to muscles then, those tremors run nor tarry,
But Thought to Voluntary Act by reflex working carry.
And what are Likes—Dislikes?—Why, mere repulsions or attractions
Nerve-atoms keep—the source of all emotions—passions—actions.
As rose organic Life, the new accretions—complications
Roused in responsive brain by new external needs—relations,
Inherited, gave Instincts born with after generations:
Till, say, the White Ant's wondrous care for ‘tribal welfare’—rising
To moral worth that weal required—the brain still aggrandizing,
In Man to ‘Conscience’ soared at last, and ‘Duty’ self-despising!—
Yes! 'tis brain-atom-groups upbuild your stormy rage, you Tyrant!
Their countless links of forces forge your hopes, O heaven-aspirant!
While passion-atoms in your brain, pale Lover, 'tis, that pester
That blooming pile of Molecules (whose powers as such attest her,
Repelling while attracting too) your lovely peace-molester!”
57

IV.

“Brilliant that Evolution-theory!” cried
The youth's hard-headed, sceptical old Guide;
“Famous that Atom-creed (from India brought)—
But yet to solve the Eternal Mystery—nought!
“For whence came ‘Motion’ first? what is the Force
Which Motion gives to Matter in its course,
Or what when lying hid in Matter stayed?
And how is ‘Heat’ by mere vibrations made?
What sudden mystic transformation serves
To make them in that way affect our nerves
We label ‘Heat’? or can they tell aright
How undulating Ether gives us ‘Light’?—
The cause—nay, mode of all is lost in Night!
“Then whence came ‘Atoms’? whence their power to change
As Elements both form and essence?—Strange!
Here are accomplished Beings, skilled to tell
Both friends and foes when rushing on pell-mell;
Myriads that most in puzzling drill excel,
In cunning multiples attract—repel,
And practise pure Arithmetic so well!
A petty Pantheon of fine Godlets, see!
Making a miniature Mythology,
With furious loves, hates, powers, a set apiece,
And transformations weird that never cease,
Out-metamorphosing the Gods of Rome or Greece!—
Could Matter or Mechanic Force, in fact
Such chemic, mental feats originate—enact?
58

V.

“Next, whence came ‘Life’? and Life's ascending scale?—
For this, could Atoms and their Sphere avail?—
Well, that amazing Plastidule admit
Could start Life-forms—the Sphere around to fit,
(Though how Life sprung from Matter, Science gives
No hint—from lifeless things gets nought that lives;)
Grant, for such Forms to rise from grade to grade
That working wise Environment must aid,
Could modulate on such harmonious plan
The golden course the mighty Music ran
Till ‘closed the diapason full in Man;’
Still—if Life-germs and that wise Sphere indeed
Could to this grand array of Being lead,
Two things perforce their action must precede:
First—an unbounded impulse and desire
In living things to rise still higher and higher
In orderly ascent; on every hand
To spread on system—normally expand;
A self-constructing power to seize and hold
All from which aptest organs it could mould,
And let the germs of ampler life unfold:
And next, a World—forefashioned to refuse
All that erroneous tendencies might use—
Disorder need; forefraught with all supplies
For wants that made its tenants fitly rise—
For ordered Progress pre-arranged,—Earth, Seas and Skies!
“Was there not here an End—that guided—swayed—
Means from the first so suitably arrayed
To reach results so complex—well-defined?—
And what is this but Forethought—Purpose—Mind?”
59

VI.

Notes from lectures or from reading;
Talk between those two succeeding—
Student led and Tutor leading,
May we offer—not unheeding
Task of pruning—lopping—weeding?
Free Nature! how careless, confiding!
Half playfully, furtively hiding
Truths ever momentous, abiding,
In her least or her lowliest works!
There assurance of Power presiding—
Foreseeing—forethinking—foreguiding—
In silence and secrecy lurks!
Think of the foresight proved in that small fact—
Next century's oak within an acorn packed!
But ‘Mummy-corn’! O greater wonder hid
Than from the summit of its Pyramid
Those famous ‘Forty Ages’ saw or did!
Rome rose—toiled through long glories—slow decay;
Still, seeming dead, that grain's-germ ready lay
To shoot, a blade—a beautiful green birth
Soon as it touched ev'n England's warm moist earth!
Truly this Life-in-death with new life fired,
Some ‘knowledge of affinities’ required—
Some lasting holdfast to an end desired!
60

What sense in sense-less tissue there can be!
Mark—in a tiny mote you scarce can see
‘The movement to achieve an end precedes
And makes the organ for the end it needs.’
A floating jelly-speck in filmy skin—
Protean globule changing form at will—
Borne on by currents that revolve within,
Wraps itself round the mite of food it meets
And turns into a stomach! Feat of feats!
How do such prescient impulses begin?—
Mark other jellied sea-motes simpler still,
Where neither limb nor organ you espy,
Nor any structure Science can detect,
Expanding into spider-webs, erect
Shell-marvels of minutest masonry
That for ingenious geometric skill
With mightiest Angelo's or Wren's may vie;—
How do such impulses such ends fulfil?
‘Fancy the antenatal human Ear!’
(Says one consummate Master of Thought severe)
‘In secret framed—of microscopic size—
That grand Piano of three thousand strings,
Each to distinct vibrations fitly tuned
Of the outer air with which it ne'er communed,
Anticipates all Music's melodies.’
What! had the Cause from which this marvel springs
No mental power to regulate—review
All the relations of these complex things—
Purposely make them each to each so true?
61

But say, through Æons film by film 'twas spun,
With power to breed it passed from Sire to Son;—
By greater prescience then the end was won.
O wise dorr-beetle! you make fit supply
For eggs you lay the moment ere you die;
Look forward to results with foresight keen—
From want beforehand will an offspring screen
You and your ancestors have never seen;
With means most apt unconsciously achieve
Ends you know nothing of, nor could conceive!
Is there no Power to which your wants were known?
No guidance here—or sense beyond your own?
See working Bees, from whom their Queen has flown,
A sexless grub with ‘royal jelly’ feed,
And make it ‘grow a Queen’ new swarms to breed!
Could all the Reason, Science, Skill of Man,
Working their utmost since the World began,
Work towards an End upon a subtler plan
Or surer, than these brainless Insects can?

VII.

“Dear Matter-mongers! what, another God
To cap the crew created by your nod;
His work all this;—nor better work nor worse
Than when he tumbled out the Universe—
That rich result of Atoms in their dance,
That Chaos tossed to Cosmos by mere—Chance!
62

“Chance—Chance!”—O do not too irreverent deem
The youth, if wider teachings through him sent
A little thrill of mocking wonderment
At this superb idea of Chance Supreme:

1

“Come any Muse of—Fog! your fond voice raise!
Chant to great Chance some—disenchanting praise!
He said: ‘Against Resistance Pressure strained
Through Space, while Atom-showers in myriads rained:
I bade the glorious hurly-burly whirl,
The clusters cling, the Dervish-dances twirl;
I—hounding on the boundless blindman's-buff,
To build the Universe was God enough!’—
Sufficing God—this Chance!

2

“‘Prime Wizard I and King of Conjurors; say
Cardpacks by millions mixed before me lay;
No skill I used—no care to look or learn—
No knowledge of their sequences to spurn
Wrong combinations or the right retain;
All sleight of hand I scorned and craft of brain;
I shuffled—shuffled; twas my only spell—
And all—hey-presto! into Order fell!’—
Astounding God—this Chance!

3

“‘My happiest hazard bade this beauteous scheme
With forces every-way responsive teem;
Inspired the living plastic power that dwells
Expert in Atoms, Molecules, and Cells;
Their infinite propensities to strain
63

Towards ends they so triumphantly attain;
To pile up organs multiplied—as means
On means—to compass intricate machines!’—
Inventive God—this Chance!

4

“‘I gave the Elements the power and skill
To keep these Life-Machines ascending still;
Gave Earth and Seas and Skies the genius rare
Discreetly to select—extinguish—spare;
Made them a mould to shape each cunning cast,
Each newer marvel nobler than the last;
Gave Life and Nature answering powers, till both
Flashed forth the million miracles of—growth!’—
Aspiring God—this Chance!

5

“‘Lo! all results of all I did—not planned—
All of one kind, as all successful, stand!
No blots about my blind creations lurk;
No failures e'er disgraced my witless work;
My creatures no incongruous mixtures marred;
From all vagaries every race I barred;
From ways aberrant warded cell and seed;
Set limits to varieties of breed!’—
Methodic God—this Chance!

