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If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: The book of Earth - -Author: Alfred Noyes - -Release Date: May 20, 2022 [eBook #68134] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at - https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images - generously made available by The Internet Archive/American - Libraries.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF EARTH *** - - - - - - -_THE TORCH-BEARERS—II_ - -THE BOOK OF EARTH - - - - -_WORKS OF ALFRED NOYES_ - - - COLLECTED POEMS—_3 Vols._ - THE LORD OF MISRULE - A BELGIAN CHRISTMAS EVE - THE WINE-PRESS - WALKING SHADOWS—_Prose_ - TALES OF THE MERMAID TAVERN - SHERWOOD - THE ENCHANTED ISLAND AND OTHER POEMS - DRAKE: AN ENGLISH EPIC - POEMS - THE FLOWER OF OLD JAPAN - THE GOLDEN HYNDE - THE NEW MORNING - _The Torch-Bearers_— - WATCHERS OF THE SKY - THE BOOK OF EARTH - - - - - _THE TORCH-BEARERS—II_ - - THE BOOK OF - EARTH - - BY - ALFRED NOYES - - [Illustration] - - NEW YORK - FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY - MCMXXV - _Copyright, 1925, by_ - FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY - - _All rights reserved, including that of translation - into foreign languages_ - - _Printed in the United States of America_ - - - - -CONTENTS - - - PAGE - - I—THE BOOK OF EARTH - - I. THE GRAND CANYON 1 - II. NIGHT AND THE ABYSS 11 - III. THE WINGS 22 - - II—THE GREEKS - - I. PYTHAGORAS - - I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD 29 - II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE 37 - - II. ARISTOTLE - - I. YOUTH AND THE SEA 50 - II. THE EXILE 60 - - III—MOVING EASTWARD - - I. FARABI AND AVICENNA 77 - II. AVICENNA’S DREAM 85 - - IV—THE TORCH IN ITALY - - LEONARDO DA VINCI - - I. HILLS AND THE SEA 95 - II. AT FLORENCE 110 - - V—IN FRANCE - - JEAN GUETTARD - - I. THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN 125 - II. MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES 137 - III. THE SHADOW OF PASCAL 146 - IV. AT PARIS 154 - V. THE RETURN 164 - - VI—IN SWEDEN - - LINNÆUS 169 - - VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION - - I. LAMARCK AND BUFFON 187 - II. LAMARCK, LAVOISIER, AND NINETY-THREE 195 - III. AN ENGLISH INTERLUDE: ERASMUS DARWIN 202 - IV. LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_ 209 - - VIII—IN GERMANY - - GOETHE - - I. THE DISCOVERER 215 - II. THE PROPHET 226 - - IX—IN ENGLAND - - DARWIN - - I. CHANCE AND DESIGN 231 - II. THE VOYAGE 242 - III. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS 249 - IV. THE PROTAGONISTS 273 - V. THE _VERA CAUSA_ 311 - - X—EPILOGUE - - EPILOGUE 325 - - - - -I—THE BOOK OF EARTH - - -I - -THE GRAND CANYON - - Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth. - - Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon, - Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine, - I came to the dreadful brink. - - I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth - Splitting apart, into two hemispheres, - Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god. - On the brink of the Grand Canyon, - Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows, - From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down, - Down from abyss to abyss, - Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming - Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings, - The inhuman ages, alien as the moon, - Æons unborn, and the unimagined end. - There, on the terrible brink, against the sky, - I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting - Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped - Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges - That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down. - - A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock, - The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light - It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it. - It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun. - All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots. - I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men. - Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss - Endlessly on. - Far down, as a cloud sailed over, - A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs, - Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite, - Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow - With smouldering colours of those buried fires - Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb. - And there, so far below that not a sound, - Even in that desert air, rose from its bed, - I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado, - The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade, - The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains, - For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder, - Rolls to the broad Pacific. - From Flaming Gorge, - Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain - Of subject canyons, the green river flows, - Linking them all together in one vast gulch, - But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn, - With names like pictures, for six hundred miles: - _Black Canyon_, where it rushes in opal foam; - _Red Canyon_, where it sleeks to jade again - And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below; - _Split-Mountain Canyon_, with its cottonwood trees; - And, opening out of this, _Whirlpool Ravine_, - Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls - With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire; - _Kingfisher Canyon_, gorgeous as the plumes - Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues; - _Glen Canyon_, where the Cave of Music rang - Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song; - _Vermilion Cliffs_, like sunset clouds congealed - To solid crags; the _Valley of Surprise_ - Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass; - _Labyrinth Canyon_, and the _Valley of Echoes_; - _Cataract Canyon_, rolling boulders down - In floods of emerald thunder; _Gunnison’s Valley_ - Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail; - Then, for a hundred miles, _Desolation Canyon_, - Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road - Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world; - _Gray Canyon_ next; then _Marble Canyon_, stained - With iron-rust above, but brightly veined - As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it; - Then deep _Still-water_. - And all these conjunct - In one huge chasm, were but the towering gates - And dim approaches to the august abyss - That opened here,—one sempiternal page - Baring those awful hieroglyphs of stone, - Seven systems, and seven ages, darkly scrolled - In the deep Book of Earth. - Across the gulf - I looked to that vast coast opposed, whose crests - Of raw rough amethyst, over the Canyon, flamed, - A league away, or ten. No eye could tell. - All measure was lost. The tallest pine was a feather - Under my feet, in that ocean of violet gloom. - Then, with a dizzying brain, I saw below me, - A little way out, a tiny shape, like a gnat - Flying and spinning,—now like a gilded grain - Of dust in a shaft of light, now sharp and black - Over a blood-red sandstone precipice. - “Look!” - The Indian guide thrust out a lean dark hand - That hid a hundred forests, and pointed to it, - Muttering low, “Big Eagle!” - All that day, - Riding along the brink, we found no end. - Still, on the right, the pageant of the Abyss - Unfolded. There gigantic walls of rock, - Sheer as the world’s end, seemed to float in air - Over the hollow of space, and change their forms - Like soft blue wood-smoke, with each change of light. - Here massed red boulders, over the Angel Trail - Darkened to thunder, or like a sunset burned. - Here, while the mind reeled from the imagined plunge, - Tall amethystine towers, dark Matterhorns, - Rose out of shadowy nothingness to crown - Their mighty heads with morning. - Here, wild crags - Black and abrupt, over the swimming dimness - Of coloured mist, and under the moving clouds, - Themselves appeared to move, stately and slow - As the moon moves, with an invisible pace, - Or darkling planets, quietly onward steal - Through their immense dominion. - There, far down, - A phantom sword, a search-beam of the sun, - Glanced upon purple pyramids, and set - One facet aflame in each, the rest in gloom; - While from their own deep chasms of shadow, that seemed - Small inch-wide rings of darkness round them, rose - Tabular foothills, mesas, hard and bright, - Bevelled and flat, like gems; or, softly bloomed - Like alabaster, stained with lucid wine; - Then slowly changed, under the changing clouds, - Where the light sharpened, into monstrous tombs - Of trap-rock, hornblende, greenstone and basalt. - - There,—under isles of pine, washed round with mist, - Dark isles that seemed to sail through heaven, and cliffs - That towered like Teneriffe,—far, far below, - Striving to link those huge dissolving steeps, - Gigantic causeways drowned or swam in vain, - Column on column, arch on broken arch, - Groping and winding, like the foundered spans - Of lost Atlantis, under the weltering deep. - For, over them, the abysmal tides of air, - Inconstant as the colours of the sea, - From amethyst into wreathing opal flowed, - Ebbed into rose through grey, then melted all - In universal amethyst again. - There, wild cathedrals, with light-splintering spires, - Shone like a dream in the Eternal mind - And changed as earth and sea and heaven must change. - Over them soared a promontory, black - As night, but in the deepening gulf beyond, - Far down in that vast hollow of violet air, - Winding between the huge Plutonian walls, - The semblance of a ruined city lay. - Dungeons flung wide, and palaces brought low, - Altars and temples, wrecked and overthrown, - Gigantic stairs that climbed into the light - And found no hope, and ended in the void: - It burned and darkened, a city of porphyry, - Paved with obsidian, walled with serpentine, - Beautiful, desolate, stricken as by strange gods - Who, long ago, from cloudy summits, flung - Boulder on mountainous boulder of blood-red marl - Into a gulf so deep that, when they fell, - The soft wine-tinted mists closed over them - Like ocean, and the Indian heard no sound. - -II - -NIGHT AND THE ABYSS - - A lonely cabin, like an eagle’s nest, - Lodged us that night upon the monstrous brink, - And roofed us from the burning desert stars; - But, on my couch of hemlock as I lay, - The Book of Earth still opened in my dreams. - Below me, only guessed by the slow sound - Of forests, through unfathomable gulfs - Of midnight, vaster, more mysterious now, - Breathed that invisible Presence of deep awe. - Through the wide open window, once, a moth - Beat its dark wings, and flew—out—over that, - Brave little fluttering atheist, unaware - Of aught beyond the reach of his antennæ, - Thinking his light quick thoughts; while, under him, - God opened His immeasurable Abyss. - All night I heard the insistent whisper rise: - _One page of Earth’s abysmal Book lies bare._ - _Read—in its awful hieroglyphs of stone—_ - _His own deep scripture. Is its music sealed?_ - _Or is the inscrutable secret growing clearer?_ - Then, like the night-wind, soughing through the pines, - Another voice replied, cold with despair: - _It opens, and it opens. By what Power?_ - _A silent river, hastening to the sea,_ - _Age after age, through crumbling desert rocks_ - _Clove the dread chasm. Wild snows that had their birth_ - _In Ocean-mists, and folded their white wings_ - _Among far mountains, fed that sharp-edged stream._ - _Ask Ocean whence it came. Ask Earth. Ask Heaven._ - _I see the manifold instruments as they move,_ - _Remote or near, with intricate inter-play;_ - _But that which moves them, and determines all_ - _Remains in darkness. Man must bow his head_ - _Before the Inscrutable._ - Then, far off, I heard, - As from a deeper gulf, the antiphonal voice: - _It opens, and it opens, and it opens,—_ - _The abyss of Heaven, the rock-leaved Book of Earth,_ - _And that Abyss as dreadful and profound_ - _Locked in each atom._ - _Under the high stars,_ - _Man creeps, too infinitesimal to be scanned;_ - _And, over all the worlds that dwindle away_ - _Beyond the uttermost microscopic sight,_ - _He towers—a god._ - _Midway, between the height_ - _That crushes, and the depth that flatters him,_ - _He stands within the little ring of light_ - _He calls his knowledge. Its horizon-line,_ - _The frontier of the dark, was narrow, once;_ - _And he could bear it. But the light is growing;_ - _The ring is widening; and, with each increase,_ - _The frontiers of the night are widening, too._ - _They grow and grow. The very blaze of truth_ - _That drives them back, enlarges the grim coasts_ - _Of utter darkness._ - _Man must bow his head_ - _Before the Inscrutable._ - Then, from far within, - The insistent whisper rose: - _Man is himself_ - _The key to all he seeks._ - _He is not exiled from this majesty,_ - _But is himself a part of it. To know_ - _Himself, and read this Book of Earth aright;_ - _Flooding it as his ancient poets, once,_ - _Illumed old legends with their inborn fire,_ - _Were to discover music that out-soars_ - _His plodding thought, and all his fables, too;_ - _A song of truth that deepens, not destroys_ - _The ethereal realm of wonder; and still lures_ - _The spirit of man on more adventurous quests_ - _Into the wildest mystery of all,_ - _The miracle of reality, which he shares._ - - But O, what art could guide me through that maze? - What kingly shade unlock the music sealed - In that dread volume? - Sons of an earlier age, - Poet and painter stretched no guiding hand. - - Even the gaunt spirit, whom the Mantuan led - Through the dark chasms and fiery clefts of pain, - Could set a bound to his own realms of night, - Enwall then round, build his own stairs to heaven, - And slept now, prisoned, in his own coiling towers.... - - Leonardo—found a shell among the hills, - A sea-shell, turned to stone, as at the gaze - Of his own cold Medusa. His dark eyes, - Hawk-swift to hunt the subtle lines of law - Through all the forms of beauty, on that wild height - Saw how the waves of a forgotten world - Had washed and sculptured every soaring crag, - Ere Italy was born. He stood alone,— - His rose-red cloak out-rippling on the breeze,— - A wondering sun-god. Through the mountain-peaks, - The rumour of a phantom ocean rolled. - It tossed a flying rainbow at his feet - And vanished.... - Milton—walked in Paradise. - He saw the golden compasses of God - Turning through darkness to create the world. - He saw the creatures of a thousand æons - Rise, in six days, out of the mire and clay, - Pawing for freedom. With the great blind power - Of his own song, he riveted one more clasp, - Though wrought of fabulous gold, on that dark Book, - Not to be loosed for centuries. - Nearer yet, - Goethe, the torch of science in his own hand, - Poet and seeker, pressed into the dark, - Caught one mysterious gleam from flower and leaf, - And one from man’s own frame, of that which binds - All forms of life together. He turned aside - And lost it, saying, “I wait for light, more light.” - - And these all towered among celestial glories, - And wore their legends like prophetic robes; - But who should teach me, in this deeper night, - The tale of this despised and wandering house, - Our lodge among the stars; the song of Earth; - Her birth in a mist of fire,—a ball of flame, - Slowly contracting, crusting, cracking and folding - Into deep valleys and mountains that still changed - And slowly rose and sank like age-long waves - On the dark ocean of ever-dissolving forms; - Earth, a magical globe, an elfin sphere, - Quietly turning through boundlessness, - Budding with miracles, burgeoning into life; - A murmuring forest of ferns, where the misty sun - Saw wingèd monsters fighting to bring forth men; - Earth, and her savage youth, her monstrous lusts, - Mastered and curbed, till these, too, pulsed into music, - And became for man the fountain of his own power; - Earth, on her shining way, - Coloured and warmed by the sun, and quietly spinning - Her towns and seas to shadow and light in turn; - Earth, by what brooding Power - Endowed at birth with those dread potencies - Which out of her teeming womb at last brought forth - Creatures that loved and sinned, laughed, wept and prayed, - Died, and returned to the unknown Power that made them; - Earth, and that tale of men, the kings of thought, - Who strove to read her secret in the rocks, - And turned, amid wild calumny and wrong, - The lucid sword-like search-beams of the mind - On the dark passion that through uncounted æons - Crept, fought, and climbed to the celestial gates, - Three gates in one, one heavenly gate in three, - Whose golden names are Beauty, Goodness, Truth. - - Then, without sound, like an unspoken prayer, - The voice I heard upon the mountain height, - Out of a deeper gulf of midnight rose, - Within me, or without, invoking One - To whom this dust, not of itself, would pray: - - Muse of the World, O terrible, beautiful Spirit, - Throned in pure light, since all the worlds obey - Thy golden law which, even here on earth, - Though followed blindly, leads to thy pure realm, - Couldst thou deliver me from this night at last, - Teach me the burning syllables of thy tongue - That I, even I, out of the mire and clay, - With face uplifted, and with arms upstretched - To the Eternal Sun of Truth, might raise - My song of adoration, not in vain. - Throned above Time, thou sawest when earth was born - In darkness, though none else was there to see; - For there was fury in the dark, and fire, - And power, and that creative pulse of thine, - The throb of music, the deep rhythmic throes - Of That which made and binds all worlds in one. - - ... - - _In the beginning, God made heaven and earth._ - One sentence burned upon the formless dark— - One sentence, and no more, from that high realm. - - The long-sought consummation of all law, - Through all this manifold universe, might shine clear - In those eight words one day; not yet; not yet! - They would be larger, then; - Not the glib prelude to a lifeless creed, - But wide as the unbounded realms of thought, - The last great simplification of them all, - The single formula, like an infinite sphere - Enfolding Space and Time, atoms and suns, - With all the wild fantastic hosts of life - And all their generations, through all worlds, - In one pure phrase of music, like a star - Seen in a distant sky. - I could not reach it. - All night I waited for the word in vain. - - -III - -THE WINGS - - Night greyed, and up the immeasurable abyss, - Brimmed with a blacker night than ocean knew, - The dawn-wind, like a host of spirits, flowed, - Chanting those airy melodies which, long since, - The same wild breath, obeying the same law, - Taught the first pine-woods in the primal world. - - _We are the voices._ - _Could man only_ - _Spell our tongue,_ - _He might learn_ - _The inscrutable secret_ - _And grow young._ - - _Young as we are_ - _Who, on shores_ - _Unknown to man,_ - _Long, long since,_ - _In waves and woods_ - _Our song began._ - - _Ere his footsteps_ - _Printed earth,_ - _Wild ferns and grass_ - _Breathed it. No man_ - _Heard that whispering_ - _Spirit pass._ - - _Not one mortal_ - _Lay and listened._ - _There was none_ - _Even to hear_ - _The sea-wave crumbling_ - _In the sun._ - - _None to hear_ - _Our choral pine-woods_ - _Chanting deep,_ - _Even as now_ - _Our solemn cadence_ - _Haunts your sleep._ - - _Ear was none_ - _To heed or hear_ - _When earth was young._ - _Even now_ - _Man understands not_ - _Our strange tongue._ - - There came a clearer rustle of nearer boughs. - A bird cried, once, a sharp ecstatic cry - As if it saw an angel. - He stood there - Against the window’s dusky square of sky, - Carrying the long curled crosier of a fern, - My singer of the woods, my Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - The invisible friend with whom I used to talk - In childhood, and that none but I could see,— - Shadow-of-a-Leaf, shy whisperer of the songs - That none could capture, and so few could hear; - A creature of the misty hills of home, - Quick as the thought that hides in the deep heart - When the loud world goes by; vivid to me - As flesh and blood, yet with an elfin strain - That set him free of earth, free to run wild - Through all the ethereal kingdoms of the mind, - His dark eyes fey with wonder at the world, - And that profoundest mystery of all, - The miracle of reality; clear, strange eyes, - Deep-sighted, joyous, touched with hidden tears. - Often he left me when I was not worthy; - And many a time I locked my heart against him, - Only to find him creeping in again - Like memory, or a wild vine through a window - When I most needed that still voice of his - Which never yet spoke louder than the breath - Of conscience in my soul. He would return - Quietly as the rustling of a bough - After the bird has flown; and, through a rift - Of evening sky, the shining eyes of a child, - The cold clear ripple of thrushes after rain, - The sound of a mountain-brook, or a breaking wave - Would teach my slumbering soul the ways of love. - He looked at me, more gently than of late, - And spoke (O, if this world had ears to hear - The sound of falling dew, the power that wrote - The Paradiso might recall that voice!) - _It is near daybreak. I am faithful still;_ - _And I am here to answer all your need._ - _The hills are old, but not so old as I;_ - _The blackbird’s eyes are young, but not so young_ - _As mine that know the wonder of their sight._ - _Eagles have wings. Mine are too swift to see;_ - _For while I stand and whisper at your side,_ - _Time dwindles to a shadow...._ - Like a mist - The world dissolved around us as he spoke. - I saw him standing dark against the sky. - I heard him, murmuring like a spirit in trance,— - _Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud_.... - - Then, slowly emerging from that mist of dreams, - As at an incantation, a lost world - Arose, and shone before me in the dawn. - - - - -II—THE GREEKS - - -I - -PYTHAGORAS - - -I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD - - Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud. - - In the still garden that Pythagoras made, - The Temple of the Muses, firm as truth, - Lucid as beauty, the white marriage-song - Made visible, of beauty and truth in one, - Flushed with the deepening East. - It was no dream. - The thrush that with his long beak shook and beat - The dark striped snail-shell on the marble flags - Between the cool white columns told me this. - The birds among the silvery olives pealed - So many jargoning rivulet-throated bells - That in their golden clashings discord drowned, - And one wild harmony closed and crowned them all - And yet, as if the spread wings of a hawk - Froze in the sky above them, every note - Died on an instant. - Over the sparkling grass - The long dark shadows of ash and pine began - To shrink, as though the rising of the sun - Menaced, not only shadows, but the world. - - A frightened bird flew, crying, and scattering dew - Blindly away; though, on this dawn of dawns, - Nothing had changed. The Golden Brotherhood stole - Up through the drifts of wet