University of Virginia Library

Love thou thy kind! Yea, but that larger kind,
The dumb, fierce, roving, nameless kind that live
Scarce less within our frames? True kinsmen these,
Only too near. Thought, travelling slowly back,
Through the long, darkened corridors of Time,
Sees, like some traveller gazing down a gorge,
Perturbing visions, dimly prowling shapes
Threatening and ravenous, fiercely tooth'd and claw'd,
With eyes which stir, and redly glare across
The intolerable darkness. What of these?
Are these our brethren? Yonder crouching form,
Chattering, half prone, the inarticulate man,
The two-legg'd wolf—is he my brother too?
Another kinsman? Lo the family
Grows till the very welkin shrieks and groans
At its portentous hugeness! Must I pine
To share with him the lodges of the Past?
Aye or to join him, clasp his hand, and kiss,
Should I—the little thinking speck called me—
Survive this scheme of things, and—roused from sleep—
Walk in new pastures? Now may God forbid!
Yet dare I not deny him. Truly mine
Are those, dull, wistful, puzzled, slave-like eyes,
Mine too that sullen dreamful slothfulness,
Which were content to squander endless time
In uttermost inaction; aye or grope,
Like a stray'd child lost in some alien house,
Now here, now there, without a scope or plan,
Up and still up innumerable stairs,
Or down grey labyrinths, a dismal maze
Of wild, distraught, and vaguely tangled thoughts
Leading no whither. Mine, too, clearly mine,
That sense of dark and maddened impotence,
Such as assails the soldier maimed and left,
Or haunts some sick man, when his drowsy thought
Fights 'gainst the potent drug which tames his brain,
And knows his helplessness, yet knows it not,
Nay doubts if he be still a living man,
Or whether he in truth be sane or mad;
For whom the hated present is his All,
No past, no future; one vast whirling void,
Across whose endless pain-filled moments come
Sounds such as flow from inarticulate throats,
And visions too—No gracious airy shapes
Such as besieged the happier Attic brain,
But things without a name, that spawn and grow
In foul prolificness; a teeming mass
Shapeless and brainless; swelling like the tide,
Gelatinous, hideous, to Life's utmost bounds;
Or feeling round it with ten thousand legs,
Threadlike, or wormlike; writhing, ell-long things
Which sprawl, entangle, clutch and maim themselves;
Or, loathlier still, yon black-winged carrion swarm
Which, like some fetid curtain, lifts and turns
Through the dense air; then settles closely back,
Breeding corruption. Painted visions, too,
Come floating thickly through the tangled woods
On sail-like wings, decked with a thousand eyes.
Eyes! Eyes! At that one word the very air
Seems choked with them! Innumerable eyes
All gazing downward with a quenchless hate,
A hate no Cain for sure hath ever earned,
Not though he slew his Abel fifty times!
Ox-eyes and dog-eyes; eyes of harmless things
That frisk in plain and woodland. Nay forbear!
I pray you curse not, suffering eyes, have pity.—
A pity never shown to you or yours!
Yet still they grow and grow; sea, shore, and plain,
Earth, our hard-trodden earth, to its last sod
Sickens beneath them. The soft summer skies,
Nay God's great heaven of heavens itself appears
One nightmare horror of accusing eyes!

Pass, pass, poor spirit. Time is vast and deep,
The dead are dead. Let not thine anguish'd soul
Thus beat and maim itself in mouldering vaults
Reeking of blood, dark lusts, old cruelty.
Rather let it uplift itself, and bask
On the broad summits of an earlier world,
The windless mountain-tops of ancient day,
Ere man, or beast, or silly buzzing fly
Troubled that stillness. Bid it pasture there;
And, as the silence filters slowly down
To the last quivering nerve of its torn depths,
Let it absorb—what only silence shows—
How man's worst worst still hath a hopeful core,
How the night's darkest breathes of coming day;
And in that changeless, mild, pellucid air,
Leaning adown the abysmal hollows, mark
The eternal drama wending on its way;
That drama which hath known no opening scene,
That drama for which Time reserves no end;
Till, through its tangles, slowly like a dream,
May dawn—What is it? sight? or sound? or thought?
Something to see and feel? or merely guess?
A play within a play? a solving touch?
Some vision of completeness? Who knows what?
That which in any case lay hidden there
Ere yet the eternal Playwright fashioned it:
That end to which all else were but a dream
Dreamed by some sick man. Thought, eternal Thought,
Itself sole actor, and sole dramatist,
Goal of whatever hopes, and strives, and loves,
Wholly divine, and therefore wholly human,
From which our best and clearest stands as far
As sounds from words, as words from living thought,
As death from life. So leave it. Let no cry,
Song, word, or even prayer disturb that hope,
Seeing that what is Highest hath no words,
And what is Best transcends the need of prayer,
And that which we desire may yet be ours,
Though not as now we crave. Sleep, and beyond
That merciful enfolding faithful sleep
Lies—What may be. Only of this be sure—
That He who ruleth hath no preference,
No narrow choice, no blind exclusiveness;
We and our kin, to the last drop of blood,
The first dull dawn of hovering consciousness,
Shall share and share. Aye, and not only we,
But all the crowded denizens of Space,
World after world, till the long muster-roll
Be closed and sealed. Then?—Ah well then, poor Faith,
Fainting thou fallest, and canst see no more!
Yet—even as earth's streams leap to join earth's sea—
May we not, myriad parts of one vast whole,
In no obscure or arbitrary sense,
Seeking renew, and by such seeking find
Each in that Wholeness his own larger Self?

So runs the Hope. Now to our several tasks.