6

“‘My luck to no gross junctions lapsed or led—
Harpy or Centaur or Empusa dread!
In Earth's rock-depths on record never left
Worse malformations than a monstrous Eft;
No botch or bungle since my work began—
64

The monstrous Eft a miracle—like Man!
E'en forms extinct ordained due part to play
In one unfolding harmonised array!’—
Unerring God—this Chance!

7

“‘But O! of miracles the crown and cream—
Of my elaborate accidents supreme!
The brain I made from sense so subtly free
That first discovered it was made by Me!
O skill my suicidal skill to beat
And deify myself by self-defeat!
What other God such deadliest foe could frame
To turn High-Priest to glorify his name?’—
Surely no God—but Chance!”

VIII.

And then that old Enquirer, who
His free conclusions calmly drew
From facts alone his foes held true,
Would thus from time to time anew
The apologetic strain pursue.
O shining Apostles of Matter,
If in antitheistical panic
Effete superstitions you shatter,
In Chance and your Forces Mechanic
No Cause that is Primal you gain!
All notion from Nature dissever
Of Cause then (an idle endeavour!)
65

Or confess:—for the meanest of Forces
Which up to that rank you would strain—
Though but Motion's first faint indication;
Or, for something it holds in relation—
Say the Scene of its earliest stirring,
Beforehand—throughout—and for ever
Prepared for its sure operation;
Though too subtle that scene for sensation,
Any feeling, or seeing or hearing:—
You assume all the skill—the resources,
All the purpose to compass whatever
The final results may contain!
‘Your Newton's—Shakspeare's genius—('tis allowed)
Were latent once within a fiery cloud!’—
The marvel is, what from the first impelled
And guided onward in the course they held
Blind forces through all mazes—tangles—ties—
Till to such grand achievements they could rise;
Made from the first each step involve the next,
Unchecked—unfoiled—unfailing—unperplexed!
Find Being's slight beginnings slighter still,
Through ampler Æons creeping, if you will;
The less the means that lead to mighty ends
The more the Power employing them transcends;
The grand results themselves the slowlier grown,
The greater is the Prescient Purpose shown!
66

Chance is no Chance that works out wonders fine
As matchless Skill or Forethought could design.
But Law seems Chance, when Law's great system lends
All means it lets occur their destined ends:
Makes special ends that seem to fail, no less
New means to some more general success.
The Power that plays the game of Nature knows
All the results of all the dice he throws:
Whate'er turns up, it is to him the same;
High throws or low alike advance his game:
No lawless tampering with the dice he needs,
When such the game that every throw succeeds!
Necessity's no less an idle dream,
Though all results inevitable seem.
Law seems Necessity, if Will decree
That no exception to its Law shall be!
Necessity! its very name implies
'Tis an Effect itself, and must arise
From some compelling Cause beyond itself that lies.

IX.

But here's a new material forged! enough
To work these wonders all alone—‘Mind-Stuff!’
‘Each molecule of Matter has a germ
Of Mind attached called Mind-Stuff (mark the term)
Not Mind itself—but with its likes combined,
Able, so subtly linked, to turn to Mind!’
67

Well, not the prior question to discuss,
Whence came the ‘germ,’ and who attached it thus?
Here Science must a miracle endorse,
Or beg the point unproved (‘no Spirit-Force
Exists’)—assume it as a thing of course.—
Mind-Stuff!—Thought-Matter say; Death-Life; Black-White!
Can hyphens make all Nature's darkness—light?
You join two names—(but what is that when done?)
Of things unknown to prove them known—and one!
Or is Mind, Matter?—If on that you rest,
Give us three feet of Love (as children jest)
Which lest some cubic inch of Envy mar,
Hermetically seal it in a jar!
‘Ten times a Thought!’—bottle the product! Say
How many scruples weighty Reasons weigh!
Or polarise a flash of Wit, and find
At what nice angle Fancy's rays inclined
Start true reflections—off a polished Mind!

X.

Attraction—Atoms—Plastidules—'tis clear—
Impulsive organs—upward-guiding Sphere—
Motion—Necessity—or aught behind
Of simpler Force that you could feign or find—
All Second Causes these—whereby the First
Is of no jot of Might or Mind amerced.
But if to make them First your Faith incline,
Or make Mind, Matter's self; such Faith in fine
But shifts to them or this the powers divine
Old creeds to their ‘Creators’ would assign.
68

XI.

Yes! it seems—to one conclusion
No ingenious shift—illusion—
Should the Reason blind;
One great Fact defies rebuttal:—
All Existence, simple, subtle,
Points you with behest imperious
To a Source, profound, mysterious,
Ne'er to be defined;
Yet of Might so transcendental,
All the Powers that men call ‘mental’
Are its dim reflections merely,
Glimmerings of a Glory clearly
Inexpressible more nearly
Than as ‘Primal Mind’!

XII.

Yet of this First Intelligence confessed
Ineffable, may nought be fairly guessed?
Can we in sober reason think or feign
The ALL an Imperfection? or maintain
The Absolutely Perfect, an Ideal,
A Fancy, nowhere actual proved or real?
But say 'tis realised; what wonder we
Seeing so little of that All should be
Unable to discern how what is styled
‘Evil’ by us, through Nature running wild,
Can be with such Perfection reconciled?
69

A full round Moon the Universal Scheme,
We catch the Crescent's ragged golden gleam;
In Man's wide Faiths if hoary Light be found
Would feebly reillume the faded round,
Faint reflex of far glory!—'tis mayhap
Real as that ‘old Moon in the new Moon's lap’!
But since on two great negatives profound
Science and Metaphysics are at one,
And all their mightiest Masters most renowned—
Grant Darkness all its grandeur—own that none
Can prove ‘Divine Existence’ cannot be;
While for its ‘nature,’ all alike agree
Your Kants and Newtons, Doctors wigged and gowned,
Helpless as smockfrocked Hobnail at his plough,
Baffled before that mystery must bow;
On what compulsion must good sense allow
That this Unknown ‘First Cause’ in deed or will
Has just but so much power for good and ill
As in the Universe we see displayed?
When even the fraction seen of Power—Skill—Mind—
Say in that play of Atoms, so transcends
All human estimate, even Science ends
Her coolest quest bewildered and half blind?
Were it not then a paradox most strange
Should finite Mind, thus paralysed before
Its best-proved Actual, limit and degrade
All possible Existence to the range
Of what its impuissance can conceive?
We say, nor—Sages Positive!—ignore
70

What truths you teach, 'tis harder to believe
That which has done so much cannot do more
And all the Evil that exists retrieve
With compensating Good somewhere in store—
Than that the fault lies with the human Mind,
Too weak or lowly-placed the cause to find
Why from the first throughout the Universe
The best has not excluded all the worse.
And more preposterous it is to dream
The Universe is an abortive scheme,
Worked by a Power unequal to its task,
Or its presumed incompetence to mask,
Than that the vast Obscure which round us lies,
Somehow—somewhere—the Being must comprise
Our most exalted Nature must demand;
Reality than our Ideal more grand;
And therefore, in some way least understood,
Nay, which the Finite could not understand,—
Perfectly wise—just—powerful—loving—good!
To Reason less repugnant seems this creed,
And less credulity than theirs to need
Who for ‘First Cause’ in blind Momentum trust,
Or find Divinity in finer dust.

XIII.

Thus have we faintly shadowed forth
How, tutored by a Mind, sagacious, deep
With the true sceptic caution of the North,
Apt by no Master's word to swear, nor let
71

The current of a Creed in fashion sweep
Firm Reason off her feet whate'er its set,
How, for a Soul so led—bold—healthy—bright
As his—the Sea-bred Youth's of whom we write,
The young fresh faith in so-called ‘God’—that came
From deeper depths than Logic's, as before
Sprung greenly through Doubt's furnace, and no more
Shrivelled or shrunk in scientific blight,
Than dewy grass through window-panes descried
Waving unscorched in vivid flickering flame
Reflected from the fire that burns inside.
72

Canto the Fifth. Cloud-blowing.