rose-laurel bloom - As on so many a dawn for many a year, - To make their morning vows. - They thronged the porch, - The lean athletes of truth, trained body and mind, - For their immortal trial. Among them towered - Milon, the soldier-wrestler. His brown limbs - Moved with the panther’s grace, the warrior’s pride; - Milon, who in the Olympic contests won - Crown after crown, but wore them on broad brows - Cut like fine steel for thought; and, in his eyes, - Carried the light of those deep distances - That challenge the spirit of man. - They entered in; - And, like the very Muses following them, - Theano, and her Golden Sisterhood, - First of that chosen womanhood, by the grace - Of whose heaven-walking souls the race ascends, - Passed through the shining porch. - It was no dream. - In the bright marble, under the sandalled feet, - And in the glimmering columns as they passed, - The reflex of their flowing vestments glowed - White, violet, saffron, like another dawn. - - ... - - Before them, through the temple’s fragrant gloom, - The Muses, in their dim half-circle, towered; - And, in the midst, over the smouldering myrrh, - The form of Hestia. - In her mighty shadow, - Pythagoras, with a scroll in his right hand, - Arose and spoke. - “Our work is well-nigh done. - Our enemies are closing round us now. - I have given the sacred scrolls into the hands - Of Lysis; and, though all else be destroyed, - If but a Golden Verse or two live on - In other lands, and kindle other souls - To seek the law, our work is not in vain. - If it be death that comes to us, we shall lose - Nothing that could endure. It was not chance - That sent us on this pilgrimage through time, - But that which lives within us, the desire - Of gods, to know what once was dark in heaven. - Gods were not gods who, in eternal bliss, - Had never known this wonder—the deep joy - Of coming home. But we have purchased it, - And now return, enriched with memories - Of mortal love, terrestrial grief and pain, - Into our own lost realm.” - His dark eyes flashed. - He lifted his proud head as one who heard - Strains of immortal music even now. - He towered among the Muses in the dusk, - And then, as though he, too, were carved in stone, - And all their voices breathed through his own voice, - “Fear nothing now,” he said. “Our foes can steal - The burdens we lay down, but nothing more. - All that we are we keep. They strike at shadows - And cannot hurt us. Little as we may know, - We have learned at least to know the abiding Power - From these poor masks of clay. This dust, this flesh, - All that we see and touch, are shadows of it, - And hourly change and perish. Have we not seen - Cities and nations, all that is built of earth, - Fleeting into the darkness, like grey clouds, - And only one thing constant—the great law, - The eternal order of their march to death? - Have we not seen it written upon the hills? - The continents and seas do not endure. - They change their borders. Where the seas are now - Mountains will rise; and, where the land was, once, - The dark Atlantic ends the world for man. - But all these changes are not wrought by chance. - They follow a great order. It may be - That all things are repeated and reborn; - And, in their mighty periods, men return - And pass through their forgotten lives anew. - It may be; for, at times, the mind recalls— - Or half recalls—the turning of a road, - A statue on a hill, a passing face.... - It may be; for our universe is bound - In rhythm; and the setting star will rise. - This many a cunning ballad-singer knows - Who haunts the mind of man with dark refrains; - Or those deep poets who foretell in verse - The restoration of the world’s great Year. - Time never fails. Not Tanais, or the Nile - Can flow for ever. They spring up and perish; - But, after many changes, it may be - These, too, return, with Egypt and her kings.” - - He paused a moment; then compassion, grief, - Wonder and triumph, like one music, spoke - Farewell to shadows, from his own deep soul - Rapt, in pure vision, above the vanishing world: - “The torrents drag the rocks into the sea. - The great sea smiles, and overflows the land. - It hollows out the valleys and returns. - The sea has washed the shining rocks away - And cleft the headland with its golden fields - That once bound Sicily to her mother’s breast. - Pharos, that was an island, far from shore - When Homer sang, is wedded now and one - With Egypt. The wild height where Sappho stood, - The beautiful, white, immortal promontory, - Crowned with Apollo’s temple, long ago - The struggling seas have severed from the land. - And those fair Grecian cities, Helice - And Buris, wondering fishermen see, far down, - With snowy walls and columns all aslant, - Trembling under the unremembering wave. - The waters of Anigris, that were sweet - As love, are bitter as death. There was a time - When Etna did not burn. A time will come - When it will cease to burn; for all things change; - And mightier things by far have changed than these - In the slow lapse of never-ending time. - I have seen an anchor on the naked hills, - And ocean-shells among the mountain-tops. - Continents, oceans, all things pass away; - But One, One only; for the Eternal Mind - Enfolds all changes, and can never change.” - - -II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE - - Night on Crotona, night without a star. - I heard the mob, outside the Temple, roaring - _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_ - - Before the flushed white columns, in the glare - Of all those angry torches, Cylon stood - Wickedly smiling. “They have barred the doors. - Pythagoras and his forty chosen souls - Are all within. They are trapped, and they shall die. - It will be best to whet the people’s rage - Before we lay the axe, or set the torch - Against the Muses’ temple. One wild howl - Of ‘sacrilege’ may defeat us.”—This he called - “Faith in the people.” - He moistened his dry lips, - And raised his hand. The savage clamouring ceased. - One breathless moment, ere he spoke, he paused, - Gathering his thoughts. His thin white weasel face - Narrowed, his eyes contracted. In their pain - —Pain pitiable, a torment of the mind— - A bitter memory burned, of how he sued - To join that golden brotherhood in vain. - For when the Master saw him, he discerned - A spirit in darkness, violent, empty of thought, - But full of shallow vanity, cunning lies, - Intense ambition. - All now was turned to hate; - Hate the destroyer of men, the wrecker of cities, - The last disease of nations; hate, the fire - That eats away the heart; hate, the lean rat - That gnaws the brain, till even reason glares - Like madness through blind eyes; hate, the thin snake - That coils like whip-cord round the victim’s soul - And strangles it; hate, that slides up through his throat, - And with its flat and quivering head usurps - The function of his tongue,—to sting and sting, - Till all that poison which is now his life - Is drained, and he lies dead; hate, that still lives, - And for the power to strike and sting again, - May yet destroy this world. - So Cylon stood, - Quivering a moment, in the fiery glare, - Over the multitude. - Then, in his right hand, - He shook a roll of parchment over his head, - Crying, _The Master said it_! - At that word, - A snarl, as of a myriad-throated beast, - Broke out again, and deepened into a roar— - _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_ - - Cylon upheld his hand, as if to bless - A stormy sea with calm. The howling died - Into a deadly hush. With twisted lips - He spoke. - - “This is their Scroll, the Sacred Word, - The Secret Doctrine of their Golden Order! - Hear it!” - Then, interweaving truth with lies, - Till even the truth struck like a venomed dart - Into his hearers’ minds, he read aloud - His cunningly chosen fragments. - At the end, - He tore the scroll, and trampled it underfoot. - “Ye have heard,” he said. “Ye are kin to all the beasts! - And, when ye die, your souls again inhabit - Bodies of beasts, wild beasts, and beasts of burden. - Even yet more loathsome—he that will not starve - His flesh, and tame himself and all mankind - To bear this golden yoke shall, after death, - Dwell in the flesh of swine. He that rejects - This wisdom shall, hereafter, seek the light - Through endless years, with toads, asps, creeping things. - Thus would they exile all our happier gods! - Away with Bacchus and his feasts of joy! - Back, Aphrodite, to your shameful foam! - Men must be tamed, like beasts. - The Master said it! - And wherefore? There are certain lordly souls - Who rise above the beasts, and talk with gods. - These are his Golden Brotherhood; these must rule! - Ye heard that verse from Homer—whom he loves— - Homer, the sycophant, who could call a prince - ‘The shepherd of his people.’ What are ye, - Even in this life, then, but their bleating flocks? - _The Master said it!_ - Homer—his demi-god, - Ye know his kind; ye know whence Homer sprang; - An old blind beggarman, singing for his food, - Through every city in Greece”—(This Cylon called - Honouring the people)—“already he is outworn, - Forgotten, without a word for this young age; - And great Pythagoras crowns him! - When they choose - Their Golden Brotherhood, they lay down their laws, - Declaring none may rule until he learn, - Prostrate himself in reverence to the dead, - And pass, through golden discipline, to power - Over himself and you; but—mark this well— - Under Pythagoras! Discipline! Ah, that path - Is narrow and difficult. Only three hundred souls, - Aristocrats of knowledge, have attained - This glory. It is against the people’s will - To know, or to acknowledge those that know, - Or let their knowledge lead them for one hour. - For see—see how the gods have driven them mad, - Even in their knowledge! In their own Sacred Scroll, - Pythagoras, who derives you from the beasts, - Affirms that earth, this earth beneath our feet, - Spins like a little planet round the sun!” - - A brutal bellowing, as of Asian bulls, - Boomed from a thousand mouths. (This Cylon called - The laughter of the people and their gods.) - He raised his hand. It ceased. - “_This_ is their knowledge, - And _this_,” he cried, “their charter to obscure - What all men know, the natural face of things. - _This_ proves their right to rule us from above. - They meet here nightly. Nightly they conspire - Against your rights, your liberties, and mine. - Was it not they who, when the people rose - In Sybaris, housed her noble fugitives here? - And was it not Pythagoras who refused - To send them back to Sybaris and their death? - Was it not this that plunged us into war - With Sybaris; and, when victory crowned our arms, - Who but Pythagoras robbed us of its fruits? - We gathered booty, and he called it theft. - We burned their palaces, and he called it hate. - We avenged our sons. He called it butchery, - And said the wild beast wakes again in man. - What have we gained, then? Nothing but the pride - Of saving those Pythagoras wished to save; - Counting gold dross, and serving his pure gods. - _The Master said it._ What is your judgment, then?” - He stretched one hand, appealing to the crowd, - And one to the white still Temple. - “_Death! Death! Death!_” - Under the flaring torches, the long waves - Of tense hot faces opened a thousand mouths, - Little blue pits of shadow that raced along them, - And shook the red smoke with one volleying roar,— - _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_ - - ... - - But, in the Temple, through those massive walls, - While Cylon spoke, no whisper had been heard; - Only, at times, a murmur, when he paused, - As of a ninth wave breaking, far away. - - The half-moon of the Muses, crowned with calm, - Towered through the dimness. Under their giant knees, - In their immortal shadow, those who knew - How little was their knowledge waited death - Proudly, around their Master. Robed in white, - Beautiful as Apollo in old age, - He stood amongst them, laying a gentle hand, - One last caress, upon that dearest head - Bowed there before him, his own daughter’s hair. - Then, tenderly, the god within him moved - His mortal lips; and, in the darkness there, - He spoke, as though the music of the spheres - Welled from his heart, to ease the hurts of death. - - “Not tears, belovèd. Give it welcome, rather! - Soon, though they spared us, this blind flesh would fail. - They are saving us the weary mile or two - That end a dusty journey. The dull stains - Of travel; the soiled vesture; the sick heart - That hoped at every turning of the road - To see the Perfect City, and hoped in vain, - Shall grieve us now no more. Now, at the last, - After a stern novitiate, iron test, - And grinding failures, the great light draws near, - And we shall pass together, through the Veil.” - - He bowed his head. It was their hour of prayer; - And, from among the Muses in the dark, - A woman’s voice, a voice in ecstasy, - As if a wound should bless the sword that made it, - Breathed through the night the music of their law: - - _Close not thine eyes in sleep_ - _Till thou hast searched thy memories of the day,_ - _Graved in thy heart the vow thou didst not keep,_ - _And called each wandering thought back to the way._ - - _Pray to the gods! Their aid,_ - _Their aid alone can crown thy work aright;_ - _Teach thee that song whereof all worlds were made;_ - _Rend the last veil, and feed thine eyes with light._ - - _Naught shall deceive thee, then._ - _All creatures of the sea and earth and air,_ - _The circling stars, the warring tribes of men_ - _Shall make one harmony, and thy soul shall hear._ - - _Out of this prison of clay_ - _With lifted face, a mask of struggling fire,_ - _With arms of flesh and bone stretched up to pray,_ - _Dumb, thou shalt hear that Voice of thy desire._ - - _Thou that wast brought so low;_ - _And through those lower lives hast risen again,_ - _Kin to the beasts, with power at last to know_ - _Thine own proud banishment and diviner pain;_ - - _Courage, O conquering soul!_ - _For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_ - _Though worlds on worlds into that darkness roll,_ - _The gods abide; and of their race art thou!_ - - There was a thunder of axes at the doors; - A glare as of a furnace; and the cry, - _Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_ - - Then, over the streaming smoke and the wild light - That like a stormy sunset sank away - Into a darker night, the deeper mist - Rolled down, and of that death I knew no more. - - -II - -ARISTOTLE - - -I. YOUTH AND THE SEA - - The mists unfolded on a sparkling coast - Washed by a violet sea. - It was no dream. - The clustering irised bubbles in the foam, - The grinding stir as through the shining pebbles - The wave ran back; the little drifts of smoke - Where wet black rocks dried grey in the hot sun; - The pods of sea-weed, crackling underfoot, - All told me this. - My comrade at my side, - Moved like a shadow. I turned a promontory, - And like a memory of my own lost youth, - Shining and far, across the gulf I saw - Stagira, like a little city of snow, - Under the Thracian hills. - Nothing had changed. - I saw the City where that Greek was born - Who ranged all art, all life, and lit a fire - That shines yet, after twice a thousand years; - And strange, but strange as truth, it was to hear - No slightest change in that old rhythmic sound - Of waves against the shore. - Then, at my side, - My soul’s companion whispered, all unseen, - ‘Two thousand years have hidden him from the world, - Robed him in grey and bearded him with eld, - Untrue to his warm life. There was a time - When he was young as truth is; and the sun - Browned his young body, danced in his young grey eyes; - And look—the time is now.’ - There, as he spoke, - I saw among the rocks on my right hand, - Lying, face downward, over a deep rock-pool, - A youth, so still that, till a herring-gull swooped - And sheered away from him with a startled cry - And a wild flutter of its brown mottled wings, - I had not seen him. - Quietly we drew near, - As shadows may, unseen. - He pored intent - Upon a sea-anemone, like a flower - Opening its disk of blue and crimson rays - Under the lucid water. - He stretched his hand, - And with a sea-gull’s feather, touched its heart. - The bright disk shrank, and closed, as though a flower - Turned instantly to fruit, ripe, soft, and round - As the pursed lips of a sea-god hiding there. - They fastened, sucking, on the quill and held it. - Young Aristotle laughed. He rose to his feet. - “Come and see this!” he called. - Under the cliff - Nicomachus arose, and drawing his robe - More closely round him, crossed the slippery rocks - To join his son. - There, side by side, they crouched - Over the limpid pool,—the grey physician - And eager boy. - “See, how it grips the feather! - And grips the rock, too. Yet it has no roots. - Your sea-flowers turn to animals with mouths. - Take out the quill. Now it turns back again - Into a flower; look—look—what lovely colours, - What marvellous artistry. - This never was formed - By chance. It has an aim beyond this pool. - What does it mean? This unity of design? - This delicate scale of life that seems to ascend - Without a break, through all the forms of earth - From plants to men? The sea-sponge that I found - Grew like a blind rock-rooted clump of moss - Dilating in water, shrinking in the sun; - I know it for a strange sea-animal now, - Shaped like the brain of a man. Can it be true - That, as the poets fable in their songs - Of Aphrodite, life itself was born - Here, in the sea?” - Nicomachus looked at him. - “That’s a dark riddle, my son. You will not hear - An answer in the groves of Academe, - Not even from Plato. When you go to Athens - Next year, remember, among the loftiest flights - Of their philosophy, that the living truth - Is here on earth if we could only see it. - This, this at least, all true Asclepiads know. - Remember, always, in that battle of words, - The truth that father handed down to son - Through the long line of men that served their kind - From Æsculapius, father of us all, - To you his own descendant:—naught avails - In science, till the light you seize from heaven - Shines through the clear sharp fact beneath your feet. - This is the test of both—that, in their wedding, - The light that was a disembodied dream - Burns through the fact, and makes a lanthorn of it, - Transfigures it, confirms it, gives it new - And deeper meanings; and itself, in turn, - Is thereby seen more truly. - Use your eyes; - And you, or those that follow you, will outsoar - Pythagoras. - He believed the soul descends - From the pure realm of gods; is clothed with clay; - And, struggling upward through a myriad forms, - After a myriad lives and deaths, returns - Enriched with all those memories, lord of all - That knowledge, master of all those griefs and pains - As else it could not be, home to the gods, - Itself a god, prepared for the full bliss, - The living consummation of the whole. - Earth must be old, if all these things are true. - But take this tale and read it. If it seem - Only a tale, the light in it has turned - Dark facts to lanthorns for me. There are tales - More true than any fragment of the truth. - - One of his homeless clan (who came to me - Dying), his last disciple’s wandering son, - Gave me the scroll. I give it now to you,— - The young swift-footed runner with the fire. - You’ll find strange thoughts; and, woven into the close, - His Golden Verses, with a thought more strange.” - - Then, from his breast, the Asclepiad drew a scroll, - Smooth as old ivory, honey-stained by time, - A wand of whispering magic; and the boy - Seized it with brown young hands. - His father smiled - And turned away, between the shining pools - To seek Stagira. Under his sandalled feet - The sea-weeds crackled. His footsteps crunched away - Along the beach. - Upon a sun-warmed rock - The boy outspread the curled papyrus-roll, - Keeping each corner in place with a small grey stone. - There, while the white robe drifting down the coast - Grew smaller and smaller, till at last it seemed - A flake of vanishing foam, he lay full length, - Reading the tale. - The salt on his brown skin - Dried to a faint white powder in the sun. - Over him, growing bold, the peering gulls - Wheeled closer, as he lay there, tranced and still; - Till, through the tale, the golden verses breathed - Like a returning music, rhythmic tones - Changed by new voices, coloured by new minds, - Yet speaking still for one time-conquering soul, - As on the shore the wandering ripples changed - And tossed new spray-drops into the sparkling air, - Yet pulsed with the ancient breathing of the sea: - - _Guard the immortal fire._ - _Honour the glorious line of the great dead._ - _To the new height let all thy soul aspire;_ - _But let those memories be thy wine and bread._ - - _Quench not in any shrine_ - _The smouldering storax. In no human heart_ - _Quench what love kindled. Faintly though it shine,_ - _Not till it wholly dies the gods depart._ - - _Truth has remembering eyes._ - _The wind-blown throng will clamour at Falsehood’s gate._ - _Has Falsehood triumphed? Let the world despise_ - _Thy constant mind. Stand thou aside, and wait._ - - _Write not thy thoughts on snow._ - _Grave them in rock to front the thundering sky._ - _From Time’s proud feast, when it is time to go,_ - _Take the dark road; bid one more world good-bye._ - - _The lie may steal an hour._ - _The truth has living roots, and they strike deep._ - _A moment’s glory kills the rootless flower,_ - _While the true stem is gathering strength in sleep._ - - _Out of this earth, this dust,_ - _Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;_ - _Out of these cosmic throes of wrath, and lust,_ - _Breaks the lost splendour from the world’s blind womb._ - - _Courage, O conquering soul!