PART X THE BETTER LIFE HEARD ARE THE VOICES BUT heard are the voices, "Here eyes do regard you The brave, to reward you; Work, and despair not." THOMAS CARLYLE (from Goethe). HOW TO LIVE HE liveth long who liveth well. Of living most for heavenly gain. He liveth long who liveth well! Of true things truly done each day. Waste not thy being; back to Him 'T is but to be, and not to live. Be what thou seemest! live thy creed! Let the great Master's steps be thine. Fill up each hour with what will last; The life above, when this is past, Sow truth, if thou the truth wouldst reap: A HAPPY LIFE HORATIUS BONAR How happy is he born and taught, Whose passions not his masters are, Who envies none that chance doth raise, Who hath his life from rumors freed, Who God doth late and early pray, This man is freed from servile bands, GRADATIM SIR HENRY WOTTON. HEAVEN is not reached at a single bound; I count this thing to be grandly true, We rise by the things that are under our feet; We hope, we resolve, we aspire, we pray, And we think that we mount the air on wings While our feet still cling to the heavy clay. Wings for the angels, but feet for men ! We borrow the wings to find the way - From the weary earth to the sapphire walls; pray, But we build the ladder by which we rise A HINDOO'S SEARCH FOR TRUTH ALL the world over I wonder, in lands that I never have trod, Are the people eternally seeking for signs and steps of a God? Westward across the ocean, and northward beyond the snow, Do all stand gazing, as ever, and what do the wisest know? Here in this mystical India, the deities hover and swarm, Like the wild bees heard in the tree-tops, or the gusts of a gathering storm ; In the air men hear their voices, their feet on the rocks are seen, Yet we all say, "Whence is the message, and what may the wonders mean?" A million shrines stand open, and ever the censer swings, As they bow to mystical symbol or the figures of ancient kings; And the incense rises ever, and rises the endless cry For the destiny drives us together, like deer in a pass of the hills: They are gods, these kings of the foretime, they are spirits who guard our race: Ever I watch and worship; they sit with a marble face. And the myriad idols around me, and the legion of mutter ing priests, The revels and rites unholy, the dark unspeakable feasts! What have they wrung from the silence? Hath even a whisper come - Of the secret - whence and whither? are dumb. Alas! for the gods Shall I list the word of the English, who come from the utter The Secret, hath it been told you, and what is your message to me? It is naught but the wide-world story how the earth and the heavens began, How the gods are glad and angry, and a Deity once was man. I had thought, "Perchance in the cities where the rulers of India dwell, Whose orders flash from the far land, who girdle the earth with a spell, They have fathomed the depths we float on, or measured the Sadly they turn from the venture, and say that the quest is vain. Is life, then, a dream and delusion, and where shall the dreamer awake? Is the world seen like shadows on water, and what if the mirror break ? Shall it pass as a camp that is struck, as a tent that is gathered and gone From the sands that were lamp-lit at eve, and at morning are level and lone ? Is there naught in the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are hurled, But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling world? The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep, With the dirge, and the sounds of lamenting, and voices of women who weep? A. C. LYALL. RESPONSES NEVER from lips of cunning fell Out from the heart of Nature rolled The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew Ever the fiery Pentecost, Girds with one flame the countless host, RALPH WALDO EMERSON (The Problem). DE PROFUNDIS THE face which, duly as the sun, The tongue which, like a stream, could run |