1. Talk about the ‘Soul’—and ‘Immortality.’ 2. Ideal result of the work of an Ideally Divine Power—ultimate bliss for all. 3. Does ‘Evolution’ preclude Immortality? 4. Spirit-Life not excluded by the Material Universe, as (5) There may be an Unseen Universe beyond; or after; or (6) within this One—since Matter may refine to Spirit.

7. Is not ‘Cosmical Energy’ the outcome of Omnipotent Will? and (8) akin to Thought and Will in Man; both, emanations of Infinite Will? 9. This Will the Power that informs all Nature—‘Personality’ its clearest display. The union of this last with Matter being utterly inexplicable—what do we know of it when separated? how be sure it may not still exist? Want of sensuous experience of it no disproof. May not new organs await it even in the Atomic Universe?

10. Soul-truths perhaps only to be found and proved by Emotions. 11. That Man should rise by the False—a discord in Nature. 12. What makes the scheme of Existence rational, it is rational to hold true. 13. What if Immortality should have to be proved by a practical ‘reductio ad absurdum’ of its denial? 14. Hope.

I.

“The silvery dews on the meadows are blending
Like gauze with the gold of the buttercups' gleam;
The hawthorn is scenting the hollow green ways;
Its masses all snowy with blossom depending
Are sunlit emerging from faintly blue haze
Like a delicate dream!
73

O the leaflets—how innocent, frank, their unfolding;
What a sweet hidden twitter—the birds' callow speech!
Two loud muffled notes like a flute's—how they stray!
'Tis the Cuckoo—his weariless plaint still upholding—
Still calling for something still further away—
For a joy out of reach!
See the framework of traceried jet overshingled
With emerald scales, jewel-roofing of Spring!
Over canopy canopy brilliantly spread,
Made of gems, the transparent and shadowy mingled!—
—Just the Elm—with new leaves, and the Sun overhead;
'Tis a tent for a King!”
So Ranolf; beckoning to a settle rude
His Tutor, as their musings they pursued.
The youngster, drinking into heart and brain
Elastic freshness from the fragrant Morn,
Could not but launch out in a cheery strain,
As on the ‘Soul’ they touched—‘Immortal Life,’
(O noblest themes with direst discords rife!)
Treating Despair almost with joyous scorn.—
Sanguine, say you, his temper!—If his blood
Coloured his reasoning, haply 'twas as good
As props the atrabiliar doctrines dyed
So darkly on the melancholic side.
We ground on those mudbanks of Doubt alone
In the ebb of the world's heart or our own;
Tangled in shallows of Despondence dark
Only when life is at low-water mark.
Not in Man's healthiest, his completest state
Do such misgivings his wise joys abate:
For Confidence is Life—and Hope is health:
And youth's glad trust is worth most mental wealth!
74

II.

“What! will they say our hopeful trust is blind!
That the Heart's sunshine needs the clouded Mind!
Must Reason then be spurned from her high seat,
Or that most natural passion held a cheat?
That thirst for deathless life, that high desire
With which all wakened Intellects aspire,
As the dread Serpent of Eternity
Had bitten them with fangs like those accurst
Once fabled of the Dipsas—causing thirst
That quenchless burnt for ever! must this be
Held a mere lure to lead the human race
Through the long ages to some loftier place,
And from the myriad generations spent
And wasted in the wearisome ascent,
Evolve some sample of consummate skill
Whom powers with instincts harmonized should fill—
The clearest Reason and the purest Will?
That perfect race—must it, too, have its day,
Rise, growth, and culmination, and decay,
Then, like its predecessors, pass away?
Say, does ‘Supreme Intelligence’ contrive
A million shifts this vast machine to drive,
Only at such a failure to arrive?
Can neither check illusive Hope's uprise,
Nor make the illusion's fathomless disguise
At least impervious to poor human eyes?
What ‘Mind Divine’ would show for one short hour
Such want, yet waste, of Goodness and of Power?
If such the Universe, at once declare
Some Demon-Bungler has been busy there;
75

Willing and yet too clumsy to deceive,
Creating spirits to aspire and grieve
And die without redemption or reprieve!
And not this World's,—this human race alone—
But all the Soul-drifts—countless throngs unknown
In many an unimaginable Star
Whirled round unnumbered Suns that shine afar!
Myriads on myriads fleeting like a breath,
Endless vicissitude of Life and Death;
The swarming star-shoals coming—going—whence
Or whither? without object in the dense
Infinitude of futile impotence!
“Nor boots it that the central Primal Cause
Itself might boast of permanence or pause,
Be an ‘Eternal Now’—a ‘Boundless Here,’
If all his emanations gone and spent
And every fleeting vain development,
Though after million Æons disappear
Left neither in a Seen or Unseen Sphere!
No! any ‘Mind’ I would believe or teach
As Power Supreme, Divine, Eternal, One,
Should be at lowest competent to reach,
And to eternise ere his work were done,
The good of All through happiness of Each!
Each life progressive and the last result
In bliss unqualified should all exult;
Perfect as well as permanent should be
Creation's glorious Crown and every glad degree!
76

III.

“But does that beauteous Evolution scheme
Prove Man's great Hope a too ambitious dream?”
“Why think,” the Elder said, “it should or can?
Prove if you will the human race began
Far off in Manlike Ape or Apelike Man;
Detect or fancy links that would annul
Diversities in shape of bone or skull;
Prove Conscience, Sense of Duty, Right and Wrong,
From self-preserving instincts, weak or strong,
Tribal or Individual, slowly came;
Are not Man's soaring spirit and its claim,
Its maker, mystery, miracle, the same
As if in that more vulgar conjuring way
He sprang at one great leap from ruddy clay?—
'Tis not what height he rose from, but the height
He reaches—makes Man need the Infinite;
'Tis not his birthright—but the Soul he sways
When born—such need into a Hope must raise!”—

IV.

Said Ranolf, “What about the notion
With which some potent Pundits batter
Their foes, in obstinate devotion
To one absorbing hobby—Matter—
That in the Universe around
No ‘room for Spirit’ can be found?”
77

The Old Man from his poke outdrew
His pipe and tapped the ashes out,
Filled it from twisted pouch anew,
For ‘Lucifers’ then felt about,
And lit it with the third-struck match,
As half-delayed by lurking doubt;
Then from his pursed lips slowly blew
A whiff of smoke, and seemed to watch
How from its centre it would curl
Outward in circles, then o'erhead
In dainty spirals float and spread:
“Just like their wondrous vortex-whirl
Of Atom-rings”—he smiling said;
Then gently, taking circuit wide,
Yet half impatiently replied:

V.

“What! no room for your ‘Soul-Life’ they say? so with Atoms and Vortices packed
Is your Ether, no Space is there left for your ‘Ghosts’ to exist in or act?
Might a dullard presume but to ask, while on this side or that side they brawl,
Can their utmost sagacity prove that the Universe Seen is the All?
Think of ‘Energy’—mystical wonder! an Infinite Ocean of Force
Through the visible Universe flying—of Heat, Light and Motion the Source!
Though to active or latent it change, in amount undiminished it flows;
78

Indestructible then and Eternal?—but who can its wellspring disclose?
From the Sun ever effluent—true: but to Him from what fountain effused?
What becomes of it all? but a part in the visible Universe used,
While the bulk of it rushes at speed inconceivable—whither away?—
Nay the part—must it quench in this Cosmos its Æons on Æons of play?
The conditions it works in, for ever be just what you find them to-day?
Must the whirl of the planets wax fainter and fainter till into the Sun
They are plunged, and the Suns on their mightier centres be dashed one by one,
At each crash upward-flinging a billion-years' flicker of quickening heat
Efflorescent in Worlds ever fewer, the whirl and the waste to repeat
Till the last on a measureless cinder-heap sink and—the Farce be complete?
Must the Universe-Fire—enormous—æonian—burn itself out,
And the Energy cease when it dies? Shall a failure so infinite flout
At the last this ineffable wonderful outflow of purposeless Might?—
Better think it may well from and wend to some Universe hidden from sight!
79

VI.