_ - _For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_ - _Though suns and stars into oblivion roll,_ - _The gods abide, and of their race art thou._ - - -II. THE EXILE - - Time dwindled to a shadow. The grey mist, - Wreathed with old legends, drifted slowly away - From the clear hill-top, where the invisible wings - Had brought me through the years. - It was no dream, - Clearly, as in a picture, at my feet, - Among dark groves, the columned temples gleamed, - And I saw Athens, in the sunset, dying. - - Dying; for though her shrines had not yet lost - One radiant grain of what lies crumbling now - Like a god’s bones upon the naked hills; - Though the whole city wound through gate on gate - Of visionary splendour to one height - Where, throned above this world, the Parthenon - Smiled at the thought of Time, her violet crown - Was woven of shadows from a darker realm, - And I saw Athens, dying. - From that hill— - The hill of Lycabettus—on our right - Eridanus flowed, Ilissus on the left, - Girdling the City like two coils of fire. - Then, as a spirit sees, I saw, unseen, - One standing near me on the bare hillside, - Still as a statue, gazing to the west; - So still that, till his lengthening shadow crept - Up to my feet, the wonder of the City - Withheld my gaze from something more august - In that one lonely presence. - Earth and sun, - On their great way, revealed him, with the touch - Of his long stealing shadow; yet it seemed - The power that cast it was no mortal power. - Fie towered against the dying gleams below - Like Truth in exile. - On him, too, at last - The doom had fallen. Clasping his grey robe - More closely round him, Aristotle looked - Long, long, at his proud City. She had lost - More glories in that sunset than she knew; - For, though the sun went down in kingly gold - To westward, on that darkening eastern hill, - The bearer of a more celestial fire - Now looked his last on Athens. - Changed, how changed, - Was this grey form from that immortal youth - Who read the Golden Verses by the sea. - His brow was furrowed now; and, on his face, - Life, with her sharp-edged tools of joy and pain, - Had deeply engraved a legend of her own. - - There, as his lengthening shadow had drawn my gaze, - He seemed himself a shadow of vaster things, - A still dark portent of those moving worlds - Whose huge events, unseen and far away, - Had led him thither; and, as he once had shaped - Their course, now shaped his destiny and doom. - - He had ranged all art, all science. He had shaped - Kingdoms and kings, by virtue of his part - In the one all-shaping Mind. Had he not lived, - The world that never knows its noblest powers - Had moved, with half mankind, another way. - There, looking backward, through his life, he knew - That, though the gods conceal their ways from men, - Yet in their great conjunctures there are gleams - That show them at their work. Theirs was the word, - Twenty years back, when Philip of Macedon - Summoned him, as the uncrowned king of thought, - To teach his eaglet how to use his wings. - For, by that thought, and by the disciplined power, - The sovran power of judgment, swift to seize - Causes, effects, and laws, and wield the blind - Unreasoning mass, he had wellnigh brought to birth - What Plato saw in vision—a State enthroned - Above the flux of time, Hellas at one, - A harmony of cities, each a chord - In an immortal song of Beauty and Truth, - Freedom and Law. His was the moving power, - Not wholly aware, that strove to an end unseen; - And in that power had Alexander reigned. - Autocrator of the Greek hegemony, - He had rolled all Asia back into the night. - Satraps of Persia, the proud kings of Tyre, - Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, all bowed down; - And Alexander shaped the conquered world, - But Aristotle shaped the conqueror’s mind. - He had shaped that mind to ends not all its own. - His was the well-thumbed Odyssey that reposed - Under the conqueror’s pillow; his the love, - Fragrant with memories of the hills and sea, - That had rebuilt Stagira; his the voice - In the night-watches; his the harnessed thoughts - That, like immortal sentries, mounted guard - In the dark gates of that world-quelling mind. - His was the whisper, the dark vanishing hint, - The clue to the riddle of slowly emerging life - That, imaged in Egyptian granite, rose - Before the silent conqueror when he stared - At that strange shape, half human and half brute, - The Sphinx, who knew the secret of the world - And smiled at him, and all his victories, - Under the desert stars, while the deep night - Silently deepened round him. - Far away, - In Athens, towered the bearer of the fire. - His was the secret harmony of law - That, while the squadrons wheeled in ordered ranks, - Each finding its full life only in the whole, - Flashed light upon the cosmos; his the quest - That taught the conqueror how to honour truth - And led him, while he watered his proud steeds - In all the streams from Danube to the Nile, - To send another army through the wilds, - Ten thousand huntsmen, ranging hills and woods - At Aristotle’s hest, for birds and beasts; - So that the master-intellect might lay hold - Upon the ladder of life that mounts through Time, - From plants to beasts, and up, through man, to God. - So all the might of Macedon had been turned - To serve the truth, and to complete his work - At Athens, for the conquering age to come; - When Athens, like the very City of Truth, - Might shine upon all nations, and might wear, - On her clear brows, his glory as her own. - - Then came a flying rumour through the night. - Earth’s overlord, the autocrator, his friend, - Alexander the Great had fallen in Babylon. - A little cup of poison, subtle drops - Of Lethe—in a cup of delicate gold,— - And the world’s victor slept, an iron sleep; - The conqueror, stricken in his conquered city, - Cold, in the purple of Babylon, lay dead: - And the slow tread of his armies as they passed, - Soldier by soldier, through that chamber of death, - To look their last upon his marble face, - Pulsed like a muffled drum across the world. - Had Aristotle’s cunning mixed the draught - That murdered tyranny? Let that whispered lie - Estrange the heart of Macedon. - There, in Athens, - It was enough, now that his friend lay dead, - To know that, as the body is rent away - From the immortal soul, his greatness now - Had lost its earthly stay. His mighty mind - Walked like a ghost in Athens. It was enough - To hint that he had taught his king too well; - Served him too well; and played the spy for him; - While, for main charge, since he had greatly loved - The mother who had borne him, since he had poured - His love out on her tomb, it would suffice - To snarl that rites like these were meant for gods - And that this man who had seen behind the world - The Mover of all things, the eternal God, - The supreme Good, by these fond rites of love, - Too simple and too great, too clear, too deep, - Had robbed the little sophists of their dues - And so blasphemed against their gods of clay. - - ... - - Hurrying footsteps neared. He turned and saw - His young adopted son and Tyrtamus. - “Nicanor! Theophrastus!—nay, lift up - Your heads. You cannot bring me bitterer news - Than I foresaw. I must be brought to judgment. - But on what grounds?”— - “Dear father of us all——” - The youth, Nicanor, answered, “When the crowd - Grins in the very face of those who ask, - Or think, or dream that truth should be their guide; - Nay, grins at truth itself, as at a fool - Tricked in his grandsire’s rags, a rustic oaf, - A blundering country simpleton who gapes - At the great city’s reeling dance of lies, - How can the grounds be wanting?” - “The true grounds,” - His ‘Theophrastus’ muttered, “we know too well. - Eurymedon, and the rest, those gnat-like clans, - The sophists’ buzzing swarms, desire a change. - They hold with Heraclitus—all things change.” - His irony stung the youth. His grey eyes gleamed. - His voice grew harsh with anger. “Ay, all things change! - So justice and injustice, right and wrong, - Evil and good, must wear each other’s cloaks; - And, in that chaos, when all excellence - And honour are plucked down, and the clear truth - Trampled into the dirt, themselves may rise. - Athens is dying.” - “They speak truly enough - Of all that they can know,” the Master said. - “Change is the rhythm that draws this world along. - They see the change. Its law they cannot see. - But man who is mortal in this body of earth - Has also a part, by virtue of his reason, - In an enduring realm. Their prophet knew - And heard what sophists have no souls to hear,— - The Harmony that includes the pulse of change; - The divine Reason, past the flux of things; - The eternal Logos, ordering the whole world.” - And, as he spoke, I heard, through his own words, - Tones that were now a part of his own mind, - The murmur of that old legend which he read - So long ago, in boyhood, by the sea. - _Time never fails. Not Tanais or the Nile_ - _Can flow for ever. All things pass away_ - _But One, One only; for the eternal Mind_ - _Enfolds all changes, and can never change._ - Tyrtamus touched his arm. “Time presses now. - Come with us. All is ready. On the coast, - In a lonely creek, the quiet keel is rocking. - Three trusty sailors wait us, and at dawn - We, too, shall find new life in a new world - With all that could endure. The voyager knows - The blindness of the cities. Each believes - Its narrow wall the boundary of the world; - And when he puts to sea, their buzzing cries - Fade out behind him like a wrangle of bees.”— - - “If I remain, what then?”— - The hill-top shone - In the last rays. Athens was growing dark. - Tyrtamus answered him. “A colder cup - Of hemlock, and the fate of Socrates.” - The Master looked at Athens. Far away - He traced the glimmering aisle of olive-trees - Where, for so long, with many a youthful friend - He had walked, and taught, and striven himself to learn. - Southward, below the Acropolis, he could see - The shadowy precincts of the Asclepiads, - Guarding their sacred spring, the natural fount, - Loved for his father’s memory. - Close beside, - The Dionysiac theatre, like a moon - Hewn from the marble of Hymettus, gleamed, - A silvery crescent, dying into a cloud. - There, though the shade of Sophocles had fled, - Long since, he heard even now in his deep soul - The stately chorus on a ghostly stage - Chanting the praise of thought that builds the city, - Hoists the strong sail to cross the hoary sea, - Ploughs the unwearied earth, yokes the wild steed - And the untamed mountain-bull; thought that contrives - Devices that can cure all ills but death: - - _Of all strong things none is more strong than man;_ - _Man that has learned to shield himself from cold_ - _And the sharp rain; and turns his marvellous arts_ - _Awhile to evil; and yet again, to good;_ - _Man that is made all-glorious with his city_ - _When he obeys the inviolable laws_ - _Of earth and heaven; but when, in subtle pride,_ - _He makes a friend of wrong, is driven astray_ - _And broken apart, like dust before the wind._ - - All now, except the heights, had died away - Into the dark. Only the Parthenon raised - A brow like drifted snow against the west. - He watched it, melting into the flood of night - With all those memories. - Then he turned and said, - “If in a moment’s thoughtless greed I grasped - The prize that Athens offers me to-night, - She is not so rich but this might make her poor. - Death wears a gentle smile when we grow old; - And I could welcome it. But she shall not stain - Her hands a second time. Let Athens know - That Aristotle left her, not to save - His last few lingering days of life on earth - But to save Athens. - I have truly loved her, - Next to the sea-washed town where I was born, - Best of all cities built by men on earth. - But there’s another Athens, pure and white, - Where Plato walks, a City invisible, - Whereof this Athens is only a dim shadow; - And I shall not be exiled from that City.” - - The hilltop darkened. The blind mist rolled down; - The voices died. I saw and heard no more. - - - - -III—MOVING EASTWARD - - -I - -FARABI AND AVICENNA - - _Grey mists enfolded Europe; and I heard_ - _Sounds of bewildered warfare in the gloom._ - - _Yet, like a misty star, one lampad moved_ - _Eastward, beyond the mountains where of old_ - _Prometheus, in whose hand the fire first shone,_ - _Was chained in agony. His undying ghost_ - _Beheld the fire returning on its course_ - _Unquenched, and smiled from his dark crag in peace,_ - _Implacable peace, at heaven._ - _Eastward, the fire_ - _Followed the road Pythagoras trod, to meet_ - _The great new morning._ - _The grey mists dissolved._ - _And was it I—or Shadow-of-a-Leaf—that saw_ - _And heard, and lived through all he showed me then?_ - - I saw a desert blazing in the sun, - Tufts of tall palm; and then—that City of dreams. - As though an age went past me in an hour - I saw the silken Khalifs and their court - Flowing like orient clouds along the streets - Of Bagdad. In great Mahmoun’s train I saw - Nazzam, who from the Stagirite caught his fire. - Long had he pondered on the Eternal Power - Who, in the dark palm of His timeless hand - Rolls the whole cosmos like one gleaming pearl. - Had he not made, in one pure timeless thought, - All things at once, the last things with the first, - The first life with the last; so that mankind, - Through all its generations, co-exists - For His eternal eyes? Yet, from our own - Who in the time-sphere move, the Maker hides - The full revolving glory, and unfolds - The glimmering miracles of its loveliness - Each at its destined moment, one by one, - In an æonian pageant that returns - For ever to the night whence it began. - Thus Nazzam bowed before the inscrutable Power, - Yet found Him in his own time-conquering soul. - - I saw the hundred scribes of El Mansour - Making their radiant versions from the Greek. - I saw Farabi, moving through the throng - Like a gaunt chieftain. His world-ranging eyes - Beheld the Cause of causes. - In his mind, - Lucid and deep, the reasoning of the Greeks - Flooded the world with new celestial light, - Golden interpretations that made clear - To mighty shades the thing they strove to say. - - He carried on their fire, with five-score books - In Arabic, where the thoughts of Athens, fledged - With orient colours, towered to the pure realm - Of Plato; but, returning earthward still, - Would wheel around his Aristotle’s mind - Like doves around the cote where they were born. - Then the dark mists that round the vision flowed - Like incense-clouds, dividing scene from scene, - Rolled back from a wide prospect, and I saw, - As one that mounts upon an eagle’s wing, - A savage range of mountains, peaked with snow, - To northward. - They glowed faintly, for the day - Was ending, and the shadows of the rocks - Were stretched out to the very feet of night. - Yet, far away, to southward, I could see - The swollen Oxus, like a vanishing snake - That slid away in slippery streaks and gleams - Through his grey reed-beds to the setting sun. - Earthward we moved; and, in the tawny plain, - Before me, like a lanthorn of dark fire - Bokhara shone, a city of shadowy towers - Crimsoned with sunset. In its turreted walls - I saw eleven gates, and all were closed - Against the onrushing night. - Then, at my side, - My soul’s companion whispered, “You shall see - The Gates of Knowledge opening here anew. - Here Avicenna dwelt in his first youth.” - - At once, as on the very wings of night, - We entered. In the rustling musky gloom - Of those hot streets, thousands of falcon eyes - Were round us; but our shadows passed unseen - Into the glimmering palace of the Prince - Whom Avicenna, when all others failed, - Restored to life, and claimed for all reward - Freedom to use the Sultan’s library, - The pride of El Mansour; a wasted joy - To the new Sultan. Radiances were there - Imprisoned like the innumerable slaves - Of one too wealthy even to know their names; - Beautiful Grecian captives, bought with gold - From tawny traffickers in the Ionian sea. - A shadow, with a shadow at my side, - I saw him reading there, intent and still, - Under a silver lamp; his dusky brow - Wreathed with white silk, a goblet close at hand - Brimmed with a subtle wine that could uncloud - The closing eyes of Sleep. - Along each wall - Great carven chests of fragrant cedar-wood - Released the imprisoned magic,—radiant scrolls, - Inscribed with wisdom’s earliest wonder-cry; - Dark lore; the secrets of the Asclepiads; - History wild as legend; legends true - As history, all being shadows of one light; - Philosophies of earth and heaven; and rhymes - That murmured still of their celestial springs. - He thrust his book aside, as in despair. - Our shadows followed him through the swarming streets - Into the glimmering mosque. I saw him bowed - Prostrate in prayer for light, light on a page - Of subtle-minded Greek which many a day - Had baffled him, when he sought therein the mind - Of his forerunner. - I saw him as he rose; - And, as by chance, at the outer gates he met - A wandering vendor of old tattered books - Who, for three dirhems, offered him a prize. - He bought it, out of gentle heart, and found - A wonder on every page,—Farabi’s work, - Flooding his Greek with light. - He could not see - What intricate law had swept it into his hand; - But, having more than knowledge, he returned - Through the dark gates of prayer; and, pouring out - His alms upon the poor, lifted his heart - In silent thanks to God. - - -II - -AVICENNA’S DREAM - - But all these books—for him—were living thoughts, - Clues to the darker Book of Nature’s law; - For, when he climbed, a goat-foot boy, in Spring - Up through the savage Hissar range, he saw - A hundred gorges thundering at his feet - With snow-fed cataracts; torrents whose fierce flight - Uprooted forests, tore great boulders down, - Ground the huge rocks together; and every year - Channelled raw gullies and swept old scars away; - So that the wildered eagle beating up - To seek his last year’s eyry, found that all - Was new and strange; and even the tuft of pines - That used to guide him to his last year’s nest - Had vanished from the crags he knew no more. - - There, pondering on the changes of the world, - Young Avicenna, with a kinglier eye, - Saw in the lapse of ages the great hills - Melting away like waves; and, from the sea, - New lands arising; and the whole dark earth - Dissolving, and reshaping all its realms - Around him, like a dream. - Thus of his hills - And of their high snows flowing through his thoughts - Was born the tale that afterwards was told - By golden-tongued Kazwini, and wafted thence - Through many lands, from Tartary to Pameer. - For, cross-legged, in the shadow of a palm, - The hawk-eyed teller of tales, in years unborn - Holding his wild clan spell-bound, would intone - The deep melodious legend, flowing thus, - As all the world flows, through the eternal mind. - - I came one day upon an ancient City. - I saw the long white crescent of its wall - Stained with thin peach-blood, blistered by the sun. - - I saw beyond it, clustering in the sky, - Ethereal throngs of ivory minarets, - Tall slender towers, each crowned with one bright pearl. - - It was no desert phantom; for it grew - And sharpened as I neared it, till I saw, - Under the slim carved windows in the towers, - The clean-cut shadows, forked and black and small - Like clinging swallows. - In the midst up-swam - The Sultan’s palace with its faint blue domes, - The moons of morning. - Wreaths of frankincense - Floated around me as I entered in. - A thousand thousand warrior faces thronged - The glimmering streets. Blood-rubies burned like stars - In shadowy silks and turbans of all hues. - - The markets glowed with costly merchandise. - I saw proud stallions, pacing to and fro - Before the rulers of a hundred kings. - I saw, unrolled beneath the slender feet - Of slave-girls, white as April’s breathing snow, - Soft prayer-rugs of a subtler drift of bloom - Than flows with sunset over the blue and grey - And opal of the drifting desert sand. - - Princes and thieves, philosophers and fools - Jostled together, among hot scents of musk. - Dark eyes were flashing. Blood throbbed darker yet. - Lean dusky fingers groped for hilts of jade. - Then, with a roll of drums, through Eastern gates, - Out of the dawn, and softer than its clouds, - Tall camels, long tumultuous caravans, - Like stately ships came slowly stepping in, - Loaded with shining plunder from Cathay. - I turned and asked my neighbour in the throng - Who built that city, and how long ago. - He stared at me in wonder. “It is old, - Older than any memory,” he replied. - “Nor can our fathers’ oldest legend tell - Who built so great a city.” - I went my way. - And in a thousand ages I returned, - And found not even a stone of that great City, - Not even a shadow of all that lust and pride. - But only an old peasant gathering herbs - Where once it stood, upon the naked plain. - - “What wars destroyed it, and how long ago?” - I asked him. Slowly lifting his grey head, - He stared at me in wonder. - “This bleak land - Was always thus. Our bread was always black - And our wine harsh. It is a bitter wind - That scourges us. But where these nettles grew - Nettles have always grown. Nothing has changed - In mortal memory here.” - “Was there not, once, - A mighty City?” I said, “with shining streets, - Here, on this ground?” I spoke with bated breath. - He shook his head and smiled, the pitying smile - That wise men use to poets and to fools.— - “Our fathers never told us of that City. - Doubtless it was a dream.” - I went my way. - And in a thousand ages I returned; - And, where the plain was, I beheld the sea. - The sea-gulls mewed and pounced upon their prey. - The brown-legged fishermen crouched upon the shore, - Mending their tarry nets. - I asked how long - That country had been drowned beneath the waves. - They mocked at me. “His wits are drowned in wine. - Tides ebb and flow, and fishes leap ashore; - But all our harvest, since the first wind blew, - Swam in deep waters. Are not wrecks washed up - With coins that none can use, because they bear - The blind old images of forgotten kings? - The waves have shaped these cliffs, dug out these caves, - Rounded each agate on this battered beach. - How long? Ask earth, ask heaven. Nothing has changed. - The sea was always here.”— - I went my way. - - And in a thousand ages I returned. - The sea had vanished. Where the ships had sailed - Warm vineyards basked, among the enfolding hills. - I saw, below me, on the winding road, - Two milk-white oxen, under a wooden yoke, - Drawing a waggon, loaded black with grapes. - Beside them walked a slim brown-ankled girl. - I stood beneath a shadowy wayside oak - To watch them. They drew near. - It was no dream. - Blood of the grape upon the wrinkled throats - And smoking flanks of the oxen told me this. - I saw the branching veins and satin skin - Twitch at the flickering touch of a fly. I saw - The knobs of brass that sheathed their curling horns, - The moist black muzzles. - Like many whose coats are white, - Their big dark eyes had mists of blue. - Their breath - Was meadows newly mown. - By all the gods - That ever wrung man’s heart out in the grave - I did not dream this life into the world.