Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;

And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,

As the earth had done her best, in my

passion, to scale the sky : Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,

Not a point nor peak but found and

fixed its wandering star; Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,

For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast, Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,

Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last ; Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone, But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new : What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon; And what is,-shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,

All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole, Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth: Had 1 written the same, made versestill, effect proceeds from cause, Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;

It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,

Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled :

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are! And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught:

It is everywhere in the world-loud, soft, and all is said:

Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:

And there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head !

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;

Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;

For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,

That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.

Never to be again! But many more of the kind

As good, nay, better, perchance: is this your comfort to me?

To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind

To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands? There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;

The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;

What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour,

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky.

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence

For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized? Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence? Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized? Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:

But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;

The rest may reason and welcome; 't is we musicians know.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,

Sliding by semitones till I sink to the minor,-yes,

And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,

Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;

Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

RABBI BEN EZRA

GROW old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

1864.

The last of life, for which the first was

made:

Our times are in his hand

Who saith, "A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

Not that, amassing flowers,

Youth sighed, "Which rose make ours, Which lily leave and then as best recall?

Not that, admiring stars,

It yearned, "Nor Jove, nor Mars;
Mine be some figured flame which
blends, transcends them all! "

Not for such hopes and fears
Annulling youth's brief years,

Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!
Rather I prize the doubt

Low kinds exist without,

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.

But I need, now as then,

So passed in making up the main ac

count;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

Ay, note that Potter's wheel,
That metaphor! and feel

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,

Thou, to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
"Since life fleets, all is change; the
Past gone, seize to-day!"

Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

He fixed thee 'mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,

This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest:

Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

What though the earlier grooves,
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and
press?

What though, about thy rim,
Skull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,

The new wine's foaming flow,
The master's lips aglow!

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos ! "Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the

moon.

"Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,

But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;

Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:

Also this isle, what lives and grows

thereon,

And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold,

Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish

That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,

And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine

O'the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,

A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;

Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun,)

Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,

And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,

Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;

Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown

He hath watched hunt with that slant whitewedge eye

By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue

That pricks deep into oakwarts for a

worm,

And says a plain word when she finds her prize, [selves

But will not eat the ants; the ants themThat build a wall of seeds and settled stalks

About their hole-He made all these

and more,

Made all we see, and us, in spite : how else?

He could not, Himself, make a second self

To be His mate; as well have made Himself:

He would not make what He mislikes or slights,

An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:

But did, in envy, listlessness or sport, Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be

Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,

Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it.

Because, so brave, so better though they be,

It nothing skills if He begin to plague. Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,

Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,

Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,

Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;

Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded

thyme,

And wanton, wishing I were born a bird. Put case, unable to be what I wish,

I yet could make a live bird out of clay : Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban Able to fly?-for, there, see, he hath wings,

And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire,

And there, a sting to do his foes offence, There, and I will that he begin to live, Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns Of grigs high up that make the merry din Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.

In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,

And he lay stupid-like,-why I should laugh;

And if he, spying me should fall to weep Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, Bid his poor leg smart less or grow

again,

Well, as the chance were this might take or else

Not take my fancy: I might hear his ery And give the manikin three sound legs

for one,