“Need we ask if that Universe elsewhere in Space—this familiar one—be?
Or a new kind of Space to be measured more ways than our hampering ‘Three?’
Or belike in a kind of Existence by Space and by Time unconfined,
In the thoroughly ‘Absolute?’ both of them blanks to our limited Mind?
Why, the Cosmos whose surface we see, what behind it may lurk or within?—
Up from solids to liquids, from liquids to gases, still subtler, more thin,
Look how Matter refines; then as fluid Electric, as Light or as Heat,
Or their medium Ether, half loses its nature; and lastly its height
Of pure subtilty—rather the point where it possibly vanishes quite—
Gravitation—Attraction, attains: while the finer of every grade
Can the grosser, it seems, interpenetrate, permeate, freely pervade!
Who shall say then, where ‘Spirit’ begins, where the merely Material ends?
Must that process refining be stopped where our limited ken it transcends?
To Existences pure, immaterial, rather believe it pursued,
Which the presence of Matter nowise from the place that it filled would exclude!—
80

So may thousands of Worlds all of Spirit no twinkle or flame would betray
Through the starry expanses (if Spirit need any locality) stray,
Or each other pervade intermingling, in rest unimpeded or flight,
Unperceived, undetected, unknown,—a Universe hidden from sight!”

VII.

A cliff-top lone and high;
A noon-day soft and calm;
Sea melting into sky;
Sky into liquid balm;
Horizon lost!—
The vast expanse how bare!
Unmoving, here and there,
Clouds floating on the Sea,
Ships white-sailed, hung in Air,
Four—five at most:
How tiny each—a toy
Upon the pale blue, fair,
Silent Immensity!
—So better to enjoy
Their dreamy talk,
Our Student and his Guide,
He of the shaggy hair
Snow-white—the weary-eyed,
Now on the cliff-top bare
Together walk.
81

“But for Power?” the latter was saying, “Can we who are forced to believe
That the First Cause of All is Intelligence greater than Man can conceive—
Guess the mode of its Power?—Just think of the Force in this Cosmos we trace:
This Earth flying miles as we speak it, a thousand a minute through Space!
In a second from Pole to Equator Auroral effulgences leap!
Then the billion-leagued shudders of Light, how they speed through the Infinite Deep!
Yet beside Gravitation—Attraction, all these may but linger and creep!
Ever swifter, more subtile, intense grows the Power that recedes and ascends;
To Omnipotence still and Ubiquity nearer and nearer it tends!
What should stay its progression—that Power expanding, intensified still,
At the point where we cease to perceive?—But confess, to Omnipotent ‘Will,’
As of Force the sole fountain our reason can reach, ere the quest must be stanched,
We may follow, and fairly, the Might that across the Immensities launched
Wafts a million of Worlds on its breath in a sprinkle of galaxy-spray,
And can weave the gold meshes of Life our Earth-speck is webbed with to-day!—
So this Cosmos itself of that Will were the outcome, expression and sign,
Were its infinite-spreading and endlessly-ramified Instrument, Shrine,
And myriad-organed Embodiment ever and wholly divine!
82

Worked from some inconceivable Source, say, of mental or physical Light—
Inconceivable truly, but real,—in the Universe hid or in sight!

VIII.

“Two Mysteries freely confest by the sages of Science we find:—
Through the visible Universe clearly an ‘Energy’ works like a Mind;
For the grasp of the Senses too fine: never known but with Atoms combined;
Never caused by these Atoms—for how can dead Matter originate Force?
And how linked with the Universe ever a Mystery dark as its source.—
Through the brain of Mankind works an ‘Energy’—Thought call it—Consciousness—Will;
Never known but when joined with brain-atoms; itself imperceptible still;
Never caused by these Atoms,—for how can mere Matter, though living—be Thought?
And how linked with the Brain such a secret, in vain is the clue to it sought.—
Are they kindred these ‘Energies’ then? and the last, what if simply 'twere true
'Tis a drop of its Ocean, the first, and as such indestructible too!
Why—of Matter one mightiest Mystagogue—vaunted of Theists a rod—
A candid and fearless fine creature whose only one bugbear was—‘God,’—
83

Whose disgust with dead Ghosts in the Sky made him blot out the sky for the sod—
Has recorded of this very ‘Thought’—in its Essence who deepliest delves
Must acknowledge it one and the same with the Essence of Things-in-Themselves—
Of this Universe then! and 'tis clear that the happy result undesigned
Of his proving them both to be Matter—is proving them both to be Mind!
Soul-Energy then and the Cosmical—are they not both of one kind?—
Of ‘Omnipotent Will,’ say, but streamlets or filaments, ample or slight?
The immediate Effluence then of that Essence Divine, which aright
To reveal—though divinely bedimmed lest its naked transcendency smite
On perception too finite and feeble with splendour unbearably bright—
Is the use of this Garment of God—this Universe ever in sight?

IX.

“Aye indeed, 'tis Intelligent Power—Omnipotent Will, as it seems,
Feeds the ‘Energy’ mystic which through this molecular Universe streams,
And can guide or unite with—inform—all its Forces in all their degrees,
And impart just so much of itself as its purpose or wisdom may please;
84

From its lowest display—Gravitation—your Newton and Locke call ‘divine,’
Up through sensuous impress and impulse instinctive till clearest it shine
In the Conscience and Will of Mankind. Surely this, well may Reason maintain
Is the ‘Soul’ in the Atoms the fancy or faith of that German would feign—
Is the ‘Mind-Stuff’ to molecules joined—in the rock—in the plant—in the brain!—
But the union of Body with Thought, if Man has no faculties fit,
Says Science, its Nature to tell; on the truth can he possibly hit
Of what follows their severance? hidden the link—and not knowing a whit
Of the Essence of either when linked—are we hopelessly forced to admit
That Man's Personality—peerless on lofty-willed Conscience its throne—
Of that Energy ever divine the divinest Investiture known—
Could not live though the link should be broken—its vassal and vehicle gone?—
O we never have known it—forsooth! with Experience inch-deep at best!—
Why, the truth of what lies beyond Sense, say how should the Senses attest!
The invisible has not been seen, the inaudible heard! 'tis confest:
But o'erdone by the surface of things as we helplessly dabble and glower,
In such Infinite Mystery plunged—in the hands of such Infinite Power,
85

Can we tell, do you think, all that Power may do to combine and to change
Even Atoms through millions of Worlds that from solar to nebular range,
Though a thread of its working in them with its work on our Earth-speck may blend?
While between what our microscopes show and the bounds to which Atoms extend,
Even here, are such structural wonders—complexities,—change without end,
As the keenest sagacity stagger—the finest conceptions transcend.
Can we tell what is possible, then, or impossible either, to Might
Such as that, with such Essence as Mind—in a realm imperceptible quite,
Though within their molecular bounds—in the Universe plainly in sight?—”

X.

“Yet after all”—and here the wary old
Campaigner in the war against Despair
Fell back upon a fortress he would hold
When Reason's forces seemed too hardly prest,
Rearing a broader banner in brighter air
And sounding notes that like a bugle's blare
Triumphant echoes woke in Ranolf's breast:
“Whate'er that Unknown Realm—of Spirit whole
Or matter wholly past perception—be,
That hiding-place and homestead of the Soul;
Its nature and mysterious destiny;
86

If entrance 'tis impossible to gain
For Science to that royal-rich domain,
And Intellect alone be found too poor
A tool to burst the Imperial Palace-door,
(Though I must think the expanding range allowed
To Man's Experience will supply some day
A basis, starting-point or link whereby
Science Demonstrative will pierce the cloud
And back with glittering spoil come laden gloriously!)
But if this may not be, why fear to say
The Soul, its sphere and nature must be such—
For Intellect thereon to logicise
Is just to try rich colours with the touch,
Or test melodious sounds with keen bright eyes;
As Dante's heard the sculptured Widow's speech—.
On that white frieze-like Purgatorial bank
Whose end each way his eyesight could not reach—
Ask death for her son's murderer as she sank
At Trajan's feet, and ceased not to beseech
Till his roused virtue had vouchsafed her prayer;
Then saw the sound of visible replies
The marble Emperor made her voiceless cries.
That feat we would not ape, but rather dare
Confess that in an atmosphere so rare
The leaden wing of Logic cannot rise;
That by Emotion, not Reflection, best
The Soul is borne aloft in that fine air—
Feeling, not Thought, her fiery chariot there!
The highest Sentiment were then confest
The base whereon the highest Truth must rest;
The highest Truth itself, not such—about
87

Whose sureness 'twere impossible to doubt;
But as to sureness, in the next degree,
Such as, not proved, most probable might be:
True till a higher Truth were felt or found
And by the beating hearts of men around
As such accepted—welcomed—honoured—crowned;
Still raised, refined, as Science purged away
What Error in her reach obscured its ray;
Aught from that lower realm that might alloy
Its gold, would Logic fasten on—destroy;
And everything she honestly disproved,
Must be relinquished—howsoe'er beloved:
With one proviso, proved default of proof
Is from disproof a million leagues aloof.
“Let us cling then, my lad, to that glimpse of a Truth about Truth we have caught,
That Emotions may teach it as well as Sensations. Aye! perish the thought
‘What we feel with the fingers is all—what we feel with the heart shall be nought!’
That the heart and the soul reach beyond all the senses is ever confest;
Then for what lies beyond all the senses, their evidence must be the best.
And if many, the best and the deepest to feel and to think, can arrive
By emotions most pure to that grandest conviction—the Soul shall survive,
Such a theorem rightly they prove, do they not? from premises read
Not in reasons but feelings alone—Q.E.D. of the heart, not the head?—
88

XI.