— - Blood of the grape upon the girl’s brown arms - And lean, young, bird-like fingers told me this. - Her smooth feet powdered by the warm grey dust; - The grape-stalk that she held in her white teeth; - Her mouth a redder rose than Omar knew; - Her eyes, dark pools where stars could shine by day; - These were no dream. And yet,— - “How long ago,” - I asked her, “did the bitter sea withdraw - Its foam from all your happy sun-burnt hills?” - She looked at me in fear. Then, with a smile, - She answered, “Nothing here has ever changed. - My father’s father, in his childhood, played - Among these vines. That oak-tree where you stand - Had lived a century, then. The parent oak - From which its acorn dropped had long been dead. - But hills are hills. I never saw the sea. - Nothing has ever changed.” - I went my way. - Last, in a thousand ages I returned, - And found, once more, a City, thronged and tall, - More rich, more marvellous even than the first; - A City of pride and lust and gold and grime, - A City of clustering domes and stately towers, - And temples where the great new gods might dwell. - But, turning to a citizen in the gates, - I asked who built it and how long ago. - He stared at me as wise men stare at fools; - Then, pitying the afflicted, he replied - Gently, as to a child: - “The City is old, - Older than all our histories. Its birth - Is lost among the impenetrable mists - That shroud the most remote antiquity. - None knows, nor can our oldest legends tell - Who built so great a City.” - I went my way. - - - - -IV—THE TORCH IN ITALY - -LEONARDO DA VINCI - - -I - -HILLS AND THE SEA - - The mists rolled back. I saw the City of Flowers - Far down, upon the plain; and, on the slope - Beside us—we were shadows and unseen,— - Giulio, the painter, sketching rocks and trees. - We watched him working, till a pine-cone crackled - On the dark ridge beyond us, and we saw, - Descending from the summits like a god, - A deep-eyed stranger with a rose-red cloak - Fluttering against the blue of the distant hills. - - He stood awhile, above a raw ravine, - Studying the furrows that the rains had made - Last winter. Then he searched among the rocks - As though for buried gold. - As he drew near - Giulio looked up and spoke, and he replied. - Their voices rose upon the mountain air - Like a deep river answering a brook, - While each pursued his work in his own way. - - _Giulio._ - - What are you seeking? Something you have lost? - - _The Stranger._ - - Something I hope to find. - - _Giulio._ - - You dropped it here? - Was it of value? Not your purse, I hope. - - _The Stranger._ - - More precious than my purse. - - _Giulio._ - - Your lady’s ring? - A jewel, perhaps? - - _The Stranger._ - - A jewel of a sort; - But it may take a thousand years to trace it - Back to its rightful owner. - - _Giulio (laughing)._ - - O, you are bitten - By the prevailing fashion. Since the plough - Upturned those broken statues, all the world - Is relic-hunting; but, my friend, you’ll find - No Aphrodite here. - - _The Stranger (picking up a fossil)._ - - And yet I think - It was the sea, from which she rose alive, - That shaped these rocks and left these twisted shells - Locked up, like stone in stone. They must have lived - Once, in the sea. - - _Giulio._ - - Ah, now I understand. - You’re a philosopher,—one of those who tread - The dusty road to Nowhere, which they call - Science. - - _The Stranger._ - - All roads to truth are one to me. - - _Giulio._ - - Sir, you deceive yourself. Your road can lead - Only to error. The Adriatic lies - How many miles away? We stand up here - On these unchanging hills; and yet, to fit - Your theory, you would roll the seas above - The peaks of Monte Rosa. - - _The Stranger._ - - But these shells? - How did they come here? - - _Giulio._ - - Obviously enough, - The sea being where it is, it was the Flood - That left them here. - - _The Stranger._ - - Then Noah must have dropped them - Out of his Ark. They never crept so far; - And Noah must have dumped his ballast, too, - Among our hills; for all those rippled rocks - Up yonder were composed of blue sea-clay. - I have found sea-weed in them, turned to stone, - The claws of crabs, the skeletons of fish. - Think you that, if your Adriatic lay - Where it now lies, its little sidling crabs - Could scuttle through the Deluge to the hills? - Your Deluge must have risen above the tops - Of all the mountains. If it rose so high, - Then it embraced the globe, and made our earth - One smooth blue round of water. When it sank - What chasm received those monstrous cataracts? - Or was the sun so hot it sucked them up - And turned them into a mist? - Is not that tale - A racial memory, lingering in our blood, - Of realms that now lie buried in the sea, - Or isles that heaved up shining from the deep - In old volcanic throes? - - _Giulio._ - - I must confess - I always feel a pang, sir, when I see - A man of talent wasting his fine powers - On this blind road. - - _The Stranger._ - - Show me a better way. - - _Giulio._ - - The way of Art, sir. - - _The Stranger._ - - Yes. That is a road - I have wished that I might travel. But are you sure - Our paths are not eventually the same? - Why have you climbed up here? To paint the truth, - As you perceive it, in those rocks and trees. - Suppose that, with your skill of hand, you saw - The truth more clearly, saw the lines of growth, - The bones and structure of the world you paint, - And the great rhythm of law that runs through all, - Might you not paint them better even than now? - Might you not even approach the final cause - Of all our art and science,—the pure truth - Which also is pure beauty? - - _Giulio._ - - Genius leaps - Like lightning to that mark, sir, and can waive - These pains and labours. - - _The Stranger._ - - O, I have no doubt - That you are right. I speak with diffidence, - And as a mere spectator; one who likes - To know, and seizes on this happy chance - Of learning what an artist really thinks. - - _Giulio._ - - We artists, sir, are not concerned with laws, - Except to break them. Genius is a law - Unto itself. - - _The Stranger._ - - And that is why you’ve made - Your wood-smoke blue against that shining cloud? - Against the darker background of the hill - It is blue in nature also; but it turns - To grey against the sky. - - _Giulio._ - - I am not concerned - With trivial points. - - _The Stranger._ - - But if they point to truth - Beyond themselves, and through that change of colour - Reveal its cause, and knit your scheme in law; - Nay, as a single point of light will speak - To seamen of the land that they desire, - Transfiguring all the darkness with one spark, - Would this be trivial? Sir, a touch will do it. - Lend me your brush a moment. Had you drawn - Your rocks here in the foreground, thus and thus, - Following the ribbed lines of those beds of clay - As the sea laid them, and the fire upheaved - And cracked them, you’ll forgive me if I say - That they’d not only indicate the law - Of their creation; but they’d look like rocks - Instead of—— - - _Giulio._ - - Pray don’t hesitate. - - _The Stranger._ - - I speak - As a spectator only; but to me— - Sponges or clouds perhaps—— - - _Giulio._ - - We artists, sir, - Aim at this very effect. To us, the fact - Is nothing. There is a kingdom of the mind, - Where all things turn to dreams. Nothing is true - In that great kingdom; and our subtlest work - Is that which has no basis. - - _The Stranger._ - - Then I fear - My thoughts are all astray; for I believed - That kingdom to be more substantial far - Than anything we see; and that the road - Into that kingdom is the road of law - Which we discover here,—the Word made Flesh. - - _Giulio._ - - I do not understand you—quite. I fear - Yours is the popular view—that art requires - Purposes, meanings, even moralities - With which we artists, sir, are not concerned. - - _The Stranger._ - - O, no. I merely inquire. I wish to hear - From one who knows. I am a little puzzled. - You have dismissed so much—this outer world - And all its laws; and now this other, too. - I am no moralist; but I must confess - That, in the greatest Art, I have always found - A certain probity, a certain splendour - Of inner and outer constancy to law. - - _Giulio._ - - All genius is capricious. You’ll admit - That men who lived like beasts have painted well. - - _The Stranger._ - - Yes; but not greatly, except when their own souls - Have gripped the beast within them by the throat, - And risen again to reassert the law. - - _Giulio._ - - Art lives by its technique, a fact the herd - Will never understand. A noble soul - Is useless, if it cannot wield a brush. - - _The Stranger._ - - May not technique include control and judgment? - Alone, they are not enough; but, for the heights, - More is required, not less. I’d even add - Some factors you despise. - - _Giulio._ - - Your shells, for instance? - And that mysterious and invisible sea? - - _The Stranger._ - - The sea whence Beauty rose. - - _Giulio._ - - You have an eye - For Beauty, too. You are a lover of art - And you are rich. What opportunities - You throw away! Was it not you I saw - Yesterday, in the market-place at Florence, - Buying caged birds and tossing them into the air? - - _The Stranger._ - - It may have been. I like to see them fly. - The structure of the wing,—I think that men - Will fly one day. - - _Giulio._ - - It was not pity, then? - - _The Stranger._ - - I’d not exclude it. As I said before, - I would include much. - - _Giulio._ - - You were speaking, sir, - Of Art. There are so few, so very few - Who understand what Art is. - - _The Stranger._ - - Fewer still - Who know the few to choose. - - _Giulio._ - - Perhaps you’d care - To see some work of mine. I do not live - In Florence; but I’d like to set your feet - On the right way. We are a little group - Known to the few that know. You’d find our works - Far better worth your buying than caged birds. - Pray let me know your name, sir. - - _The Stranger._ - - Leonardo. - - -II - -AT FLORENCE - - I saw the house at Florence, cool and white - With violet shadows, drowsing in the sun. - The fountain splashed and bubbled in the court. - Beside it, in a space of softened light, - Under a linen awning, ten feet high, - Roofing a half-enclosure, where three walls - Were tinted to a pine-wood’s blue-black shade, - I saw a woman seated on a throne, - And Leonardo, with his radiant eyes, - Glancing from his wet canvas to her face. - - Her face was filled with music. Music swelled - Above them, from a gallery out of sight; - And as the soft pulsation of the strings - Died into infinite distances, he spoke. - His voice was more than music. It was thought - Ebbing and flowing, like a strange dark sea. - - “Listen to me; for I have things to say - That I can only tell the world through you. - Were you not just a little afraid of me - At first? You know by popular report - I dabble in Black Arts, and so I would - To keep you here, an hour or two each day, - Until the mystery we have conjured up - Between us—there again, it came and went— - Smiles at the centuries in their masquerade - As you smiled, then, at me. - Not mockery—quite— - Not irony either; something we evoked - That seems to have caught the ironist off his guard, - And slyly observes the mocker’s naked heel. - So we’ll defend humanity, you and I, - Against the worst of tyrannies,—the blind sneer - Of intellectual pride. The subtle fool - And cunning sham at least shall meet one gaze - More subtle, more secure; not yours or mine, - But Nature’s own—that calm, inscrutable smile - Whereby each erring atomy is restored - To its true place, taught its true worth at last, - And heaven’s divine simplicity renewed. - - Not yours or mine, Madonna. Could I trust - To brush and palette or my skill of hand - For this? Oh, no! We need Black Arts, I think, - Black Arts and incantations, or you’d grow - Weary of sitting here. - Last night I made - Five bubbles of glass—you blow them with a pipe - Over a flame,—and set them there to dance - Upon the fountain’s feathery crest of spray. - Piero thought it waste of time. He jeers - At these mechanical arts of mine. I watched - That dance and learned a little of the machine - We call the world. I left them leaping there - To catch your eyes this morning, and learned more. - So one thing leads to another. A device, - Mechanical as the spinning of the stars - In the Arch-Mechanic’s Cosmos, woke a gleam - Of wonder; and I lay these Black Arts bare - To make you wonder more. - Black Arts, Madonna; - For even such trifles may discover depths - Dark as the pit of death; as when I laid - Dice on a drum, and by their trembling showed - Where underneath our armoured city walls - The enemy dug his mines. - And now—you smile, - To think how wars are won. - Catgut and wood - Have served our wizardry. Yes; that’s why I set - Musicians in the gallery overhead, - To pluck their strings; and, while you listened, so - Painted the living spirit that they bound - With their bright spells before me, in your face. - Black Arts, Madonna, and cold-blooded, too. - O, sheer mechanical, playing upon your mind - And senses, as they too were instruments, - Or colours to be ground and mixed and used - For purposes that were not yours at all, - Until the living Power that uses me - Breathes on this fabric, also made by hands, - The inscrutable face that smiles all arts away. - - How many tales I have told you sitting here - To make you see, according to my need, - The comedy of the world, its lights and shades: - The sensual feast; the mockery of renown; - Youth and his innocent boastings, unaware - How swiftly run the sands; Youth that believes - His own bright scorn for others’ aching faults - Has crowned him conqueror; Youth so nobly sure - That plans are all achievements; quite, quite sure - Of his own victory where all others failed; - Age, with blind eyes, or staring at defeat, - Dishonoured; Age, in honour, with a wreath - Of fading leaves in one old trembling hand, - And at his feet the dark all-gulfing grave; - Envy, the lean and wizened witch behind him, - Riding on death, like his own crooked shadow, - Snapping at heaven with one contemptuous hand, - As though she hated God; and, on her face, - A mask of fairness; Envy, with those barbs - Of wicked lightning darting from her flesh; - Envy, whose eyes the palm and olive wound; - Whose ears the laurel and myrtle pierce with pain; - A fiery serpent eating at her heart; - A quiver on her back with tongues for arrows. - Each of these pictures left its little shadow, - A little memory in your spellbound face, - And so your picture smiles at all of these, - And at one secret never breathed aloud, - Because I think we knew it all too well. - - Once only, in a riddle, I made you smile - At our own secret also, when I said - ‘If liberty be dear to you, Madonna, - Never discover that your painter’s face - Is Love’s dark prison.’ - Sailing to the south - From our Cilicia, you and I have seen - Beautiful Cyprus, rising from the wave; - Cyprus, that island where Queen Venus reigned. - The blood of men was drawn to that rough coast - As tides, on other shores, obey the moon. - Glens of wild dittany, winding through the hills - From Paphos, her lost harbour, to the peak - Of old Olympus, where she tamed the gods, - Enticed how many a wanderer, - Odorous winds - Welcomed us, ruffling, crumpling the smooth brine - Into a sea of violets. We drew near. - We heard the muffled thunder of the surf! - What ships, what fleets, had broken among those rocks! - We saw a dreadful host of shattered hulls, - Great splintered masts, innumerable keels - With naked ribs, like skeletons of whales - All weltering there, half-buried in the sand. - The foam rushed through them. On their rotted prows - And weed-grown poops the sea-gulls perched and screamed; - And all around them with an eerie cry - An icy wind was blowing. - It would seem - Like the Last Judgment, should there ever be - A resurrection of the ships we saw - Lying there dead. These things we saw and live. - And now your picture smiles at all of these. - The secret still evades me everywhere; - And everywhere I feel it, close at hand. - Do you remember when Vesuvius flamed - And the earth shivered and cracked beneath our feet? - Ten villages were engulfed. I wandered out - Among the smoking fragments of earth’s crust - To see if, in that breaking-up of things, - Nature herself had now perhaps unsealed - Some of her hidden wonders. - On that day, - I found a monstrous cavern in the hills, - A rift so black and terrible that it dazed me. - I stood there, with my back bent to an arch, - My left hand clutching at my knee, my right - Shading contracted eyes. I strained to see - Into that blackness, till the strong desire - To know what marvellous thing might lurk within - Conquered my fear. I took a ball of thread - And tied one end to a lightning-blasted tree. - I made myself a torch of resinous pine - And entered, running the thread through my left hand, - On, on, into the entrails of the world. - - O, not Odysseus, when his halting steps - Crept through that monstrous hollow to the dead, - Felt such a fearful loneliness as I; - For there were voices echoing through _his_ night, - And shadows of lost friends to welcome him; - But my fierce road to knowledge clove its way - Into a silence deeper than the grave, - Into a darkness where not even a ghost - Could stretch its hands out, even in farewell. - And all that I could see around me there - Was my own smoking torchlight, walls of rock - And awful rifts where other caverns yawned. - And all that I could hear was my own steps - Echoing through endless darkness, on and on. - - My thread ran out. My torch was burning low, - When, through the darkness, I became aware - Of something darker, looming up in front; - Solid as rock, and yet more strange and wild - Than any shadow. My flesh and blood turned cold - Before that awful Presence in the dark. - I left the thread behind me, and crept on; - Held up the guttering torch; and there, O there, - I saw it, and I live. - A monstrous thing - With jaws that might have crushed a ship, and bones - That might upheave a mountain; a Minotaur, - A dreadful god of beasts, now turned to stone, - Like a great smoke-bleared idol. The wild light - Smeared it with blood; a thing that once had lived; - A thing that once might turn the sea to mist - With its huge flounderings, and would make a spoil - For kingdoms with the ships it drove ashore. - The torchlight flared against it, and went out; - And I groped back, in darkness.... - And you smile. - O, what a marvel of enginery was there! - What giant thews and sinews once controlled - The enormous hinges of the rock-bound bones - I saw in my dark cavern. Yet it perished, - And all its monstrous race has perished, too. - Was it all waste? Did it prepare the way - For lordlier races? Even, perhaps, for men? - - Only one life to track these wonders home, - So many roads to follow. Never the light - Till all be travelled. - We will not despise - Mechanical arts, Madonna, while we use - These marvellous living instruments of ours. - Rather we’ll seek to master for ourselves - The Master’s own devices. Birds can fly, - And so shall men, when they have learned the law - Revealed in every wing. Far off, I have seen - Men flying like eagles over the highest clouds; - Men that in ships like long grey swordfish glide - Under the sea; men that in distant lands - Will speak to men in Italy; men that bring - The distant near, and bind all worlds in one. - And yet—I shall not see it. I have explored - This human instrument, traced its delicate tree - Of nerves, discovering how the life-blood flows - Out of the heart, through every branching vein; - And how, in age, the thickening arteries close - And the red streams no longer feed this frame, - And the parched body starves at last and dies. - - I have built bridges. Armies tread them now. - The rains will come. The torrents will roll down - And sweep them headlong to the sea, one day. - I have painted pictures. Let cicalas chirrup - Of their brief immortality. I know - How soon these colours fade. - And yet, and yet, - I do not think the Master of us all - Would set us in His outer courts at night - As the Magnificent, once, in the flush of wine, - Set Angelo, to flatter an idle whim - And sculpture him a godhead out of snow. - - The work’s not wasted. In my youth I thought - That I was learning how to live, and now - I see that I was learning how to die. - Then comes the crowning wonder. We strip off - The scaffolding; for the law is learned at last; - And our reality, Parian then, not snow, - Dares the full sun of morning, fronts the gaze - Of its divine Pygmalion; lives and breathes; - And knows, then, why it passed through all those pains. - - Now—the last touch of all! And, as this face - Begins to breathe against those ancient rocks, - Let music breathe these arts of mine away.” - - Music awoke. It throbbed like hidden wings - Above them. Then a minstrel’s golden voice, - As from a distance, on those wings arose - And poured the Master’s passion into song: - - _Burn, Phœnix, burn;_ - _And, in thy burning, take_ - _All that love taught me, all I strove to learn,_ - _All that I made, and all I failed to make._ - - _If it be true_ - _That from the fire thou rise_ - _In splendour, as men say dead worlds renew_ - _Their light from their own embers in the skies,_ - - _In thy fierce nest_ - _I’d share that death with thee,_ - _To make one shining feather on thy breast_ - _Of all I am, and all I strove to be._ - - _The worthless bough_ - _May kindle a rich coal;_ - _And in our mingling ashes, how wilt thou_ - _Know mine from thine, ere both reclothe thy soul?