(So tight he kept his lips compressed, Scarce any blood came through)
You looked twice ere you saw his breast Was all but shot in two.
Well,' cried he, 'Emperor, by God's grace We've got you Ratisbon!
The Marshal's in the market-place,
To see your flag-bird flap his vans
Where I, to heart's desire,
Perched him!' The chief's eye flashed; his plans
Soared up again like fire.
The chief's eye flashed; but presently
Softened itself, as sheathes
A film the mother-eagle's eye
When her bruised eaglet breathes ;
'You're wounded!'-'Nay,' the soldier's pride
Touched to the quick, he said,
'I'm killed, Sire!' And his chief beside, Smiling, the boy fell dead.
JUST for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat -
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, Lost all the others, she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
were they purple, his heart had been proud! We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us, they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
We shall march prospering, not through his presence; Songs may inspirit us, · - not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done, while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire; Blot out his name, then; record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,
Forced praise on our part-the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him— strike gallantly, Menace our heart ere we master his own;
Then let him receive the new knowledge, and wait us, Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
THE world of books is still the world, I write ; And both worlds have God's providence, thank God, To keep and hearten. With some strnggle, indeed, Among the breakers, some hard swimming through The deeps, I lost breath in my soul sometimes, And cried, 'God save me if there's any God!' But, even so, God saved me; and being dashed From error on to error, every turn Still brought me nearer to the central truth.
I thought so. All this anguish in the thick Of men's opinions — press and counterpress, Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now Emergent — all the best of it, perhaps, But throws you back upon a noble trust And use of your own instinct, — merely proves Pure reason stronger than bare inference At strongest. Try it, fix against heaven's wall Your scaling-ladders of school logic, mount Step by step! - sight goes faster; that still ray Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell, And why, you know not, (did you eliminate, That such as you indeed should analyze ?) Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God. The cygnet finds the water; but the man
Is born in ignorance of his element, And feels out, blind, at first, disorganized By sin i' the blood, his spirit-insight dulled And crossed by his sensations. Presently He feels it quicken in the dark sometimes, When mark, be reverent, be obedient, For such dumb motions of imperfect life Are oracles of vital Deity,
Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say, A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph, Defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's, – The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps, Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old Scripture.
'There is none good save God,' said Jesus Christ. If he once, in the first creation-week,
The Devil only has done it, and his heirs,
The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose: The world's grown dangerous. In the middle age I think they called malignant fays and imps Good people. A good neighbor, even in this, Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up To mince-meat of the very smallest talk, Then helps to sugar her bohea at night With your reputation. I have known good wives, As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar's;
And good, good mothers, who would use a child To better an intrigue; good friends, beside, (Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do By sleeping infants. And we all have known Good critics who have stamped out poet's hopes, Good statesmen who pulled ruin on the state, Good patriots who for a theory risked a cause, Good kings who disembowelled for a tax, Good popes who brought all good to jeopardy, Good Christians who sate still in easy chairs And damned the general world for standing up. Now may the good God pardon all good men!
Appears to souls who live in 't (ask Carlyle) Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours- The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip- A pewter age, mixed metal, silver-washed - An age of scum, spooned off the richer past, - An age of patches for old gaberdines,
of mere transition, meaning nought Except that what succeeds must shame it quite
If God please. That's wrong thinking, to my mind, And wrong thoughts make poor poems.
Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill discerned
By those who have not lived past it.
Mount Athos carved, as Alexander schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man.
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