“There's a ‘Tendency making for Righteousness:’ True! which abundantly proves
A ‘Supreme Moral Power’ exists; all the more that so slowly it moves,
So accords with the gradual processes physical Nature so loves.
If to physical Harmony—Order, the Universe wins as a whole,
May not Order and Harmony Moral be fixed for its loftier goal?—
Now the thinkers and feelers—those best and profoundest, sincerely declare
With such Power—of Reason all perfect and Will the divinest—to share
Inexpressible inner communion, purifies, elevates most
The Spirit that yearns to be like it. We know too, the pride and the boast
Of their race—the magnificent Souls who have loftiest towered through Time,
By the depth of their love of that Power have been stirred up and strengthened to climb—
And through faith in Immortal Existence, have soared to that climax sublime!
What! did Man o'er those animal cycles to royal pre-eminence rise
But by stimulants—impulses true—true outer and inner supplies,
Yet by means that are false and illusive to moral perfection must tower—
89

True Sun and true Air make the plant, mock Sun and sham Air make its flower!
Are not forces through Nature the nobler, to nobler productions that tend?
And shall Man by the false and deceptive, most truly the lower—ascend?
Can His upward be really Her downward? one refluent wave can he be—
Flowing back 'mid the millions that run right-ahead in the Universe-Sea?
Is he placed topsy-turvy, as 'twere, with harmonious Nature at strife—
Like a slide set by chance upside-down in the rich Magic-Lantern of Life?

XII.

“Look! here's an arrangement for Being—half-finished; a scheme incomplete;
By itself, full of outrage on Justice and Love; a remorseless deceit
For the high aspirations it rouses; a jargon, a nightmare, a cheat!
Like a Nineveh fragment of tile, nicked all over with arrow-head lines,
Broken off through the middle of each—a farrago of meaningless signs.
Comes a cuneate Linguist profound, fills the lines up with words he has guessed,
With ‘Survival of Soul,’ ‘Probation by Evil,’ ‘Reward’ and the rest,
90

Till it seems all consistent and rational, beautiful, wisest and best!
Were it sensible then, or wild whim, to believe the lost half of the tile
Was o'ernicked by the Ancient Clay-writer with words in a similar style,
To be found, when they dig up the whole of the mighty Assyrian pile?

XIII.

“'Tis my faith—should this Soul-Life, my lad, in the Intellect's hotter attacks
Melt away like a counterfeit flower Superstition has modelled in wax,
And the Heart could not rear the live blossom,—yet Nature and Fate would be heard—
Would ‘reduce’ its denial at last to a crushing, terrific ‘absurd;’
Let Mankind down a withering process of practical Logic be hurled;
Prove by vivid Experience how,—mortal-soulled—a mere animal World
To a Bedlam and Chaos must come—universal putridity—rot!
So be forced to assume Immortality—hold it Humanity's lot—
Whether ‘Logic’ the truth of the Fact could directly demonstrate or not!
91

XIV.

“Life's the green Cone-cap hiding for its hour
That golden Californian poppy-bud;
Death pulls it off—outbursts the Soul—the flower!”—
(So mused that time-worn Sage)—“The Soul when freed
From its environment of flesh and blood
Will flush into full-blooming power
The riddle of its folded fate to read.—
See the dilating Sun
Down to the mountains sunk!
An awful human Eye
Beneath such sable brows—
Cloud-stripes like Cedar-boughs
Soft-floated off some giant trunk
Of ancient Lebanon.
Why are you watching there,
O great red Mystery—why?—
Just as—with ominous glare
Yet grandly—solemnly sublime,
O'er mortal Life and fleeting Time,
Watches Eternity!
—Watches; and yet can throw
A magic mellowed glow
Of Hope o'er Life's mysterious doom,
As balmy Evening's soothing gloom
You sanctify—illume!—
92

The sandbank of the Sea-lagoon
You glorify to gold;
Crimson the jet-white sandbirds—soon
To cease their restless run, and fold
Their wings on sea-roost cold.
I saw you rise this Morn.
On the black Mountain's rim there came
Some little tongues of shifting flame;
They linked—a dome grew slow in sight,
Then throbbed—a sphere of blinding light!
Low down, right opposite,—
The wan full Moon, dead-white,
Disconsolate—forlorn,
Lingered in shy retreat
To see what glad reception might
Her dazzling rival greet.
—So looks poor Faith at Science. Yet
Why should she at the splendour fret,
(I thought) the glory shun?
Her turn will come; that rival bright
Will fill—or own her full of light
Ere all be done!”
93

Canto the Sixth. Land-Life or Sea-Life?

1. Choice of a profession. 2. ‘Physic.’ 3. ‘Law.’ 4. ‘Divinity.’ 5. Again to Sea. 6. Sea-sketches. Sunset on the Line. 7. A luminous Sea. 8. An Iceberg.

I.

O blest escape from psychologic Quest
And metaphysic Sieves for sifting air!
Life-theories and their seesaw Swing at rest,
Life's livelier Roundabout on earth to share!—
Not unamused, ‘in that obscure sojourn
Though long detained,’ our Optimist must turn
To some profession now, and haply learn
How in the hungry press of strugglers best
The means of life his own right hand may wrest.
But better is the narrow humble sphere
Which sets from childhood's days before the eyes
Some calling which to climb to were a prize,
Which, difficult to win, is therefore dear—
Than wider means which leave the cultured lad
Himself to choose what path of life to run;
Let Fancy tell what Duty should be done,
Make worthless what can be for wishing had,
And prove how too much choice is worse than none.
94

And this felt Ranolf—puzzled sore to name
Church—Physic—Law—which most attractive seemed,
Or rather least repulsive should be deemed.

II.

What marvellous study like the human frame!
What webs and tissues by that living loom
Woven to rarest texture, richest bloom;
What wefts and warps of flexile ducts that wind
In never-tangled courses intertwined;
What mechanisms intricate, exact,
In orderly profusion ranged and packed;
What cunning cordage curiously inlaced;
What delicate engines of supply and waste;
What fine concoctions and witch-juices strange
For metamorphosis and magic change;
What subtlest forces balanced and combined;
Leaving poor human skill so far behind,
All Art seems artless, all Invention blind!
(Wonders, all Chance! some wondrous Sages say!)
But then how saddening, that superb array
No more in healthy and harmonious play,
But festering in disorder and decay!
What grander triumph can Experience show
Than the cool Surgeon's, who in conquering strife
With fell disease, with science-guided knife
Dares open wide the dreadful door of Life
Some perilous moments, and his dexterous feat
Of desperate rescue rapidly complete
With sure decisive stroke, lest the grim Foe
Should entrance gain and all his work o'erthrow!
“Aye!” thought our student, with a transient glow,
95

“For object so exalted who denies
The labour of a life were well bestowed?
But then, alas! to that proud power the road
Through fetid chambers of Dissection lies
Whereat a very Ghoul's foul gorge would rise.”

III.