_ - - _Now—as thy wings_ - _Arise from this proud fire,_ - _My dust in thy assumption mounts and sings;_ - _And, being a part of thee, I still aspire._ - - - - -V—IN FRANCE - -JEAN GUETTARD - - -I - -THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN - - Who knows the name of Jean Guettard to-day? - I wrestled with oblivion all night long. - At times a curtain on a lighted stage - Would lift a moment, and fall back again. - Once, in the dark, a sunlit row of vines - Gleamed through grey mists on his invisible hill. - The mists rolled down. Then, like a miser, Night - Caught the brief glory in her blind cloak anew. - At dawn I heard the voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf - Breathing a quiet song. It seemed remote - And yet was near, as when the listener’s heart - Fills a cold shell with its remembered waves. - - “When I was young,” said Jean Guettard, - “My comrades and myself would hide - Beneath a tall and shadowy Rock - In summer, on the mountain-side. - The wind and rain had sculptured it— - Such tricks the rain and wind will play,— - To likeness of a Mother and Child; - But wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard, - “Have worn the rocks for many a day.” - - “The peasants in that quiet valley, - Among their vineyards bending there, - Called it the Rock of the Good Virgin, - And breathed it many an evening prayer. - When I grew up I left my home - For dark Auvergne, to seek and know - How all this wondrous world was made; - And I have learned,” said Jean Guettard, - “How rains can beat, and winds can blow.” - - “When I came home,” said Jean Guettard, - “Not fifty years had fleeted by. - I looked to see the Form I loved - With arms outstretched against the sky. - Flesh and blood as a wraith might go. - This, at least, was enduring stone. - I lifted heart and eyes aglow, - Over the vines,” said Jean Guettard.... - - “The rain had beaten, the wind had blown, - The hill was bare as the sky that day. - Mother and Child from the height had gone. - The wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard, - “Had crumbled even the Rock away.” - - “Shadow-of-a-Leaf,” I whispered, for I saw - The crosier of a fern against the grey; - And, as the voice died, he stood dark before me. - “You sang as though you loved him. Let the mists - Unfold.” - He smiled. “See, first, that Rock,” he said, - “Dividing them.” - At once, through drifting wreaths - I saw a hill emerging, a green hill - Clothed with the dying rainbow of those tears - The mist had left there. From the rugged crest - Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away. - I saw the Rock upstanding on the height - So closely, and so near me, that I knew - Its kinship with the rocks of Fontainebleau; - The sandstone whose red grains for many an age - Had been laid down, under a vanished sea; - A Rock, upthrust from darkness into light, - By buried powers, as power upthrust it now - In the strong soul, with those remembering hills, - Till, graven by frost and beaten by wind and rain, - It slowly assumed the semblance of that Form - Of Love, the Mother, holding in her arms - The Child of Earth and Heaven; a shape of stone; - An image; but it was not made by hands. - Footsteps drew near. I heard an eager voice - Naming a flower in Latin. - Up they came— - Each with a bunch of wild flowers in his hand,— - A lean old man, with snowy wind-blown hair, - Panting a little; and, lightly at his side, - Offering a strong young arm, a sun-burnt boy, - Of eighteen years, with darkly shining eyes. - It was those eyes, deep, scornful, tender, gay, - Dark fires at which all falsehood must consume, - That told me who they were—the young Guettard, - And his old grandsire. - Under the Rock they stood. - “Good-bye. I’ll leave you here,” the old man said. - “We’ve had good luck. These are fine specimens. - The last, perhaps, that we shall find together; - For when you leave your home to-morrow, Jean, - I think you are going on a longer journey - Even than you know. Perhaps, when you are famous, - You will not be so proud as I should be, - Were I still living, to recall the days - When even I, the old apothecary, - Could teach you something.” - Jean caught a wrinkled hand, - Held it between his own, and laughed away - That shadow, but old Descurain looked at him, - Proudly and sadly. “It will not rest with you, - Or your affection, Jean. The world will see to it. - The world that knows as much of you and me, - As you and I of how that creeper grew - Around your bedroom window.” - As he spoke, - Along the lower slopes the mists began - To blow away like smoke. The patch of vines - Crept out again; and, far below I saw, - Sparkling with sun, the valley of the Juine, - The shining river, and the small clear town - Étampes, the grey old church, the clustering roofs, - The cobbled square, the gardens, wet and bright - With blots of colour. - “I have lived my life - Out of the world, down there,” Descurain said, - “Compounding simples out of herbs and flowers; - Reading my Virgil in the quiet evenings, - Alone, for all those years; and, then, with you. - _O fortunatos_—Do we ever know - Our happiness till we lose it? You’ll remember - Those Georgics—the great praise of Science, Jean! - And that immortal picture of the bees! - No doubt you have chosen rightly. For myself, - I know, at least, where healing dittany grows, - And where earth’s beauty hides in its dark heart - An anodyne, at last, for all our pain. - And one thing more I have learned, and see with awe - On every side, more clearly, that on earth - There’s not one stone, one leaf, one creeping thing, - No; nor one act or thought, but plays its part - In the universal drama. - You’ll look back - One day on this lost bee-like life of mine; - And find, perhaps, in its obscurest hour - And lowliest task, the moment when a light - Began to dawn upon a child’s dark mind. - The old pestle and mortar, and the shining jars, - The smell of the grey bunches of dried herbs, - The little bedroom over the market-square, - The thrifty little house where you were born, - The life that all earth’s great ones would despise— - All these, perhaps, were needed, as the hand - That led you, first, in childhood to the hills. - You’ll see strange links, threads of effect and cause, - In complicated patterns, growing clear - And binding all these memories, each to each, - And all in one; how one thing led to another, - My simples to your love of plants and flowers, - And this to your new interest in the haunts - That please them best—the kinds of earth, the rocks, - And minerals that determine where they grow, - Foster them, or reject them. You’ll discover - That all these indirections are not ruled - By chance, but by dark predetermined laws. - You’ll grope to find what Power, what Thought, what Will, - Determined them; till, after many a year, - At one swift clue, one new-found link, one touch, - They are flooded with a new transfiguring light, - Deep as the light our kneeling peasants know - When, dumbly, at the ringing of a bell - They adore the sacred elements; a light - That shows all Nature, of which your life is part, - Bound to that harmony which alone sets free; - And every grain of dust upon its way - As punctual to its purpose as a star. - - This Rock has played its part in many a life. - We know it, for we see it every day. - No angelus ever rang, but some one’s eyes - Were lifted to it; and, returning home, - The wanderer strains to see it from the road. - What is it, then? It plays no greater part - Than any grain of dust beneath our feet, - Could we discern it. A dumb block of stone, - A shadow in the mind, a thought of God, - A little fragment of the eternal order, - That postulates the whole. - If we could see - The universal Temple in which it stands - We, too, should bow our heads; for if this Form - Were shaped by Chance, it was the selfsame Chance - That gave us love and death. In this the fool - Descries a reason for denying all - To which our peasants kneel. The years to come - (And you will speed them, Jean) will rather make - This dust the floor of heaven.” - The old man laid - His bunch of herbs and flowers below the Rock, - Smiled, nodded, and went his way. - “Was it by chance,” - Thought Jean Guettard, “that grandad laid them so; - Or by design; or by some vaster art - Transcending, yet including, all our thoughts, - And memories, with those flowers and that dumb stone, - As chords in its world-music? Why should flowers - Laid thus”—he laid his own at the feet of the Rock— - “Transfigure it with such beauty that it stood - Blessing him, from its arch of soft blue sky - Above him, like a Figure in a shrine?” - - He touched its glistening grains. “I think that Ray - Was right,” he murmured. “This was surely made - Under the sea; sifted and drifted down - From vanished hills and spread in level beds, - Under deep waters; compressed by the sea’s weight; - Upheaved again by fire; and now, once more, - Wears down by way of the rain and brook and river, - Back to the sea; but all by roads of law.” - Then, looking round him furtively, to make sure - No one was near, he dropped upon his knees. - The mist closed over him. Rock and hill were lost - In greyness once again. - - -II - -MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES - - Moments were years, - Till, at the quiet whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - Those veils withdrew, and showed another scene. - I saw two dusty travellers, blithely walking - With staffs and knapsacks, on a straight white road - Lined with tall sentinel poplars as to await - A king’s return; but scarce a bird took heed - Of those two travel-stained wanderers—Jean Guettard - And Malesherbes, his old school-friend. - Larks might see - Two wingless dots that crept along the road. - The Duke rode by and saw two vagabonds - With keenly searching eyes, as they jogged on - To Moulins. Birds and Duke and horse could see, - Against the sky, that old square prison-tower, - The tall cathedral, the dark gabled roofs, - Thronging together behind its moated wall; - But not one eye in all that wide green land - Saw what those two could see; and not one soul - Espied the pilgrim thought upon its way - To change the world for man. - The pilgrim thought! - Say rather the swift hunter, tracking down - More subtly than an Indian the dark spoor - Of his gigantic prey. - I saw them halt - Where, at the white road’s edge, a milestone rose - Out of the long grass, like a strange black gnome, - A gnome that had been dragged from his dark cave - Under the mountains, and now stood there dumb, - Striving to speak. But what? - “There! There! Again!” - Cried Jean Guettard. They stood and stared at it, - But not to read as other travellers use - How far themselves must journey. - They knelt down - And looked at it, and felt it with their hands. - A farmer passed, and wondered were they mad. - For, when they hailed him, and his tongue prepared - To talk of that short cut across the fields - Beside the mill-stream, they desired to know - Whence the black milestone came. It was the fourth - That they had passed since noon. - He grinned at them. - “Black stones?” he said, “you’ll find them all the way - To Volvic now!” - “To Volvic,” cried Guettard, - “Volcani vicus!” - They seized their staffs again; - Halted at Moulins, only to break a crust - Of bread and cheese, and drink one bottle of wine, - Then hastened on, following the giant trail, - Milestone by milestone, till the scent grew hot; - For now they saw, in the wayside cottages, - The black stone under the jasmine’s clustering stars; - And children, at the half-doors, wondered why - Those two strange travellers pushed the leaves away - And tapped upon their walls. - At last they saw, - Black as a thundercloud anchored to its hill, - Above the golden orchards of Limagne, - The town of Riom. All its walls were black. - Its turreted heights with leering gargoyles crawled - Above them, like that fortress of old Night - To which Childe Roland came. - No slughorn’s note - Challenged it, and they set no lance in rest, - But dusty and lame, with strangely burning eyes, - Those footpads, quietly as the ancient Word, - Stole into that dark lair and sought their prey. - Surely, they thought, the secret must be known - To some that live, eat, sleep, in this grim den. - Have they not guessed what monster lurks behind - This blackness? - In the chattering streets they saw - The throng around the fruit-stalls, and the priest - Entering the Sainte Chapelle. With eyes of stone - The statue of that lover of liberty - The chancellor, L’Hôpital, from his great dark throne - Gazed, and saw less than the indifferent sparrow - That perched upon his hand. Barefooted boys - Ran shouting round the fountain in the square. - It was no dream. Along the cobbled street, - Clattering like ponies in their wooden shoes, - Three girls went by with baskets full of apples. - The princely butcher, standing at his door, - Rosily breathing sawdust and fresh blood, - Sleeked his moustache and rolled an amorous eye. - It was no dream. They lived their light-winged lives - In this prodigious fabric of black stone, - Slept between walls of lava, drank their wine - In taverns whose black walls had risen in fire; - Prayed on the slag of the furnace; roofed their tombs - With slabs of that slaked wrath; and saw no more - Than any flock of birds that nightly roost - On the still quivering Etna. - It was late, - Ere the two travellers found a wise old host - Who knew the quarries where that stone was hewn; - Too far for them that night. His inn could lodge them. - A young roast fowl? Also he had a wine, - The Duc de Berry, once.... Enough! they supped - And talked. Gods, how they talked and questioned him,— - The strangest guests his inn had ever seen. - They wished to know the shape of all the hills - Around those quarries. “There were many,” he said, - “Shaped at the top like this.” He lifted up - An old round-bellied wine-cup. - At the word - He wellnigh lost his guests. They leapt to their feet. - They wished to pay their quittance and press on - To see those hills. But, while they raved, the fowl - Was laid before them, luscious, fragrant, brown. - He pointed, speechless, to the gathering dusk, - And poured their wine, and conquered. - “The Bon Dieu - Who made the sensual part of man be praised,” - He said to his wife; “for if He had made a world - Of pure philosophers, every tavern in France - Might close its shutters, and take down its sign.” - - So Jean Guettard and Malesherbes stayed and supped; - And, ere they slept, being restless, they went out - And rambled through the sombre streets again. - They passed that haunted palace of Auvergne, - Brooding on its wild memories and grim birth; - And from the Sainte Chapelle, uplifting all - That monstrous darkness in one lean black spire - To heaven, they heard an organ muttering low - As though the stones once more were stirred to life - By the deep soul within. Then, arched and tall, - In the sheer blackness of that lava, shone - One rich stained window, where the Mother stood, - In gold and blue and crimson, with the Child. - They looked at it as men who see the life - And light of heaven through the Plutonian walls - Of this material universe. They heard - The young-voiced choir, in silver-throated peals, - Filling the night with ecstasy. They stood - Bareheaded in the dark deserted street, - Outcasts from all that innocence within, - And silent; till the last celestial cry, - Like one great flight of angels, ebbed away. - - -III - -THE SHADOW OF PASCAL - - At daybreak they pressed on. Strange hills arose - Clustering before them, hills whose fragrant turf, - Softer than velvet, hid what savage hearts! - At noon they saw, beside the road, a gash - Rending the sunlit skin of that green peace; - An old abandoned quarry, half overgrown - With ferns, and masked by boughs. - They left the road - And looked at it. Volcanic rock! A flood - Of frozen lava! - They marked its glossy blackness, the rough cords - And wrinkles where, as the fiery waves congealed, - It had crept on a little; and strangely there - New beauty, like the smile on truth’s hard face, - Gleamed on them. Never did bracken and hart’s tongue ferns - Whisper a tale like those whose dauntless roots - Were creviced in that grim rock. They tracked it up - Through heather and thyme. They saw what human eyes - Had seen for ages, yet had never seen,— - The tall green hill, a great truncated cone, - Robed in wild summer and haunted by the bee, - But shaped like grey engravings that they knew - Of Etna and Vesuvius. - Near its crest - They saw the sunlight on a shepherd’s crook, - Bright as a star. A flock of nibbling sheep - Flowed round it like a cloud, a rambling cloud - With drifting edges that broke and formed again - Before one small black barking speck that flew - Swift as a bird about a cloud in heaven. - Thyme underfoot, wild honey in the thyme; - But, under the thyme and honey, if eyes could see, - In every runnel and crevice and slip and patch, - A powdery rubble of pumice, black and red, - Flakes of cooled lava and stones congealed from fire. - It was no dream. A butterfly spread its fans - White, veined with green, on a rock of sunlit slag, - Slag of the seething furnaces below. - They reached the summit; and, under them, beheld - The hollow cup, the crater, whence that flood - Out of the dreadful molten heart of the earth - Poured in red fury to create Auvergne. - But now, instead of smoke and fire, they saw - Red of the heather in that deep grassy hollow, - And heard, instead of the hissing of the abyss, - The small grey locust, stridulent in the sun. - They came to Clermont. All its dark old streets - Were built of lava. By the _Place de Jaude_, - O, strangely in their own swift race for truth, - They met the phantom of an earlier fire! - They found the house where Pascal first beheld - The sunlight, through a window in lava-stone; - And many a time had passed, a brooding child, - With all his deep celestial thoughts to come, - Through that volcanic porch, but never saw - The wonder of the walls wherein he slept. - They saw, through mists, as I through mists discerned - Their own strange drama, that scene within the scene. - They climbed the very hill that Pascal made - A beacon-height of truth—the Puy de Dôme, - Where Florin Périer, at his bidding, took - His tubes of soft quicksilver; and, at the base, - And, at the summit, tested, proved, and weighed - The pressure of that lovely body of light, - Our globe-engirdling air. On one swift hint, - One flash of truth that Torricelli caught - From Galileo, and Pascal caught in turn, - He weighed that glory. - Ever the drama grew. - The vital fire, in yet more intricate ways - (As life itself, enkindling point by point - In the dark formless embryo, grows to power), - Coursed on, from mind to mind, each working out - Its separate purpose, yet all linked in one. - For those two pilgrims, on the cone-shaped hill - That Pascal knew, and yet had never known, - Met his great spirit among the scoriac flakes, - And found themselves, in vision, on that pure height - Where all the paths to truth shall one day meet. - They met his brooding spirit as they climbed. - They passed the dead man’s words from mouth to mouth, - With new significance, deeper and more strange - Even than they knew. _“We are on fire to explore_ - _The universe, and build our tower of truth_ - _Into the Infinite. Then the firm earth laughs,_ - _Opens, under its cracked walls, an abyss.”—_ - _Lavoisier! Malesherbes! Friends of Jean Guettard._ - _Was it only the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf that showed me_ - _Gleams of the Terror approaching, a wild storm_ - _Of fiercer, hell-hot lava, and that far sound_ - _Of tumbrils.... The Republic has no need_ - _Of savants!_ - _This dream went by, with the dead man’s words._ - They reached the highest crest. Before their eyes - The hill-scape opened like a mighty vision - That, quietly, has come true. - They stood there, dumb, - To see what they foresaw, the invisible thought - Grown firm as granite; for, as a man might die - In faith, yet wake amazed in his new world, - They saw those chains of dead volcanoes rise, - Cone behind cone, with green truncated crowns, - And smokeless craters, on the dazzling blue. - There, in the very sunlit heart of France, - They saw what human eyes had daily seen - Yet never seen till now. They stood and gazed, - More lonely in that loneliness of thought - Than wingèd men, alighting on the moon. - - Old as the moon’s own craters were those hills; - And all their wrath had cooled so long ago - That as the explorers on their downward path - Passed by a cup-shaped crater, smooth and green, - Three hundred feet in depth and breadth, they saw, - Within it, an old shepherd and his flock - Quietly wandering over its gentle slopes - Of short sweet grass, through clumps of saffron broom. - They asked him by what name that hill was known. - He answered, _The Hen’s Nest_! - “Hen’s Nest,” cried Jean Guettard, “the good God grant - This fowl be not a phœnix and renew - Its feathers in Auvergne.” - They chuckled aloud, - And left the shepherd wondering, many a day, - What secret knowledge in the stranger’s eye - Cast that uncanny light upon the hill, - A moment, and no more; and yet enough - To make him feel, even when the north wind blew, - Less at his ease in that green windless cup; - And, once or twice, although he knew not why, - He turned, and drove his flock another way. - - -IV - -AT PARIS - - “Few know the name of Jean Guettard to-day,” - Said Shadow-of-a-Leaf; for now the mists concealed - All that clear vision. “I often visited him, - Between the lights, in after years. He lived - Alone at Paris then, in two lean rooms, - A sad old prisoner, at the Palais Royal; - And many a time, beside a dying fire, - We talked together. I was only a shadow, - A creature flickering on the fire-lit wall; - But, while he bowed his head upon his hands - And gazed into the flame with misted eyes, - I could steal nearer and whisper time away. - And sometimes he would breathe his thoughts aloud; - And when at night his faithful servant, Claire, - Stole into the room to lay his frugal meal, - She’d glance at him with big brown troubled eyes - To find him talking to himself alone. - - And sometimes when the masters of the hour - Won easy victories in the light world’s fashion, - With fables, easily spun in light quick minds, - He’d leave the Academy thundering its applause, - And there, in his bare room, with none to see - But Shadow-of-a-Leaf, he would unfold again - —Smiling a little grimly to himself— - Those curious beautiful tinted maps he drew, - The very first that any man had made - To show, beneath the kingdoms made by man, - The truth, that hidden structure, ribbed with rock, - And track the vanished ages by the lives - And deaths imprinted there. - They had made him rich - In nothing but the truth. - He had mapped the rocks. - “The time is not yet come,” he used to say, - “When we can clothe them with a radiant Spring - Of happy meanings. I have never made - A theory. That’s for happier men to come; - It will be time to answer the great riddle - When we have read the question. - Here and there - Already, I note, they use this work of mine - And shuffle the old forerunner out of sight. - No matter. Let the truth live. I shall watch - Its progress, proudly, from the outer dark; - More happily, I believe, thus free from self, - Than if my soul went whoring after fame. - One thing alone I’ll claim. It is not good - To let all lies go dancing by on flowers. - This—what’s his name?