But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose
To know the mind that stirs between the wings
Of bees and building wasps, or fills the woods
With myriad murmurs of responsive sense
And true-aimed impulse, rather than to know
The thoughts of warriors.
If conscience has two courts
With differing verdicts, where shall lie the appeal?
Our law must be without us or within.
The Highest speaks through all our people's voice,
Custom, tradition, and old sanctities;
Or he reveals himself by new decrees
Of inward certitude.
And Cruelty his right-hand minister,
Pity insurgent in some human breasts
Makes spiritual empire, reigns supreme
As persecuted faith in faithful hearts.
Your small physician, weighing ninety pounds,
A petty morsel for a healthy shark,
Will worship mercy throned within his soul
Though all the luminous angels of the stars
Burst into cruel chorus on his ear,
Singing, 'We know no mercy.' He would cry—
'I know it,' still, and soothe the frightened bird
And feed the child a-hungered, walk abreast
Of persecuted men, and keep most hate
For rational torturers. There I stand firm.
I read a record deeper than the skin.
What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips
Descend through generations, and the soul
That moves within our frame like God in worlds-
Convulsing, urging, melting, withering-
Imprint no record, leave no documents,
Of her great history? Shall men bequeath
The fancies of their palate to their sons,
And shall the shudder of restraining awe,
The slow-wept tears of contrite memory,
Faith's prayerful labour, and the food divine
Of fasts ecstatic-shall these pass away
Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly ?
Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain,
And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace
Of tremors reverent ?-The Prior.
The fence of rules is for the purblind crowd ;
They walk by averaged precepts: sovereign men,
Seeing by God's light, see the general
By seeing all the special-own no rule
But their full vision of the moment's worth.
'Tis so God governs, using wicked men—
Nay, scheming fiends, to work his purposes.
But when you see a king, you see the work
Of many thousand men.-Blasco.
They talk of vermin; but, sirs, vermin large
Were made to eat the small, or else to eat
The noxious rubbish.-Blasco.
Next to a missing thrust, what irks me most
Is a neat well-aimed stroke that kills your man,
Yet ends in mischief.-Lorenzo.
Pooh, thou 'rt a poet, crazed with finding words May stick to things and seem like qualities.
No pebble is a pebble in thy hands :
'Tis a moon out of work, a barren egg,
Or twenty things that no man sees but thee.
END OF THE SPANISH GYPSY.'
That mortal frame wherein was first begun
The immortal life of song.
To the far woods he wandered, listening,
And heard the birds their little stories sing
In notes whose rise and fall seem melted speech-
Melted with tears, smiles, glances-that can reach
More quickly through our frame's deep-winding night,
And without thought raise thought's best fruit, delight.
When shadows lengthen from each westward thing,
When imminence of change makes sense more fine
And light seems holier in its grand decline.
The fruit-trees wore their studded coronal,
Earth and her children were at festival,
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