Well, cannot Law awake some genuine spark
Of true ambition—pay for patient toil?
What spectacle more pleasing than to mark
Some Master of inimitable fence
Strike Falsehood to the heart through every foil
And feint of scoundrel skill? mark learning, sense,
And trained acumen flash their sunlike rays
Through all the vile, perversely winding ways
Of vice; illuminate the burrowed maze
And crannies Craft and Cunning know to shape,
And stop their every earthhole of escape!
Is not the Law a mighty mesh to snare
The many-shifted meanness of mankind?
Of cheated Innocence the Champion fair
Against all wrongs by tyrant Wealth designed?
Its task, what nobler since the world began,
To sort and settle by right Reason's plan
All deeds Man does or duties owes to Man?
To stamp the drill and discipline of schools
On the rude progeny of fertile Chance;
Through Time's still widening wilderness to chase
With the slow hounds of principles and rules
(Though mostly distanced in the dubious race)
The ever-doubling hares of Circumstance?
Nay! may not even youth's impatience glance
96

With pitying interest or perhaps with praise—
At that mole-eyed devotion of old days
Which with such mousing perseverance strove—
Such creeping subtlety and crabbed love,
To fit dead forms to living ages, lacking
Responsive facts that made their sole defence;
In search of reasons, dull inventions racking
For aims that had to reason no pretence;
And stretching Ingenuity to cracking,
To reconcile absurdity to sense?—
“Fine theories all!” thought Ranolf—“but that bowl
Of Law—what golden bias guides its roll
We know; how riches crush the right—how long
Perverted learning bolsters up the wrong;
And doubtless as distasteful it must be
To dabble in diseased morality
As physical corruption. Is it true
Besides, that Wrong, like Right, to get its due,
Let Justice fairly judge between the two,
Must have its Advocate, whate'er he feel,
To brawl and burst with simulated zeal?—
'Twere odious as, for those sly silent fees,
To cant condolement with high-fed Disease,
Paddle with Luxury's pampered pulse—and steal
Through sham sick rooms with cat-like pace and purr
Sleeking palled Fashion's pleasure-ruffled fur.”
The petulant rash judgments of a boy
Were these—all too impatient of the alloy
Which human doings that have most of gold
Too strictly analyzed must needs unfold?—
They were enough to sway him, so are told.
97

IV.

Try then the Church. “What Church?” our youngster sighed:
“Is there within the world's circumference wide
A Church or any Temple—in this dearth
Of Faith, with half her heavenly cables snapt,
Hope's anchor scarcely left—has life or worth
To make its intellectual votaries feel
What in old days they felt; that martyr zeal,
Forgetfulness of present self and rapt
Possession of the Infinite on Earth
That gave a grandeur to the Life it scorned?
But who would brook a Church if unadorned
With absolute love of Truth? unless it gave
To Thought the utmost freedom it could crave;
Followed where'er it led, true Reason's light;
Avowed itself to Truth an utter slave,
Truth ever and Truth only—come what might?
And who that loved his own free soul could bear
To work, a digger in the dark gold mine
Of spiritual Truth, or bold researches try
Where scientific Doubts with deadly shine
Like Icebergs freeze, or Faith's bleached fragments lie
Whitening the hot Saharas of Despair—
Handcuffed and fettered with the leaden links
Of dogmas stereotyped—creeds cut-and-dry
And double-dry? heart-paralysed by dread
Of all but what smooth smug ‘Society’
That feels by fashion and by custom thinks,
Gives pass and permit to? Whose Soul so dead
As dare put on a Soul-deliverer's power
98

While forced or fain a Law Divine to trace
Of Spiritual Storms in frothy-bubbling suds
Raised in some legal Washtub where they scour
And rinse hot-steaming ritualistic duds—
Awestruck lest ultra-rubric rag and clout
Lose cabalistic colour, gloss or grace,
Ere it can rage its tiny tempest out?—
Or who with strangely grovelling Quixotry
Would think to quell the Evil all about
With candlesticks and censers?—satisfy
The crave for Infinite Good that cannot die,
With trim and tinselled haberdashery?
Who, in a fight so fierce in such an age,
With lackered shields and silvered wooden swords
Of ceremonious mummeries would engage?
With pagan posture-tricks such warfare wage
And pantomime, in place on Thespian boards—
Stage-twirlings in the death-tug! Who could dote
In imbecile expectance to assuage
Sharp pangs of soul with prayers run up by rote
In self-complacent trills with pompous throat?
Would any heart remorse had desperate driven,
Or milder sense of ‘Sin’ abased, on heaven
In accents guided by the gamut call,
And do-re-mi-sol-fa the God of All?”
His youthful scorn would graver minds endorse?—
Senses or Reason—any hook to raise
The loach-like groundling Soul with—all must praise;
The end—Soul-raising—no one contravenes;
But why absurdly deify the means?—
Then greater is a Priesthood's duty too
Old Truth admitted to apply—enforce,
99

Than to explore the Universe for new.
But how much priestly truth is granted true?
Science her freshets still must thunder down
Of physical Truth, though drowsing Churches drown.
Should not the eye be open?—hand be free
To seize at once whate'er the eye may see
Of nascent truth, and let the dying go?
What, if your Priests, like Shepherds half asleep,
Over the gold-brown gloss of dogmas keep
Vain watch, while half their sheep a-hungered stray
To succulent green pastures far away?
For Forms of Faith, though beautiful they be,
If e'er the Truth, their living spirit, flee,
What are they like but cold and stony flowers,
Those geysers boiling up through emerald bowers
In far-off islands he was soon to see,
Clothe with a sparry spume, that hardens white
Around the perished plant concealed from sight,
But still retains in delicate array
Each form of tiny leaf and tender spray,
Cold, crumbling, colourless—in lifeless pride—
No growing green, no circling sap inside!
But how should he presume by thought or deed
To set up for a sower of Truth's seed?—
Not his the credence that could teach a creed;
The doubly-sure assurance that could feed
Another's faith with fervour of its own.
Faith has its temperate as its torrid zone;
And widely different as joy from grief
Is certain knowledge from sincere belief.
100

V.

Well, ere his choice was fixed—his father died,
And left the youth with more of gold supplied
Than for his moderate wishes would provide.
So to the Sea, his passion all the time,
He took. To rove from clime to clime
At least would gratify his ruling taste:
At least, he knew, upon the watery waste
His buoyant spirits kept in play would be—
His soul unfettered still, his fancy free.

VI.

And now behold this Ranolf once again
Tossing, a student-sailor on the main;
Sending from time to time, home-hearts to please,
Some glimpses of the glories of the seas,
And snatches of reflection—such as these:
“How grandly—when throughout the silent day,
Some ample Day, serene, divine,
Beneath the glowing Line,
Our helpless Ship had hung as in a trance
In light-blue glassiness of calm that lay
A wide expanse
Encircled by soft depths of ether clear,
Whose melting azure seemed to swim
Surcharged and saturate with balmiest brilliancy—
How grandly solemn was the Day's decline!
Down as if wholly dropped from out the Sky
The fallen Sun's great disc would lolling lie
Upon the narrowed Ocean's very rim,
Awfully near!
101

A hush of deep suspense, grave, almost grim,
Wrapt all the pure, blank, empty hemisphere:
While straight across the gleaming crimson floor,
From the unmoving Ship's black burnished side,
There ran a golden pathway right into the coré
Of all that throbbing splendour violet-dyed;
Whither it seemed an easy task to follow
The liquid ripples tremblingly o'erflowing
Into the intense and blinding hollow
Of palpitating purple, showing
The way as through an open door
Into some world of burning bliss, undreamt of heretofore!
Whose heart would not have swelled, the while
Deep adoration and delight came o'er him
At that stupendous mystery, close before him!
Not less, but more stupendous that he knew
Perchance, whate'er the subtle surface-play
Of Science had to teach of level ray
Reflected or refracted; and could say
Nay, almost count the millions to a mile,
How far away
That pure quintessence of dark fire, deep-lying
In fathomless Flame-Oceans round him flying,
His inconceivable circumference withdrew:
Knew marvels of the fringe of flames that frisk
In ruddy dance about his moon-masked face,
Set on like petals round a sunflower's disc—
Each glorious petal shooting into space
A thousand times as far as Earth's vast globe is thick!—
Could tell of that Fire-firmament immense
Whose element-melting heat intense
Makes iron into vapour boil—
With alternating outrush and recoil
102

Now towering high in polar crests of gold,
Now spreading broad—a cestus round him rolled;
While Chasm-Spots that worlds were pebbles thrown into,
Gape wide beneath—close up—are many or few—
As crests or girdle take their turn,
With sway and resway rhythmic burn!—
Stupendous ever! aye, though Science fancy-quick
Foreguess full many a World
Worn out, and, crushed to cinders, flying fleet;
Or in cold black rotundity complete
Into his cooling bosom headlong hurled,
Just by collision to strike out fresh heat,
And feed with flame, renew and trim,
And keep awhile from falling dim
That monstrous unimaginable wick!
Say rather—for one system's billioned years keep bright
Its awful, mystic, God-created Light!”