—who claims to be the first - To find a dead volcano in Auvergne, - And sees, in that, only an easy road - To glory for himself, shall find, ere long, - One live volcano in old Jean Guettard. - The fool has forced me to it; for he thinks - That I’ll claim nothing. I prefer my peace; - But truth compels me here. I’ll set my heel - On him, at least. Malesherbes will bear me out. - As for the rest—no theory of the earth - Can live without these rock-ribbed facts of mine, - The facts that I first mapped, I claim no more. - These rocks, these bones, these fossil ferns and shells, - Of which the grinning moon-calf makes a jest, - A byword for all dotage and decay, - Shall yet be touched with beauty, and reveal - The secrets of the book of earth to man.” - - “He made no theory,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - “And yet, I think, he looked on all these things - Devoutly; on a sea-shell turned to stone - As on a sacred relic, at whose touch - Time opened like a gate, and let him pass - Out of this mocking and ephemeral world - Through the eternal ages, home to God. - And so I watched him, growing old and grey, - In seeking truth; a man with enemies, - Ten enemies for every truth he told; - And friends that still, despite his caustic tongue, - Loved him for his true heart. - Yet even these - Never quite reached it; never quite discerned - That even his gruffest words were but the pledge - Of his own passionate truth; the harsh pained cry - For truth, for truth, of one who saw the throng - Bewildered and astray, the ways of love - Grown tortuous, and the path to heaven grown dim - Through man’s unheed for truth. - I saw him greet - Condorcet, at the Academy. “We have lost - Two members. I condole with you, my friend. - It is their last _éloges_ you’ll speak to-day! - How will you bury their false theories? - In irony, or in academic robes? - No matter. There’ll be only one or two - Who really know; and I shall not be there - To vex you, from my corner, with one smile. - Lord, what a pack of lies you’ll have to tell! - It is the custom. When my turn arrives— - ’Twill not be long,—remember, please, I want - Truth, the whole truth, or nothing.” - I saw one night - A member walking home with him—to thank him - For his support that morning. Jean Guettard - Turned on his threshold, growling like a bear. - “You owe me nothing. I believed my vote - Was right, or else you never should have had it. - Pray do not think I liked you.” - A grim door - Opened and closed like iron in the face - Of his late friend and now indignant foe; - To whom no less, if he had needed it, - Guettard would still have given his own last sou. - He came into his lonely room that night, - And sat and stared into the fluttering fire. - I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf, was there; and I could see - More in his eyes than even Condorcet saw, - Condorcet, who of all his friends remained - Most faithful to the end. - But, at the hour - When Claire would lay his supper, a light hand tapped - Timidly on his door. He sat upright - And turned with startled eyes. - “Enter,” he called. - A wide-eyed, pale-faced child came creeping in. - “What! Little Claire!” he cried. - “Your mother is not better!” - She stood before him, - The fire-light faintly colouring her thin face,— - “M’sieur, she is very ill. You are a doctor. - Come, quickly.” - Through the narrow, ill-lighted streets - Old Jean Guettard went hobbling, a small hand - Clutching his own, and two small wooden shoes - Clattering beside him, till the child began - To droop. He lifted her gently in his arms - And hobbled on. The thin, white, tear-stained face, - Pressing against his old grey-bristled cheek, - Directed him, now to left and now to right. - “O, quick, M’sieur!” Then, into an alley, dark - As pitch, they plunged. The third door on the right! - Into the small sad house they went, and saw - By the faint guttering candle-light—the mother, - Shivering and burning on her tattered bed. - Two smaller children knelt on either side - Worn out with fear and weeping. - All that night - Guettard, of all true kings of science then, - Obscure, yet first in France and all the world, - Watched, laboured, bathed the brow and raised the head, - Moistened the thirsting lips, and knew it vain; - Knew, as I knew, that in a hundred years - Knowledge might conquer this; but he must fight - A losing battle, and fight it in the dark - No better armed than Galen. - He closed her eyes - At dawn. He took the children to his house; - Prayed with them; dried their tears; and, while they slept, - Shed tears himself, remembering—a green hill, - A Rock against the sky. - - He cared for them, as though they were his own. - Guettard, the founder of two worlds of thought, - Taught them their letters. “None can tell,” he said, - “What harvests are enfolded for the world - In one small grain of this immortal wheat. - But I, who owe so much to little things - In childhood; and have seen, among the rocks, - What vast results may wait upon the path - Of one blind life, under a vanished sea, - Bow down in awe before this human life.” - - -V - -THE RETURN - - Ever, as he grew older, life became - More sacred to him. - “In a thousand years - Man will look back with horror on this world - Where men could babble about the Lamb of God, - Then turn and kill for food one living thing - That looks through two great eyes, so like their own. - I have had living creatures killed for me; - But I will have no more.” - “Though Nature laughed - His mood to scorn,” said Shadow-of-a-Leaf, “the day - Will come (I have seen it come a myriad times) - When, through one mood like this, Nature will climb - Out of its nature, and make all things new. - Who prophesied cities, when the first blind life - Crawled from the sea, to breathe that strange bright air, - And conquer its own past?”— - “I have no theory of this wild strange world,” - Said Jean Guettard, - “But, if the God that made it dies with us - Into immortal life....” - “There, there’s the meaning,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - “Could we but grasp it. There’s the harmony - Of life, and death, and all our mortal pain.” - I heard that old man whispering in the dark, - “O, little human life, so lost to sight - Among the eternal ages, I, at least, - Find in this very darkness the one Fact - That bows my soul before you.” - Once again - The mists began to roll away like smoke. - I saw a patch of vines upon the hill - Above Étampes; and through the mists I saw - Old Jean Guettard, with snowy wind-blown hair, - Nearing the shrouded summit. As he climbed, - Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away. - He lifted up his eyes to see the Rock. - The hill was bare. His facts were well confirmed. - Sun, wind, and rain, and the sharp chisels of frost - Had broken it down. The Rock was on its way - In brook and river, with all the drifting hills, - And all his life, to the remembering sea. - He looked around him, furtively. None was near. - Down, on his knees, - Among the weather-worn shards of his lost youth, - Dropt Jean Guettard. - The mist closed over him. - The world dissolved away. The vision died, - Leaving me only a voice within the heart, - Far off, yet near, the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf. - - _The rain had beaten. The wind had blown._ - _The hill was bare as the sky that day._ - _Mother and Child from the height had gone._ - _The wind and rain, said Jean Guettard,_ - _Had crumbled even the Rock away._ - - - - -VI—IN SWEDEN - - -LINNÆUS - - It was his garden that began it all, - A magical garden for a changeling child. - - “The garden has bewitched him! - Carl! Carl! O, Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding?” - - It was the voice of Christina, wife of the Pastor, - Nils Linnæus, the Man of the Linden-tree. - Youthful and comely, she stood at her door in the twilight, - Calling her truant son. - Her flaxen hair - Kerchiefed with crisp white wings; her rose-coloured apron - And blue-grey gown, like a harebell, yielding a glimpse - Of the shapeliest ankle and snowiest stocking in Sweden; - She stood at her door, a picture breathed upon air. - - She called yet again, and tilted her head to listen - As a faint, flushed, wild anemone turning aside - From a breeze out of elf-land, teasing her delicate petals, - The breeze of the warm, white, green-veined wings of her wooer; - And again, a little more troubled at heart, she called, - “Supper-time, Carl!” - But out of the fragrant pinewoods - Darkening round her, only the wood-pigeon cooed. - Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap - Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again. - Yet, he was there, she knew, though he did not answer. - The lad was at hand, she knew, though she could not see him. - Her elf-child, nine years old, was about and around her, - A queer little presence, invisible, everywhere, nowhere, - Hiding, intensely still.... - She listened; the leaves - All whispered, “Hush!” - It was just as though Carl had whispered, - “Hush! I am watching. - “Hush! I am thinking. - “Hush! I am listening, too.” - - She tiptoed through the garden, her fair head - Turning to left and right, with birdlike glances, - Peeping round lichened boulders and clumps of fern. - She passed by the little garden his father gave him, - Elfdom within an elfdom, where he had sown - Not only flowers that rightly grow in gardens, - The delicate aristocracies of bloom, - But hedgerow waifs and ragamuffin strays - That sprawled across his borders everywhere - And troubled even the queendom of the rose - With swarming insurrections. - At last she saw him, - His tousled head a little golden cloud - Among the dark green reeds at the edge of the lake, - Bending over the breathless water to watch— - What? - She tiptoed nearer, until she saw - The spell that bound him. Floating upon the lake, - A yard away, a water-lily closed - Its petals, as an elfin cygnet smooths - Its ruffled plumes, composing them for sleep. - - He watched it, rapt, intent. - She watched her son, - Intent and rapt, with a stirring at her heart, - And beautiful shining wonder in her eyes, - Feeling a mystery near her. - Shadow-of-a-Leaf - Whispered. The garden died into the dark. - Mother and child had gone—I knew not whither. - It seemed as though the dark stream of the years - Flowed round me. - Then, as one that walks all night - Lifts up his head in the early light of dawn, - I found myself in a long deserted street - Of little wooden houses, with thatched roofs. - It was Uppsala. - Over the silent town - I heard a skylark quivering, up and up, - As though the very dew from its wild wings - Were shaken to silvery trills of elfin song. - _Tirile, tirile, tirile_, it arose, - Praising the Giver of one more shining day. - - Then, with a clatter of doors and a yodelling call - Of young men’s voices, the Svartbäcken woke; - And down the ringing street the students came - In loose blue linen suits, knapsack on back - And sturdy stick in hand, to rouse old Carl - For their long ramble through the blossoming fields. - I saw them clustering round the Master’s door. - I heard their jolly song—_Papa Linnæus_: - - Linnæus, Papa Linnæus, - He gave his pipe a rap. - He donned his gown of crimson. - He donned his green fur-cap. - He walked in a meadow at daybreak - To see what he might see; - And the linnet cried, “Linnæus! - O hide! Here comes Linnæus. - Beware of old Linnæus, - The Man of the Linden-tree.” - - So beautiful, bright and early - He brushed away the dews, - He found the wicked wild-flowers - All courting there in twos; - And buzzing loud for pardon, - Sir Pandarus, the bee: - “Vincit Amor, Linnæus, - Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!” - O, ho, quoth old Linnæus, - The Man of the Linden-tree. - - Quoth he, ’Tis my conviction - These innocents must be wed! - So he murmured a benediction, - And blessed their fragrant bed; - And the butterflies fanned their blushes - And the red-cap whistled in glee, - _They are married by old Linnæus,_ - _Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!_ - _Vivat, vivat Linnæus,_ - _The Man of the Linden-tree_. - - _Vivat Linnæus!_ And out the old Master came, - Jauntily as a throstle-cock in Spring, - His big bright eyes aglow; the fine curved beak, - The kindly lips, the broad well-sculptured brow, - All looked as though the wisdom that had shaped them - Desired that they should always wear a smile - To teach the world that kindness makes men happy. - He shook his head at his uproarious troop, - And chose his officers for the day’s campaign: - One, for a marksman, with a fowling-piece, - To bring down bird or beast, if need arose; - One for a bugler, to recall their lines - From echoing valley and hill, when something rare - Lay in the Master’s hand; one to make notes - Of new discoveries; one for discipline; all - For seeking out the truth, in youth and joy. - To-day they made for Jumkil, miles away - Along the singing river, where that prize - The _Sceptrum Carolinum_ used to grow. - And, ever as they went, Linnæus touched - All that they saw with gleams of new delight. - As when the sun first rises over the sea - Myriads of ripples wear a crest of fire; - And over all the hills a myriad flowers - Lift each a cup of dew that burns like wine; - And all these gleams reflect one heavenly light; - He changed the world around him; filled the woods - With rapture; made each footpath wind away - Into new depths of elfin-land. The ferns - Became its whispering fringe; and every stile - A faerie bridge into a lovelier world. - His magic sunlight touched the adventurous plants - That grew on the thatch of wayside cottages, - _Crepis_ and _Bromus_, with the straggling brood - Of flowers he called _tectorum_, dancing there - Above the heads of mortals, like swart gnomes - In rusty red and gold. - “My Svartbäck Latin,” - Linnæus laughed, “may make the pedants writhe; - But I would sooner take three slaps from Priscian - Than one from Mother Nature.” - Ancient books - Had made their pretty pattern of the world. - They had named and labelled all their flowers by rote, - Grouping them in a little man-made scheme - Empty of true significance as the wheel - Of stars that Egypt turned for her dead kings. - His was the very life-stream of the flowers; - And everywhere in Nature he revealed - Their subtle kinships; wedded bloom and bloom; - Traced the proud beauty, flaunting in her garden, - To gipsy grandsires, camping in a ditch; - Linked the forgotten wanderers to their clan; - Grouped many-coloured clans in one great tribe; - And gathered scores of scattered tribes again - Into one radiant nation. - He revealed - Mysterious clues to changes wild as those - That Ovid sang—the dust that rose to a stem, - The stem that changed to a leaf, the crowning leaf - That changed to a fruitful flower; and, under all, - Sustaining, moving, binding all in one, - One Power that like a Master-Dramatist, - Through every act and atom of the world - Advanced the triumph that must crown the - whole. Unseen by man—that drama—here on earth - It must be; but could man survey the whole, - As even now, in flashes, he discerns - Its gleaming moments, vanishing sharp-etched scenes - Loaded with strange significance, he would know, - Like Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that not a cloud can sail - Across a summer sky, but plays its part. - There’s not a shadow drifting on the hills, - Or stain of colour where the sun goes down, - Or least bright flake upon the hawk-moth’s wing - But that great drama needs them. - The wild thrush, - The falling petal, the bubble upon the brook, - Each has its cue, to sing, to fall, to shine, - And exquisitely responds. The drunken bee - Blundering and stumbling through a world of flowers - Has his own tingling entrances, unknown - To man or to himself; and, though he lives - In his own bee-world, following his own law, - He is yet the unweeting shuttle in a loom - That marries rose to rose in other worlds, - And shapes the wonder of Springs he cannot see. - O, little bee-like man, thou shalt not raise - Thy hand, or close thine eyes, or sigh in sleep; - But, over all thy freedom, there abides - The law of this world-drama. - Under the stars, - Between sweet-breathing gardens in the dusk, - I heard the song of the students marching home. - I saw their eyes, mad nightingales of joy, - Shining with youth’s eternal ecstasy. - I saw them tossing vines entwined with flowers - Over girls’ necks, and drawing them all along; - Flags flying, French horns blowing, kettle-drums throbbing, - And Carl Linnæus marching at their head. - Up to the great old barn they marched for supper,— - Four rounds of beef and a cask of ripened ale; - And, afterwards, each with his own flower-fettered girl, - They’d dance the rest of the summer night away. - - Greybeards had frowned upon this frolic feast; - But Carl Linnæus told them “Youth’s a flower, - And we’re botanic students.” - Many a time, - In green fur-cap and crimson dressing-gown, - He sat and smoked his pipe and watched them there - On winter nights; and when the fiddles played - His Polish dance, Linné would shuffle it too. - But now, to-night—they had tramped too many miles. - The old man was tired. He left them at the door, - And turned to his own house, as one who leaves - Much that he loved behind him. - As he went - They cheered their chief—“Vivat, vivat, Linnæus!” - And broke into their frolic song again. - - I saw him in the shadowy house alone - Entering the room, above whose happy door - The watchword of his youth and his old age - Was written in gold—_Innocue vivito._ - _Numen adest._ - I saw him writing there - His last great joyous testament, to be read - Only by his own children, as he thought, - After he’d gone; an ecstasy of praise, - As though a bird were singing in his mind, - Praise, praise, to the Giver of life and love and death! - - _God led him with His own Almighty Hand,_ - _And made him grow up like a goodly tree._ - _God filled his heart with such a loving fire_ - _For truth, that truth returned him love for love._ - _God aided him, with all that his own age_ - _Had yet brought forth, to speed him on his way._ - _God set him in a garden, as of old,_ - _And gave him, for his duty and delight,_ - _The task that he loved best in all the world._ - _God gave him for his help-mate, from his youth_ - _Into old age, the wife he most desired._ - _And blessed him with her goodness._ - _God revealed_ - _His secrets to him; touched his eyes with light_ - _And let him gaze into His Council Hall._ - _God so determined even his defeats_ - _That they became his greatest victories._ - _God made his enemies as a wind to fill_ - _His homeward-rushing sails. Wherever he went_ - _The Lord was with him, and the Lord upheld him._ - And yet, O yet, one glory was to come; - One strangest gate into infinitude - Was yet to be swung back and take him home. - _I know not how the fields that gave us birth_ - _Draw us with sweetness, never to be forgotten_ - _Back through the dark._ - I saw him groping out, - As through a mist, into a shadowy garden; - And this was not Uppsala any more, - But the lost garden where his boyhood reigned. - The little dwindling path at Journey’s End - Ran through the dark, into a path he knew. - - _Carl! Carl! Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding!_ - Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap - Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again. - - _Carl! O Carl!_ Her voice, though he could not answer, - Called him. He knew she was there, though he could not see her. - He stood and listened. The leaves were listening, too. - - He tiptoed through the garden. His grey head - Turning to left and right with birdlike glances. - He passed by the little garden his father gave him. - He knew its breath in the night. - His heart stood still. - She was there. He saw her at last. Her back was towards him. - He saw her fair young head, through the deepening shadows, - Bending, breathlessly, forward to watch a child - At the edge of the lake, who watched a floating flower. - He watched her, rapt, intent. She watched her son, - Intent and rapt. - Tears in his heart, he waited, dark and still, - Feeling a mystery near him. - - - - -VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION - - -I - -LAMARCK AND BUFFON - - What wars are these? Far off, a bugle blew. - Out of oblivion rose the vanished world. - I stood in Amiens, in a narrow street - Outside a dark old college. I saw a boy, - A budding Abbé, pallid from his books, - Beaked like a Roman eagle. He stole out - Between grim gates; and stripping off his bands, - Hastened away, a distance in his eyes; - As though, through an earthly bugle, he had heard - A deeper bugle, summoning to a war - Beyond these wars, with enemies yet unknown. - I saw him bargaining for a starveling horse - In Picardy and riding to the North, - Over chalk downs, through fields of poppied wheat. - A tattered farm lad, sixteen years of age, - Followed like Sancho at his master’s heel: - Up to the flaming battle-front he rode; - Flinging a stubborn “no” at those who’d send him - Back to learn war among the raw recruits, - He took his place before the astonished ranks - Of grenadiers, and faced the enemy’s fire. - Death swooped upon them, tearing long red lanes - Through their massed squadrons. His commander fell - Beside him. One by one his officers died. - Death placed him in command. The shattered troops - Of Beaujolais were wavering everywhere. - “Retreat!” the cry began. In smoke and fire, - Lamarck, with fourteen grenadiers, held on. - “This is the post assigned. This post we hold - Till Life or Death relieve us.” - Who assigned it? - Who summoned him thither? And when peace returned - Was it blind chance that garrisoned Lamarck - Among the radiant gardens of the south, - Dazzled him with their beauty, and then slipt - That volume of Chomel into his hand, - _Traité des Plantes_? - Was it blind accident, - Environment—O, mighty word that masks - The innumerable potencies of God,— - When his own comrade, in wild horse-play, wrenched - And crippled him in body, and he returned - Discharged to Paris, free to take up arms - In an immortal army? Was it chance - That lodged him there, despite his own desire, - So high above the streets that all he saw - Out of his window was the drifting clouds - Flowing and changing, drawing his lonely mind - In subtle ways to Nature’s pageantry, - And the great golden laws that governed all? - - Was it blind chance that drew him out to watch - The sunset clouds o’er Mont Valérien, - Where the same power, for the same purpose, drew - Jean Jacques Rousseau? Flowers and the dying clouds - Drew them together, and mind from mind caught fire? - - What universal Power through all and each - Was labouring to create when first they met - And talked and wondered, whether the forms of life - Through earth’s innumerable ages changed? - Were species constant? Let the rose run wild, - How swiftly it returns into the briar! - Transplant the southern wilding to the north - And it will change, to suit the harsher sky. - Nourish it in a garden,—you shall see - The trailer of the hedgerow stand upright, - And every blossom with a threefold crown. - Buffon, upon his hill-top at Montbard - In his red turret, among his flowers and birds, - Gazing through all his epochs of the world, - Had guessed at a long ancestry for man, - Too long for the upstart kings. - He could not prove it; - And the Sorbonne, with _Genesis_ in its hand, - Had frowned upon his æons. _In six days_ - _God made the heaven and earth._ - He had withdrawn, - Smiling as wise men smile at children’s talk; - And when Lamarck had visited him alone, - He smiled again, a little ironically. - “Six epochs of the world may mean six days; - But then, my friend, six days must also mean - Six epochs. Call it compromise, or peace. - They cannot claim the victory. - There are some - Think me too—orthodox. O, I know the whine - That fools will raise hereafter. Buffon quailed; - Why did not Buffon like our noble selves - Wear a vicarious halo of martyrdom? - Strange—that desire of small sadistic eyes - At ease on the shore to watch a shipwrecked man - Drowning. Lucretius praised that barbarous pleasure. - Mine is a subtler savagery. I prefer - To watch, from a little hill above their world, - The foes of science, floundering in the waves - Of their new compromise. Every crooked flash - Of irony lightening their dark skies to-day - Shows them more wickedly buffeted, in a sea - Of wilder contradictions. - I had no proof. - Time was not ripe. The scripture of the rocks - Must first be read more deeply. But the law - Pointed to one conclusion everywhere, - That forms of flesh and bone, in the long lapse - Of time, were plastic as the sculptor’s clay, - And born of earlier forms. - Under man’s eyes, - Had not the forms of bird and beast been changed - Into new species? Children of the wolf, - Greyhound and mastiff, in their several kinds, - Fawned on his children, slept upon his hearth. - The spaniel and the bloodhound owned one sire. - Man’s own selective artistry had shaped - New flowers, confirmed the morning glory’s crown, - And out of the wild briar evoked the rose. - Like a magician, in a few brief years, - He had changed the forms and colours of his birds. - He had whistled the wild pigeons from the rocks; - And by his choice, and nature’s own deep law, - Evoked the rustling fan-tails that displayed - Their splendours on his cottage roof, or bowed - Like courtiers on his lawn. The pouter swelled - A rainbow breast to please him. Tumblers played - Their tricks as for a king. The carrier flew - From the spy’s window, or the soldiers’ camp, - The schoolboy’s cage, the lover’s latticed heart, - And bore his messages over turbulent seas - And snow-capt mountains, with a sinewy wing - That raced the falcon, beating stroke for stroke.” - - -II - -LAMARCK, LAVOISIER, AND NINETY-THREE - - So, seizing the pure fire from Buffon’s hand, - Lamarck pressed on, flinging all else aside, - To follow all those clues to his own end. - Ten years he spent among the flowers of France, - Unravelling, and more truly than Linné, - The natural orders of their tangled clans; - Then, in “six months of unremitting toil,” - As Cuvier subtly sneered, he wrote his book, - The _Flore Française_; compact, as Cuvier knew, - And did not care to say, with ten years’ thought. - But Buffon did not sneer. The great old man, - A king of men, enthroned there at Montbard, - Aided Lamarck as Jove might aid his son. - He sent the book to the king’s own printing press. - Daubenton wrote his foreword; and Rousseau - Had long prepared the way. - “Linné of France,” - The stream of praise through every salon flowed. - _Une science à la mode_, great Cuvier sneered. - - Was it blind chance that crushed Lamarck again - Back to his lean-ribbed poverty? - Buffon died. - Lamarck, who had married in his prosperous hour, - Had five young mouths to feed. With ten long years - Of toil he had made the great _Jardin du Roi_ - Illustrious through the world. As his reward - The ministers of the king now granted him - A keepership at one thousand francs a year; - And, over him, in Buffon’s place, they set - The exquisite dilettante, Bernardin - Saint Pierre, a delicate twitcher of silken strings. - Lamarck held grimly to the post assigned. - Under that glittering rose-pink world he heard - Titanic powers upsurging from the abyss. - Then, in the blood-red dawn of ninety-three, - The bright crust cracked. The furious lava rolled - Through Paris, and a thundercloud of doom - Pealed over thrones and peoples. Flash on flash, - Blind lightnings of the guillotine replied. - Blind throats around the headsman’s basket roared. - The slippery cobbles were greased with human blood. - The torch was at the gates of the Bastille. - Old towers, old creeds, old wrongs, at a Mænad shout, - Went up in smoke and flame. Earth’s dynasties - Rocked to their dark foundations. Tyrants died; - But in that madness of the human soul - They did not die alone. Innocence died; - And pity died; and those whose hands upheld - The torch of knowledge died in the bestial storm. - Lavoisier had escaped. They lured him back - Into the Terror’s hot red tiger-mouth, - Promising, “Face your trial with these your friends, - And all will be set free. If not, they die.” - He faced it, and returned. The guillotine - Flashed down on one and all. - Let the wide earth, - Still echoing its old wrath against the kings - And priests who exiled, stoned and burned and starved - The bearers of the fire, remember well - How the Republic in its red right hand - Held up Lavoisier’s head, and told mankind - In mockery, colder than the cynical snarl - Of Nero, “The Republic has no need - Of savants. Let the people’s will be done - On earth, and let the headless trunk of Truth - Be trampled down by numbers. Tread in the mire - All excellence and all skill. Daub your raw wounds - With dirt of the street; elect the sick to health. - It is the people’s will, and they shall live. - Nay, crown the eternal Power who rules by law - With this red cap of your capricious will, - And ye shall hear His everlasting voice - More clearly than ye heard it when He spoke - In stillness, through the souls of lonely men, - On starry heights. Lift up your heads and hear - His voice in the whirling multitude’s wild-beast roar, - _Not these men, but Barabbas_.” - Must the mind - Turn back to tyranny, then, and trust anew - To harnessed might? The listening soul still heard - A more imperative call. Though Evil wore - A myriad masks and reigned as wickedly - In peoples as in kings, Truth, Truth alone, - Whether upheld by many or by few, - Wore the one absolute crown. Though Pilate flung - His murderous jest at Truth—the law remained - That answered his dark question; man’s one clue, - The law that all true seekers after Truth - Hold in their hands; the law, a golden thread - That, loyally followed, leads them to full light, - Each by his own dark way, till all the world - Is knit together in harmony that sets free. - Bridge-builders of the universe, they fling - Their firm and shining roads from star to star, - From earth to heaven. At his appointed task, - Lamarck held grimly on (as once he gripped - His wavering grenadiers) till Life or Death - Relieved him. But he knew his cause at last. - _Jardin du Roi_ became _Jardin des Plantes_; - And the red tumult surging round his walls - Died to a whisper of leaves. - His mind groped back, - Back through the inconceivable ages now, - To terrible revolutions of the globe, - Huge catastrophic rendings of the hills, - Red floods of lava; cataracts of fire; - Monstrous upheavals of the nethermost deep; - Whereby as Cuvier painted them, in hues - Of blind disaster, all the hosts of life - In each æonian period, like a swarm - Of ants beneath the wheels of Juggernaut, - Were utterly abolished. - Did God create - After each earth-disaster, then, new hosts - Of life to range her mountains and her seas; - New forms, new patterns, fresh from His careless Hand, - Yet all so closely akin to those destroyed? - Or did this life-stream, from one fountain-head, - Through the long changes of unnumbered years - Flow on, unbroken, slowly branching out - Into new beauty, as a river winds - Into new channels? One, singing through the hills, - Mirrors the hanging precipice and the pine; - And one through level meadows curves away, - Turns a dark wheel, or foams along a weir, - Then, in a pool of shadow, drowns the moon. - - -III - -AN ENGLISH INTERLUDE: ERASMUS DARWIN - - Already in England, bearing the same fire, - A far companion whom he never knew - Had long been moving on the same dark quest, - But through what quiet secluded walks of peace. - - Out of the mist emerged the little City - Of Lichfield, clustering round its Minster Pool - That, like a fragment of the sky on earth, - Reflected its two bridges, gnarled old trees, - Half-timbered walls; a bare-legged child at play - Upon its brink; two clouds like floating swans, - Two swans like small white clouds; a boy that rode - A big brown cart-horse lazily jingling by; - And the cathedral, like a three-spired crown, - Set on its northern bank. - Then, from the west, - Above it, walled away from the steep street, - I saw Erasmus Darwin’s bluff square house. - Along its front, above the five stone steps - That climbed to its high door, strange vines and fronds - Made a green jungle in their dim prison of glass. - Behind, its windows overlooked a close - Of rambling mellow roofs, and coldly stared - At the cathedral’s three foreshortened spires, - Which seemed to draw together, as though in doubt - Of what lay hidden in those bleak staring eyes. - - There dwelt that eager mind, whom fools deride - For laced and periwigged verses on his flowers; - Forgetting how he strode before his age, - And how his grandson caught from his right hand - A fire that lit the world. - I saw him there, - In his brown-skirted coat, among his plants, - Pondering the thoughts, at which that dreamer sneered, - Who, through a haze of opium, saw a star - Twinkling within the tip of the crescent moon. - Dispraise no song for tricks that fancy plays, - Nor for blind gropings after an unknown light, - But let no echo of Abora praise for this - The drooping pinion and unseeing eye. - Seek, poet, on thy sacred height, the strength - And glory of that true vision which shall grasp, - In clear imagination, earth and heaven, - And from the truly seen ascend in power - To those high realms whereof our heaven and earth - Are images and shadows, and their law - Our shining lanthorn and unfailing guide. - There, if the periwigged numbers failed to fly, - Let babbling dreamers who have also failed - Wait for another age. The time will come - When all he sought and lost shall mount and sing. - He saw the life-stream branching out before him, - Its forms and colours changing with their sky: - Flocks in the south that lost their warm white fleece; - And, in the north, the stubble-coloured hare - Growing snow-white against the winter snows. - The frog that had no jewel in his head, - Except his eyes, was yet a fairy prince, - For he could change the colours of his coat - To match the mud of the stream wherein he reigned; - And, if he dwelt in trees, his coat was green. - He saw the green-winged birds of Paraguay - Hardening their beaks upon the shells they cracked; - The humming-bird, with beak made needle-fine - For sucking honey from long-throated blooms; - Finches with delicate beaks for buds of trees, - And water-fowl that, in their age-long plashing - At the lake’s edge, had stretched the films of skin - Between their claws to webs. Out through the reeds - They rowed at last, and swam to seek their prey. - He saw how, in their war against the world, - Myriads of lives mysteriously assumed - The hues that hid them best; the butterfly dancing - With its four petals among so many flowers, - Itself a wingèd flower; the hedgerow birds - With greenish backs like leaves, but their soft breasts - Light as a downy sky, so that the hawk, - Poised overhead, sees only a vanishing leaf; - Or, if he swoops along the field below them, - Loses their silvery flight against the cloud. - He saw the goldfinch, vivid as the blooms - Through which it flutters, as though their dews had splashed - Red of the thistle upon its head and throat, - And on its wings the dandelion’s gold. - He saw the skylark coloured like its nest - In the dry grass; the partridge, grey and brown - In mottled fields, escaping every eye, - Till the foot stumbles over it, and the clump - Of quiet earth takes wing and whirrs away. - I saw him there, a strange and lonely soul, - An eagle in the Swan of Lichfield’s pen, - Stretching clipped wings and staring at the sky. - He saw the multitudinous hosts of life, - All creatures of the sea and earth and air, - Ascending from one living spiral thread, - Through tracts of time, unreckonable in years. - He saw them varying as the plastic clay - Under the Sculptor’s hands. - He saw them flowing - From one Eternal Fount beyond our world, - The inscrutable and indwelling Primal Power, - His only _vera causa_; by whose will - There was no gulf between the first and last. - There was no break in that long line of law - Between the first life drifting in the sea, - And man, proud man, the crowning form of earth, - Man whose own spine, the framework of his pride, - The fern-stem of his life, trunk of his tree, - Sleeps in the fish, the reptile, and the orang, - As all those lives in his own embryo sleep. - - What deeper revolution, then, must shake - Those proud ancestral dynasties of earth? - What little man-made temples must go down? - And what august new temple must arise, - One vast cathedral, gargoyled with strange life, - Surging through darkness, up to the unknown end? - - -IV - -LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_ - - Fear nothing, Swan of Lichfield. Tuck thy head - Beneath thy snowy wing and sleep at ease. - Drift quietly on thy shadowy Minster Pool. - No voice comes yet to shake thy placid world. - Far off—in France—thy wingless angels make - Strange havoc, but the bearer of this fire, - The wise physician’s unknown comrade, toils - Obscurely now, through his more perilous night, - Seeking his _vera causa_, with blind eyes. - Blind, blind as Galileo in his age, - Lamarck embraced his doom and, as in youth, - Held to the post assigned, till Life or Death - Relieved him. All those changes of the world - He had seen more clearly than his unknown friend; - And traced their natural order. - He saw the sea-gull like a flake of foam - Tossed from the waves of that creative sea; - The fish that like a speckled patch of sand - Slides over sand upon its broad flat side, - And twists its head until its nether eye - Looks upward, too, and what swam upright once - Is fixed in its new shape, and the wry mouth - Grimaces like a gnome at its old foes. - He saw the swarming mackerel shoals that swim - Near the crisp surface, rippled with blue and green - Round their dark backs to trick the pouncing gull, - But silver-bellied to flash like streaks of light - Over the ravenous mouths that from below - Snap at the leaping gleams of the upper sea. - And all these delicate artistries were wrought - By that strange Something-Else which blind men call - “Environment,” and the name is all their need; - A Something-Else that, through the sum of things, - Labours unseen; and, for its own strange ends, - Desirous of more swiftness and more strength, - Will teach the hunted deer to escape and fly, - Even while it leads the tiger to pursue. - - He saw that sexual war; the stags that fought - In mating-time; the strong confirmed in power - By victory. Lust and hunger, pleasure and pain, - Like instruments in a dread Designer’s hand, - Lured or dissuaded, tempted and transformed. - - He saw dark monsters in primeval forests - Tearing the high green branches down for food - Age after age, till from their ponderous heads - Out of their own elastic flesh they stretched - A trunk that, like a long grey muscular snake, - Could curl up through the bunches of green leaves, - And pluck their food at ease as cattle browse; - Life’s own dark effort aiding that strange Power - Without, and all controlled in one great plan, - Grotesquely free, and beautifully at one - With law, upsurging to the unknown end. - All Nature like a vast chameleon changed; - And all these forms of life through endless years, - Changing, developing, from one filament rose. - Man, on the heights, retravelled in nine moons - All that long journey in little, never to lose - What life had learned on its æonian way: - Man on the heights; but not divided now - From his own struggling kindred of the night. - Few dared to think it yet and set him free - Through knowledge of himself and his own power; - Few, yet, in France or England. Let him bask - Where in six days God set him at his ease - Among His wingless angels; there to hate - The truth, until he breaks his own vain heart - And finds the law at last and walks with God, - Who, not abhorring even the mire and clay - In the beginning, breathed His life through all. - This was his _vera causa_. Hate, contempt, - Ridicule, like a scurrilous wind swooped down - From every side. Great Cuvier, with the friends - Of orthodoxy, sneered—could species change - Their forms at will? Could the lean tiger’s need - To crouch in hiding stripe his tawny flesh - With shadows of the cane-break where he lay? - Could the giraffe, by wishing for the leaves - Beyond his reach, add to his height one inch? - Or could the reptile’s fond desire to fly - Create his wings? - Could Cuvier read one line - Of this blind man, he might have held his peace, - Found his own _versa causa_, and sunk his pride; - And even the wiser Darwin, when he came, - Might have withheld his judgment for an hour, - And learned from his forerunner. But, in their haste, - They flung away his fire; and, as he fell, - They set their heels upon it and stamped it out. - Not always does the distant age restore - The balance, or posterity renew - The laurel on the cold dishonoured brow - Unjustly robbed and blindly beaten down. - He laboured on in blindness. At his side - One faithful daughter, labouring with her pen, - As he dictated, wrote, month after month, - Year after year; and, when her father died, - She saw him tossed into the general grave, - The pauper’s fosse, where none can trace him now, - In Montparnasse, but wrapt in deeper peace - Among the unknown and long-forgotten dead. - - - - -VIII—IN GERMANY - -GOETHE - - -I - -THE DISCOVERER - - The wreathing mist was quietly breathed away. - I stood upon a little hill at night; - The tang of pinewoods and the warbling joy - Of hidden brooks was round me. - The dark hill - Sloped to a darker garden. On the crest - A wooden cabin rose against the stars. - Its open door, a gap of golden light - In deep blue gloom, told me that he was there. - I saw his darkened house asleep below, - And Weimar clustering round it, a still cloud - Of shadowy slumbering houses. - Like a shadow, - Tracking the Sun-god to his midnight lair, - I climbed to the lighted cabin on the crest, - And I saw Goethe. - At his side a lamp - On a rude table, out of tumbled waves - Of manuscript, like an elfin lighthouse rose. - His bed, a forester’s couch for summer nights, - Was thrust into a corner. Rows of books - Lined the rough walls. - A letter was in his hand - From Craigenputtock; and while he looked at it, - The unuttered thoughts came flowing into the mind - Of his invisible listener—Shadow-of-a-Leaf. - All true, my friend; but there’s no halfway house. - Rid you of Houndsditch, and you’ll not maintain - This quite ungodlike severance of mankind - From Nature and its laws; though I should lose - My Scots apostle, if I called it so. - What’s an apostle? Is it one who sees - Just so much of his hero, as reflects - Himself and his own thoughts? I like him well, - And yet he makes me lonelier than before. - Houndsditch may go; but Cuvier will go first; - With all the rest who isolate mankind - From its true place in Nature. - Everywhere - I saw the one remodulated form. - The leaf ascended to mysterious bliss - And was assumed, with happy sister-leaves, - Into the heavenly glory of a flower. - Pistil and stamen, calyx and bright crown - Of coloured petals, all were leaves transformed, - Transfigured, from one type. - I saw in man - And his wild kinsfolk of the woods and seas, - In fish and serpent, eagle and orang, - One knotted spine that curled into a skull. - It ran through all their patterns everywhere, - Playing a thousand variants on one theme, - Branching through all the frame of fins and wings - And spreading through their jointed hands and feet. - - Throughout this infinite universe I heard - The music of one law. - Is man alone - Belied by all the signs of his ascent? - Are men even now so far above the beasts? - What can the tiger teach them when they kill? - Are they so vain that they’d deny the bones - An inch beneath their skin—bones that when stripped - Of flesh and mixed with those of their dumb kin - Themselves could not distinguish? How they clung - To that distinction in the skull of man. - It lacked the inter-maxillary. They grew angry - When I foretold it would be found one day. - What’s truth to a poet? Back to your dainty lies! - And then—one day—I found it. - Did they say - Strange work for a poet? Is mankind asleep - That it can never feel what then I felt, - To find my faith so quietly confirmed? - I held it in my hand and stared at it, - An eyeless hollow skull that once could think - Its own strange thoughts and stare as well as we; - A skull that once was rocked upon a breast, - And looked its deathless love through dying eyes; - And, in that skull, above the incisor teeth, - The signs that men denied,—of its ascent - Through endless ages, in the savage night - Of jungle-worlds, before mankind was born. - - No thought for poets, and no wonder there? - No gateway to the kingdoms of the mind? - No miracle in the miracle that I saw, - Touched, held. - My body tingled. All my veins - Froze with the inconceivable mystery, - The weirdness and the wonder of it all. - No vision? And no dream? Let poets play - At bowls with Yorick’s relic then, for ever; - Or blow dream-bubbles. I’ve a world to shape; - A law to guide me, and a God to find. - - That night in sleep I saw—it was no dream!— - It was too wild, too strange, too darkly true, - And all too human in its monstrous pangs - To be a dream. I saw it, and I live. - I saw, I saw, and closed these eyes to see - That terrible birth in darkness, the black night - Of naked agony that first woke the soul. - - Night and the jungle, burning with great stars, - Rolled all around me. There were steaming pools - Of darkness, and the smell of the wild beast - Musky and acrid on the blood-warm air. - The night was like a tiger’s hot sweet mouth; - I heard a muffled roar, and a wild cry, - A shriek, a fall. - I saw an uncouth form, - Matted with hair, stretched on the blood-stained earth; - And, in the darkness, darker than the night, - Another form uncouth, with matted hair, - Long-armed, like a gorilla, stooping low - Above his mate. - She did not move or breathe. - He felt her body with his long-clawed hands, - And called to her—a harsh, quick, startled cry. - She did not hear. One arm was tightly wound - About her little one. Both were strangely still, - Stiller than sleep. - He squatted down to wait. - They did not move all night. At dawn he stood - By that stiff mockery. He stretched up his arms - And clutched at the red sun that mocked him, too. - Then, out of his blind heart, with one fierce pang, - The man-child, Grief, was born. - His round dark eyes - Pricked with strange brine, and his broad twitching mouth - Quivered. He fell on the dark unanswering earth - Beside his dead, with inarticulate cries, - Great gasping sobs that seemed to rend his flesh - And shook him through and through. - The night returned and, with the night, a hope, - Because he could not see their staring eyes. - He rushed into the jungle and returned - With fruits and berries, ripe and soft and red. - He rubbed the dark wet plums against their lips. - He smeared the juices on their locked white teeth; - Pleading with little murmurs, while the stars - Wheeled overhead, and velvet-footed beasts - Approached and stared with eyes of gold and green; - And even the little leaves were all alive; - And tree-toads chirruped; but those dark forms lay still. - - Day followed night. He did not know them now. - All that had been so swift to answer him - Was gone. But whither? Every day he saw - A ball of light arising in the East - And moving overhead the self-same way - Into the West.... - The strange new hunger eating at his heart - Urged him to follow it, stumbling blindly on - Through endless forests; but it moved so swiftly - He could not overtake it, could not reach - The place where it went down, ere darkness came. - Then—in the dark—a shadow sometimes moved - Before him, like the shadow he had lost, - And with a cry, _Yoo! Yoo!