VII.

“Naraka—Niflheim—Tartarus—or Tophet!
From what dead heart and poor unpicturing brain,—
Too dull to see or realize
Its own demoniac phantasies—
Of Bonze, Skald, Brahmin, talapoin, or prophet—
Goth, Syrian, Greek, or old Hindu,
Of Aryan or Semitic strain,—
Came singly or from all upgrew
That rank arch blasphemy and dream insane
Of torture-gulfs where Infinite Love
All human guess or gauge above
103

Preserves in fiery suffocation
The myriads of its own creation?
I care not—I; but when I came
On deck in darkness yesternight,
That very place appeared to be
Laid bare before my startled sight!
For far and wide in pale effulgence dire,
One boundless ghastly welter of white fire,
The Ocean rolled; a hoary Sea
Of awful incandescence rolled and broke away
In bursts of firespray—tongues of lambent flame
That writhed and tossed in burning play,
And with a baleful glare
Put out the stars—quenched what mild radiance fell
From the clear skies, as that unhallowed spell
Of blighting Superstition can outblaze
With its fierce coruscations of despair
The genuine rays
Of light from heaven that fall like dew,
Divine illuminings serene and true.
“And yet such thoughts did ill beseem
This vision—so would any deem,
And other lore and wiser learn,
Who o'er the taffrail marked the excess
And marvel of the loveliness
Of those swift-whirling volumes of soft light
Fast-flashing with gold star-drops sparkling bright
In myriads through the alabaster glow—
Those spangled gyres and wreaths of dazzling snow
That still in wide expanding trail
Went roaring off her stern
So grandly as our Vessel through
104

The surging phosphorescence flew;
Streaming behind her, as the snowy plumes
Of those rich birds the Aztecs old
Reared at their royal Town of Gold,
Stream when at dusk they slowly sail
Streaking the depth of Amazonian glooms.
Ah! surely no sound heart these glories seeing
Would thence derive the notion of a Being
Creating only to destroy;
Or framing Phlegethons and fire-washed caves
Swarming with frenzied Spirits thicker than these waves
With millions of medusæ all alight with joy!”

VIII.

“St. Lawrence! yes, I well remember
Thy Gulf—that morning in September.—
Fast flew our Ship careering lightly
Over the waters breaking brightly;
Alongside close as if their aim
Were but her vaunted speed to shame,
Sleek porpoises like lightning went
Cleaving the sunny element;
Now where the black bows smote their way
How would they revel in the roaring spray!
Like victors in the contest now
Dash swift athwart the flying prow;
Or springing forward three abreast
Shoot slippery o'er each foamy crest—
Shoot upwards in an airy arc
As three abreast they passed the bark:—
105

Pied petrels coursed about the sea
And skimmed the billows dexterously;
Sank with each hollow, rose with every hill,
So close, yet never touched them till
They seized their prey with rapid bill:—
Afar, the cloudy spurts of spray
Told that the grampus sported there
With his ferocious mates at play.
Meanwhile the breeze that freshly blew
From every breaking wavetop drew
A plume of smoke that straightway from the sun
The colours of the rainbow won,
So that you saw wherever turning
A thousand small volcanoes burning,
Emitting vapours of each hue
Of orange, purple, red and blue.
The Sky meanwhile was all alive
With snow-bright clouds that seemed to drive
Swiftly, as though the Heavens in glee
Were racing with the racing Sea:
Each flitting sight and rushing sound
Spread life and hope and joy around;
Ship, birds and fishes, Sky and Ocean
All restless with one glad emotion!—
“But what a change! when suddenly we spy
Apart from all that headlong revelry—
Pencilled above the sky-line, like a Spectre drear,
A silent Iceberg solemnly appear,—
Pausing ghost-like our greeting to await.—
The crystal Mountain, as we come anear
And feel the airs that from it creep
So chilling o'er the sunny Deep,
106

Discloses—while it slowly shifts,
Now blue, faint-glistening semilucent clifts,
Now melancholy peaks, dead-white and desolate.
“But comes it not, this Guest unbidden
This wanderer from a home far-hidden,
Dim herald of the mysteries of the Pole
With tidings from that cheerless region fraught—
Comes it not o'er us like the sudden Thought,
The haunting phantom of a World apart,
The blank and silent Apparition
That, ever prompt to gain serene admission,
Lurks on the crowded confines of the heart,
The many-pictured purlieus of the Soul;
Nay, sometimes thrusts its unexpected presence
Upon our brightest-tinted hours of pleasaunce?—
“That Polar realm is ransacked—known;
Our outside World of Matter, still
Lies pervious to determined will:
And shall the World of Spirit never
Its secrets yield to true endeavour?—
Five thousand years have doubtless shown
But little of that Spirit-zone:
For Science is a Child as yet
At hornbook rude and primer set:
And Man is just emerging from the past
Eternity of Darkness; from the vast
Æons and ages of a measureless Night,
Rubbing his eyes at the unwonted light:
How should he read all things aright
And say what can or cannot be—or utter
Out of his heart the Universe, whose growth
107

And whole existence yet is but the flutter
Of an ephemeral water-moth?
Take fifty thousand years—a span
In the conceivable career of Man;
Think you, with riper knowledge—skill profounder—
No grand explorers, bolder, sounder,
Will break into that Spirit-zone—reveal
Not iron-bound realms of ruthless ice and snow
Or narrow straits where freezing waters flow,
No shooting lights, or shifting gleams;
But prospects trustier than the dance and play
Protean of those dumb magnetic storms—
Auroras lovelier than our sanguine dreams
Of fondest Inspiration—Forms
Of Being more essentially divine
Than all that in Thought's topmost triumphs shine?
And prove how real the region whence our stray
And shadowy intimations find their way;
With what true signs and tokens rife
Those glimmering dreams and fine forebodings steal
Into the circle of our little day,
Into the glad familiar Sea of Life?’
108

Canto the Seventh. The Shipwreck.

1, 2. Ranolf shipwrecked. 3. Rescued by the island's inhabitants. 4. The ‘Pure Benevolence.’ 5. He resolves to see more of the country and people.

I.

How like white steam-spurts swiftly disappearing
When railway trains are rapidly careering,
Fumes, frets and melts away this Life of Man!
Bowling before the fresh fair breezes ran
Our Ranolf's stately Ship; and now was nearing
A range of rugged hills whose olive-green,
Sleeked over faintly with a sunny sheen,
Upon the starboard bow was seen.
Obliquely towards one shadow she was steering
That, darklier-painted, showed a harbour's mouth,
Because between her and that goal
There stretched a hidden dangerous shoal.
For towering topmasts of the Kauri pine
The Ship had voyaged to the verdant Isles,
109

The Sea-girt El Dorado of the South
Whose mountains famous since for many a mine
Of marvellous wealth, and reefs of riches, stand
The golden baits from bygone ages planned
To draw the swarms that, sweltering in distress
Cannot be won by nature's simpler wiles,
From climes where Life in very overstrife
To live chokes out redundant rival Life,
To this remote sweet wilderness,
This Life-deserted, Life-desiring land.
In deep blue sky the sun is bright;
The Port some few miles off in sight;
The pleasant Sea's subsiding swell
Of gales for days gone by may tell,
But on the bar no breaker white,
Only as yet a heavier roll
Denotes where lurks that dangerous shoal.
Alert with lead, and chart, and glass,
The Pilot seeks the well-known pass;
All his familiar marks in view
Together brought, distinct and true.
Erelong the tide's decreasing stream
Chafes at the nearer bank beneath;
The Sea's dark face begins to gleam
(Like tiger roused that shows his teeth)
With many a white foam-streak and seam:
Still should the passage, though more rough,
Have depth of water, width, enough.—
But why, though fair the wind and filled
The sails, though masts and cordage strain,
Why hangs, as by enchantment stilled,
The Ship unmoving?—All in vain
110

The helm is forced hard down; 'tis plain
The shoal has shifted, and the Ship
Has touched, but o'er its tail, may slip:
She strains—she moves—a moment's bound
She makes ahead—then strikes again
With greater force the harder ground.
She broaches to; her broadside black
Full in the breakers' headlong track;
They leap like tigers on their prey;
She rolls as on they come amain,
Rolls heavily as in writhing pain.
The precious time flies fast away—
The launch is swiftly manned and sent
Over the lee, with wild intent
To anchor grapplings where the tide
Runs smoother, and the Ship might ride
Secure beyond the raging bar,
Could they but haul her off so far.
The boat against her bows is smashed:
Beneath the savage surges dashed,
Sucked under by the refluent wave,
They vanish—all those seamen brave.
On—on—the breakers press—no check—
No pause—fly hissing o'er the wreck,
And scour along the dangerous deck.
The bulwarks on the seaward side,
Boats—rudder—sternpost iron-tied
With deep-driven bolts (how vain a stay!)
The weight of waters tears away.
Alas! and nothing can be done—
No downward-hoisted flag—no gun
Be got at to give greater stress
111

To that unheard demand for aid
By the lost Ship's whole aspect made—
Herself, in piteous helplessness,
One huge sad signal of distress.
Still on—and on—the tide's return
Redoubling now their rage and bulk,
In one fierce sweep from stem to stern
The thundering sheets of breakers roar,
High as the tops in spray-clouds soar,
And down in crashing cataracts pour
Over the rolling, tortured hulk.
Death glares in every horrid shape—
No help—no mercy—no escape!
For falling spars dash out the brains
Of some—and flying guns adrift
Or splinters crush them—slaughter swift
Whereof no slightest trace remains;
The furious foam no bloodshed stains:
Up to the yards and tops they go—
No hope—no chance of life below!
Then as each ponderous groaning mast
Rocks loosened from its hold at last,
The shrouds and stays, now hanging slack,
Now jerking, bounding, tensely back,
Fling off the helpless victims fast,
Like refuse on the yeast of death
That bellows, raves and boils beneath.
One hapless wretch around his waist
A knotted rope has loosely braced;
When from the stay to which he clings,
The jerking mast the doomed one flings,
It slips—and by the neck he swings:
112

Death grins and glares in hideous shape—
No hope—no pity—no escape!—
Still on and on—all day the same,
Through all that brilliant summer day
Beneath a sky so blithe and blue
The wild white whirl of waters flew;
In stunning volleys overswept
And beat the black Ship's yielding frame,
And all around roared, tossed, and leapt—
Mad-wreathing swathes of snow! affray
More dire than most disastrous rout
Of some conceivable array
Of thronged white elephants—as they
Their phalanx broke in warfare waged
In Siam or the Punjaub—raged
And writhed their great white trunks about,
With screams that shrill as trumpets rung,
And drove destruction everywhere
In maddened terror at the shout
Of turbaned hosts and torches' flare
Full in their monstrous faces flung;—
Wide horror! but to this, no less,
This furious lashing wilderness,
Innocuous-seeming—transient—tame!
Still on—still on—like fiends of Hell
Whiter than Angels—frantic—fell,
Through all that summer day the same
The merciless murderous breakers came!
And to the mizzen-top that swayed
With every breach those breakers made,
Unaided, impotent to aid—
113

The mates and Master clung all day.
There—while the Sun onlooking gay
Triumphant trod his bright highway;
There, till his cloudless rich decline,—
Faint in the blinding deafening drench
Of salt waves roaring down the whine
And creaking groans each grinding wrench
Took from the tortured timbers—there
All day—all day—in their despair,
The gently brave—the roughly good,
Collected, calm and silent stood.
That hideous doom they firmly face;
To no unmanly moans give way,
No frantic gestures; none disgrace
With wild bravado, vain display,
Their end, but like true men await
The dread extremity of Fate.
Alas! and yet no tongue can tell
What thoughts of life and loved ones swell
With anguish irrepressible,
The hearts these horrors fail to quell.
The Master urges them to prayer,
‘No hope on Earth—be Heaven your care!’—
And is it mockery—O but mark
Those masts and crowding figures, dark
Against the flush of love and rest
Suffusing all the gorgeous West
In tearful golden glory drest!
Such soft majestic tenderness,
As of a Power that longs to bless
With ardours of divinest breath
All but one raging spot of Death:—
114

For all the wide expanse beside
Is blushing, beauteous like a Bride;
And a fierce wedding-day indeed
It seems, of Life and Death—with none to heed.
And now the foam spurts up between
The starting deck-planks; downward bowed
The mighty masts terrific lean;
Then each with its despairing crowd
Of life, with one tremendous roar
Falls like a tower—and all is o'er.

II.

One of the worn despairing ring who round
Their chief upon the mizzen-top had found
A dizzy shelter in the pelting spray,
Had Ranolf borne that dreadful day;
Down with the headlong mast was thrown;
And as his consciousness flashed back again
(A moment in the act of falling gone)
He found himself almost alone
With desperate clutch still clinging to the top
Beneath its lee that fenced the lashing rain
Of breakers off—else all had been in vain.
'Mid tangled rigging, to the vessel's side
With violent efforts he contrived to glide;
Then, by the chains protected, in the shade
Of the green flying roof the wild waves made,
In that dark hollow's gloom a hideous space,
Steadying his thoughts and strength he clung,
While in his ears the roaring ceaseless race,
The driving avalanche that knew no stop,
115

With stunning dread reverberation rung.
Beneath him frequent timbers swung
In fragments to and fro; so, quick as thought,
He seized a lucky chance to drop
Into the weltering foam, and caught
A floating piece of plank, and kept
Despairing yet determined hold,
While it and he like lightning swept
To where the waves less wildly rolled:
A larger fragment next he gained;
Then, with what failing strength remained,
Straight towards that dear-bought harbour strained.

III.

Scarce half a mile the favouring tide
Had forged his drifting plank ahead,
When in the gathering gloom he spied
A big canoe with bulwarks red;
And heard the beat of paddles plied
With strong recurrence—right good will.
Half dead with cramp, fatigue, and chill,
He called; the paddles all were still.
He called again; a cheery strain
Gave answer as the rowers sung;
And forth the bounding vessel sprung
And shot his wayward plank beside
With swirling swiftness as a coot
Or wild duck will alighting shoot—
Ere it can stay its headlong way—
Along the ruffled water. Then
An eager crowd of deep-voiced men,
Dark-visaged, wild—in unknown tongue,
116

Their hoarse congratulations cried,
As safe on board the backed canoe
With rapid talk and much ado,
That kindly crew the Stranger drew.
With fiercer chaunt they pulled ashore;
There from his clothes the water wrung,
Lit fires, brought food, and on the floor
His bed of fresh-pulled ferns o'erlaid
With clean elastic mattings made;
Tried all that care or kindness can
Of genial Earth or generous Man—
Though one half desert, one half savage—
To smooth and smile away the pangs
Of grief and bodily pain and dread
Of horrible Ocean's wreck and ravage,
Whose shadow like a nightmare hangs
O'er one who lives, of many dead,
Just rescued from her ruthless fangs.

IV.

So ended that death-stricken day.—
But how felt Ranolf as he lay
Rescued and weary—and could scarcely deem
'Twas real, what seemed a wild tremendous dream,
That all his comrades bold had passed away?
Bursting with thanks, O doubt not, to the Power
Whose laws had let him live through such an hour:
And yet—to think of all that life so marred
And mangled, swept away like worthless chaff
While merciless mocking Nature did but laugh!—
“This pure Benevolence hits somewhat hard
It must be owned,” thought he, “or rather say
117

Inexorable laws must have their way.
Were any breach of law allowed, who knows
What infinite disasters would ensue!
Such certainty is safest, we suppose,
For creatures such as Men are. Trite and true!
Yet such a hell of havoc as we saw
To-day makes one half dubious of such law;
Results so dire, alas! who would not call
Demoniac still—if what we see were all!”

V.

When from the beach with swollen corpses strewn
Like seaweed, 'mid the waste of wreck upthrown
His sea-chest had been brought, and honestly
Returned him—as he much desired
More of this people and their land to see—
(Reports all made—leave asked and given first)
To the far neighbouring continent he sent,
To pay for food and service as required,
For woven stuffs and many an implement
And trinket these barbarians most admired.
Their language then he set himself to learn
With zeal, until the vessel's slow return;
And when in that, and their strange customs versed,
With followers often changed and cheaply paid
From place to place and tribe to tribe he strayed:
And so his way, amused and loitering, made
Into the interior far—to slake the thirst
Adventurous no disasters had allayed.
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