_ he would awake - And, crashing through the forests to the West, - Would try to steal a march upon the sun, - And see it rise inexorably behind him, - And sail above, inexorably, at noon, - And sink beyond, inexorably, at night. - - Then, after many suns had risen and set, - He saw at dusk a blaze of crimson light - Between the thinning tree-trunks and emerged - Out of the forest into a place of rocks, - Washed by a water greater than the world. - He stood, an uncouth image carved in stone, - Staring into the West. He saw the sun - Staining the clouds and sinking into the flood. - His lips were parched with thirst, a deeper thirst - Than any spring on earth could quench again; - And when he laid him down upon the shore - To drink of that deep water, he knew well - That he was nearer now to what he sought, - Because it tasted salt as his lost tears. - - He drank. He waded out, and drank again. - Then a big wave of darkness rushed upon him, - And rolled him under. He rose, and with great arms - Swam out into that boundless flood of brine - Towards the last glimmer of light; a dark, blind brute, - Sobbing and panting, till the merciful waves, - Salt in his eyes and salt upon his lips, - Had drawn the agony out of his labouring limbs - And gently as the cradling boughs that once - Rocked him to sleep, embraced and drew him down - Into oblivion, the first life that caught - With eyes bewildered by the light they knew, - A glimpse of the unknown light beyond the world. - - -II - -THE PROPHET - - Before the first wild matins of the thrush - Had ended, or the sun sucked up the dew, - I saw him wrestling with his thoughts. He rose, - Laid down that eagle’s feather in his hand, - And looked at his own dawn. - He did not speak. - Only the secret music of his mind - In an enchanted silence flowed to meet - The listener, as his own great morning flowed - Through those Æolian pinewoods at his feet. - Colours and forms of earth and heaven you flow - Like clouds around a star—the streaming robe - Of an Eternal Glory. Let the law - Of Beauty, in your rhythmic folds, by night - And day, through all the universe, reveal - The way of the unseen Mover to these eyes. - Last night I groped into the dark abyss - Under the feet of man, and saw Thee there - Ascending, from that depth below all depth. - O, now, at dawn, as I look up to heaven - Descend to meet me, on my upward way. - How shall they grasp Thy glory who despise - The law that is Thy kingdom here on earth, - Our way of freedom and our path to Thee? - How shall they grasp that law, or rightly know - One truth in Nature, who deny Thy Power, - Unresting and unhasting, everywhere? - How shall the seekers, bound to their own tasks, - Each following his own quest, each spying out - His fragment of a truth, reintegrate - Their universe and behold all things in one? - Be this the task of Song, then, to renew - That universal vision in the soul. - Rise, poet, to thy universal height, - Then stoop, as eagles do from their wide heaven - On their particular prey. Between the clouds - They see more widely and truly than the mole - At work in his dark tunnel, though he cast - His earth upon the fields they watch afar. - Work on, inductive mole; but there’s a use - In that too lightly abandoned way of thought, - The way of Plato, and the way of Christ, - That man must find again, ere he can build - The temple of true knowledge. Those who trust - To Verulam’s _Novum Organum_ alone, - Never can build it. Quarriers of the truth, - They cut the stones, but cannot truly lay them; - For only he whose deep remembering mind - Holds the white archetype, can to music build - His towers, from the pure pattern imprinted there. - He, and he only, in one timeless flash - Through all this moving universe discerns - The inexorable sequences of law, - And, in the self-same flash, transfiguring all, - Uniting and transcending all, beholds - With my Spinoza’s own ecstatic eyes - God in the hidden law that fools call “chance,” - God in the star, the flower, the moondrawn wave, - God in the snake, the bird, and the wild beast, - God in that long ascension from the dark, - God in the body and in the soul of man, - God uttering life, and God receiving death. - - - - -IX—IN ENGLAND - -DARWIN - - -I - -CHANCE AND DESIGN - - _“I am the whisper that he ceased to hear,”_ - _The quiet voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf began;_ - _And, as he spoke, the flowing air before me_ - _Shone like a crystal sphere, wherein I saw_ - _All that he pictured, through his own deep eyes._ - - I waited in his garden there, at Down. - I peered between the crooklights of a hedge - Where ragged robins grew. - Far off, I heard - The clocklike rhythm of an ironshod staff - Clicking on gravel, clanking on a flint. - Then, round the sand-walk, under his trees he strode, - A tall lean man, wrapt in a loose dark cloak, - His big soft hat of battered sun-burnt straw - Pulled down to shade his face. But I could see, - For I looked upward, the dim brooding weight - Of silent thought that soon would shake the world. - - He paused to watch an ant upon its way. - He bared his head. I saw the shaggy brows - That like a mountain-fortress overhung - The deep veracious eyes, the dogged face - Where kindliness and patience, knowledge, power, - And pain quiescent under the conquering will, - In that profound simplicity which marks - The stature of the mind, the truth of art, - The majesty of every natural law. - The child’s wise innocence, and the silent worth - Of human grief and love, had set their seal. - - I stole behind him, and he did not hear - Or see me. I was only Shadow-of-a-Leaf; - And yet—I knew the word was on its way - That might annul his life-work in an hour. - I heard the whisper of every passing wing - Where, wrapt in peace, among the hills of Kent, - The patient watchful intellect had prepared - A mightier revolution for mankind - Even than the world-change of Copernicus - When the great central earth began to move - And dwine to a grain of dust among the stars. - I saw him pondering over a light-winged seed - That floated, like an elfin aeronaut, - Across the path. He caught it in his hand - And looked at it. He touched its delicate hooks - And set it afloat again. He watched it sailing, - Carrying its tiny freight of life away - Over the quick-set hedge, up, into the hills. - I heard him muttering, “beautiful! Surely this - Implies design! - Design?” Then, from his face - The wonder faded, and he shook his head; - But with such reverence and humility - That his denial almost seemed a prayer. - - A prayer—for, not long after, in his house, - I saw him bowed, the first mind of his age, - Bowed, helpless, by the deathbed of his child; - Pondering, with all that knowledge, all that power, - Powerless, and ignorant of the means to save; - A dumb Prometheus, bending his great head - In silence, as he drank those broken words - Of thanks, the pitiful thanks of small parched lips, - For a sip of water, a smile, a cooling hand - On the hot brow; thanks for his goodness—God! - Thanks from a dying child, just ten years old! - - And, while he stood in silence by her grave, - Hearing the ropes creak as they lowered her down - Into the cold dark hollow, while he breathed - The smell of the moist earth, those calm strange words— - _I am the Resurrection and the Life_, - Echoed and echoed through his lonely mind, - Only to deepen his agony of farewell - Into Eternity. - Dumbly there he strove - To understand how accents so divine, - In words so worthy of eternal power, - So postulant of it in their calm majesty, - Could breathe through mortal lips. - Madman or God, - Who else could say them? - God it could not be, - If in his mortal blindness he saw clear; - And yet, and yet, could madness wring the heart - Thus, thus, and thus, for nineteen hundred years? - _Would that she knew, would God that she knew now,_ - _How much we loved her!_ - The blind world, still ruled - By shams, and following in hypnotic flocks - The sheep-bell of an hour, still thought of him - “The Man of Science” as less or more than man, - Coldly aloof from love and grief and pain; - Held that he knew far more, and felt far less - Than other men, and, even while it praised - The babblers for their reticence and their strength, - The shallow for their depth, the blind for sight, - The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth, - Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool, - This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head. - - Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it— - I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern - The true gigantic drama of those hours - Among the quiet hills as, one by one, - His facts fell into place; their broken edges - Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic, - And, slowly, the new picture of the world, - Emerging in majestic pageantry - Out of the primal dark, before him grew; - Grew by its own inevitable law; - Grew, and earth’s ancient fantasies dwindled down; - The stately fabric of the old creation - Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod, - Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king, - Captive and conqueror, all must own alike - Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts - By the red life that flowed through all their veins - From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one - In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms - Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths - That saw and heard and hungered like his own, - His mother Earth reclaimed him. - Back and back, - He traced them, till the last faint clue died out - In lifeless earth and sea. - I watched him striving - To follow further, bending his great brows - Over the intense lens.... - Far off, I heard - The murmur of human life, laughter and weeping; - Heard the choked sobbings by a million graves, - And saw a million faces, wrung with grief, - Lifted forlornly to the Inscrutable Power. - - I saw him raise his head. I heard his thought - As others hear a whisper—_Surely this_ - _Implies design!_ - And worlds on aching worlds - Of dying hope were wrapped in those four words. - He stared before him, wellnigh overwhelmed - For one brief moment, with instinctive awe - Of Something that ... determined every force - Directed every atom.... - Then, in a flash, - The indwelling vision vanished at the voice - Of his own blindfold reason. For what mind - Could so unravel the complicated threads, - The causes that are caused by the effects - Of other causes, intricately involved, - Woven and interwoven, in endless mazes, - Wandering through infinite time, infinite space, - And yet, an ordered and mysterious whole, - Before whose very being all mortal power - Must abdicate its sovereignty? - A dog - Might sooner hope to leap beyond the mind - Of Newton than a man might hope to grasp - Even in this little whirl of earth and sun - The Scheme of the All-determining Absolute. - And yet—if that—the All-moving, were the One - Reality, and sustained and made all forms, - Then, by the self-same power in man himself - Whatever was real in man might understand - That same Reality, being one substance with it, - One substance with the essential Soul of all,— - Might understand, as children understand, - Even in ignorance, those who love them best; - Might recognise, as through their innocent eyes, - The highest, which is Love, though all the worlds - Of lesser knowledge passed unheeded by. - What meant those moments else? Moments that came - And went on wings, wild as these wings of mine, - The wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - Quick with a light that never could be reached - By toiling up the mountain-sides of thought; - Consummate meanings that were never found - By adding units; moments of strange awe - When that majestic sequence of events - We call the cosmos, from its wheeling atoms - Up to its wheeling suns, all spoke one Power, - One Presence, One Unknowable, and One Known? - - _In the beginning God made heaven and earth_: - He, too, believed it, once.... - - -II - -THE VOYAGE - - As if the wings - Of Shadow-of-a-Leaf had borne me through the West - So that the sunset changed into the dawn, - I saw him in his youth. - The large salt wind, - The creak of cordage, the wild swash of waves - Were round him as he paced the clear white deck, - An odd loose-tweeded sojourner, in a world - Of uniforms and guns. - The _Beagle_ plunged - Westward, upon the road that Drake had sailed; - But this new voyager, on a longer quest, - Sailed on a stranger sea; and, though I heard - His ringing laugh, he seemed to live apart - In his own mind, from all who moved around him. - I saw him while the _Beagle_ basked at anchor - Under West Indian palms. He lounged there, tanned - With sun; tall, lankier in his cool white drill; - The big slouched straw pulled down to shade his eyes. - The stirring wharf was one bright haze of colour; - Kaleidoscopic flakes, orange and green, - Blood-red and opal, glancing to and fro, - Through purple shadows. The warm air smelt of fruit. - - He leaned his elbows on the butt of a gun - And listened, while a red-faced officer, breathing - Faint whiffs of rum, expounded lazily, - With loosely stumbling tongue, the cynic’s code - His easy rule of life, belying the creed - That both professed. - And, in one flash, I caught - A glimpse of something deeper, missed by both,— - The subtle touch of the Master-Ironist - Unfolding his world-drama, point by point, - In every sight and sound and word and thought, - Packed with significance. - Out of its myriad scenes - All moving swiftly on, unguessed by man, - To close in one great climax of clear light, - This vivid moment flashed. - The cynic ceased; - And Darwin, slowly knitting his puzzled brows, - Answered, “_But it is wrong!_” - “Wrong?” chuckled the other. “Why should it be wrong?” - And Darwin, Darwin,—he that was to grasp - The crumbling pillars of their infidel Temple - And bring them headlong down to the honest earth, - Answered again, naïvely as a child, - “_Does not the Bible say so?_” - A broad grin - Wreathed the red face that stared into his own; - And, later, when the wardroom heard the jest, - The same wide grin from Christian mouth to mouth - Spread like the ripples on a single pool - Quietly enough! They liked him. They’d not hurt him! - And Darwin, strange, observant, simple soul, - Saw clearly enough; had eyes behind his back - For every smile; though in his big slow mind - He now revolved a thought that greatly puzzled him, - A thought that, in their light sophistication, - These humorists had not guessed. - Once, in his cabin, - His red-faced cynic had picked up a book - By one whose life was like a constant light - On the high altar of Truth. - He had read a page, - Then flung it down, with a contemptuous oath, - Muttering, “These damned atheists! Why d’you read them?” - Could pagan minds be stirred, then, to such wrath - Because the man they called an “atheist” smiled - At dates assigned by bland ecclesiasts - To God for His creation? - _Man was made_ - _On March the ninth, at ten o’clock in the morning_ - _(A Tuesday), just six thousand years ago_: - A legend of a somewhat different cast - From that deep music of the first great phrase - In _Genesis_. The strange irony here struck home. - For Darwin, here, was with the soul-bowed throng - Of prophets, while the ecclesiasts blandly toyed - With little calendars, which his “atheist’s book,” - In its irreverence, whispered quite away; - Whispered (for all such atheists bend their heads - Doubtless in shame) that, in the Book of Earth, - Six thousand years were but as yesterday, - A flying cloud, a shadow, a breaking wave. - Million of years were written upon the rocks - That told its history. To upheave one range - Of mountains, out of the sea that had submerged - So many a continent, ere mankind was born, - The harnessed forces, governed all by law, - Had laboured, dragging down and building up, - Through distances of Time, unthinkable - As those of starry space. - It dared to say - (This book so empty of mystery and awe!) - That, searching the dark scripture of the rocks, - It found therein no sign of a beginning, - No prospect of an end. - Strange that the Truth, - Whether upheld by the pure law within - Or by the power of reason, thus dismayed - These worshippers of a little man-made code. - Alone there in his cabin, with the books - Of Humboldt, Lyell, Herschel, spread before him. - He made his great decision. - If the realm - Beyond the bounds of human knowledge gave - So large a sanctuary to mortal lies, - Henceforth his Bible should be one inscribed - Directly with the law—the Book of Earth. - - -III - -THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS - - I saw him climbing like a small dark speck - —Fraught with what vast significance to the world— - Among the snow-capt Andes, a dark point - Of travelling thought, alone upon the heights, - To watch the terrible craters as they breathed - Their smouldering wrath against the sky. - I saw him, - Pausing above Portillo’s pass to hear - The sea-like tumult, where brown torrents rolled - Innumerable thousands of rough stones, - Jarring together, and hurrying all one way. - He stood there, spellbound, listening to the voice - Of Time itself, the moments hurrying by - For ever irrecoverably. I heard - His very thought. The stones were on their way - To the ocean that had made them; every note - In their wild music was a prophecy - Of continents unborn. - When he had seen - Those continents in embryo, beds of sand - And shingle, cumulant on the coastwise plains, - Thousands of feet in thickness, he had doubted - Whether the river of time itself could grind - And pile such masses there. But when he heard - The mountain-torrents rattling, he recalled - How races had been born and passed away, - And night and day, through years unreckonable, - These grinding stones had never ceased to roll - On their steep course. Not even the Cordilleras, - Had they been ribbed with adamant, could withstand - That slow sure waste. Even those majestic heights - Would vanish. Nothing—not the wind that blows - Was more unstable than the crust of the earth. - - He landed at Valdivia, on the day - When the great earthquake shuddered through the hills - From Valparaiso, southward to Cape Horn. - I saw him wandering through a ruined city - Of Paraguay, and measuring on the coast - The upheaval of new land, discovering rocks - Ten feet above high-water, rocks with shells - For which the dark-eyed panic-stricken throngs - Had dived at ebb, a few short days ago. - I saw him—strange discoverer—as he sailed - Through isles, not only uncharted, but newborn, - Isles newly arisen and glistening in the sun, - And atolls where he thought an older height - Had sunk below the smooth Pacific sea. - - He explored the Pampas; and before him passed - The centuries that had made them; the great streams - Gathering the red earth at their estuaries - In soft rich deltas, till new plains of loam - Over the Banda granite slowly spread, - And seeds took root and mightier forests towered, - Forests that human foot could never tread, - Forests that human eye could never see; - But by the all-conquering human mind at last - Trodden and seen, waving their leaves in air - As at an incantation, - And filled once more with monstrous forms of life. - - He found their monstrous bones embedded there, - And, as he found them, all those dry bones lived. - I stole beside him in the dark, and heard, - In the unfathomable forest deeps, the crash - Of distant boughs, a wild and lonely sound, - Where Megatherium, the gigantic Sloth - Whose thigh was thrice an elephant’s in girth, - Rose, blindly groping, and with armoured hands - Tore down the trees to reach their tender crests - And strip them of their more delicious green. - I saw him pondering on the secret bond - Between the living creatures that he found - On the main coast, and those on lonely isles; - Forms that diverged, and yet were closely akin. - One key, one only, unlocked the mystery there. - - Unless God made, for every separate isle - As it arose, new tribes of plants, birds, beasts, - In variant images of the tribes He set - Upon their nearest continent, grading all - By time, and place, and distance from the shore, - The bond between them was the bond of blood. - All, all had branched from one original tree. - - I saw him off the Patagonian coast - Staring at something stranger than a dream. - There, on a rocky point above the ship - With its world-voyaging thoughts, he first beheld - Primeval man. There, clustering on the crags, - Backed by their echoing forests of dark beech, - The naked savages yelled at the white sails, - Like wolves that bay the moon. They tossed their arms - Wildly through their long manes of streaming hair, - Like troubled spirits from an alien world. - Whence had they risen? From what ancestral night? - What bond of blood was there? What dreadful Power - Begot them—fallen or risen—from heaven or hell? - - I saw him hunting everywhere for light - On life’s dark mystery; gathering everywhere - Armies of fact, that pointed all one way, - And yet—what _vera causa_ could he find - In blindfold Nature? - Even had he found it, - What æons would be needed! Earth was old; - But could the unresting loom of infinite time - Weave this wild miracle, or evolve one nerve - Of all this intricate network in the brain, - This exquisite machine that looked through heaven, - Revelled in colours of a sunset sky, - Or met love’s eyes on earth? - Everywhere, now, - He found new clues that led him all one way. - And, everywhere, in the record of the rocks, - Time and to spare for all that Time could do, - But not his _vera causa_. - Earth grew strange. - Even in the ghostly gleam that told the watch - One daybreak that the ship was nearing home - He saw those endless distances again.... - He saw through mist, over the struggling waves - That run between the white-chalk cliffs of France - And England, sundered coasts that once were joined - And clothed with one wide forest. - The deep sea - Had made the strange white body of that broad land, - Beautifully establishing it on death, - Building it, inch by inch, through endless years - Out of innumerable little gleaming bones, - The midget skeletons of the twinkling tribes - That swarmed above in the more lucid green - Ten thousand fathoms nearer to the sun. - There they lived out their gleam of life and died, - Then slowly drifted down into the dark, - And spread in layers upon the cold sea-bed - The invisible grains and flakes that were their bones. - Layer on layer of flakes and grains of lime, - Where life could never build, they built it up - By their incessant death. Though but an inch - In every thousand years, they built it up, - Inch upon inch, age after endless age; - And the dark weight of the incumbent Deep - Compressed them (Power determined by what Will?) - Out of the night that dim creation rose - The seas withdrew. The bright new land appeared. - Then Gaul and Albion, nameless yet, were one; - And the wind brought a myriad wingèd seeds, - And the birds carried them, and the forests grew, - And through their tangled ways the tall elk roared. - But sun and frost and rain, the grinding streams - And rhythmic tides (the tools of what dread Hand?) - Still laboured on; till, after many a change, - The great moon-harnessed energies of the sea - Came swinging back, the way of the southwest wind, - And, æon after æon, hammering there, - Rechannelled through that land their shining way. - There all those little bones now greet the sun - In gleaming cliffs of chalk; and, in their chines - The chattering jackdaw builds, while overhead - On the soft mantle of turf the violet wakes - In March, and young-eyed lovers look for Spring. - What of the Cause? O, no more rounded creeds - Framed in a realm where no man could refute them! - Honesty, honesty, honesty, first of all. - And so he turned upon the world around him, - The same grave eyes of deep simplicity - With which he had faced his pagan-christian friends - And quoted them their Bible.... - Slowly he marshalled his worldwide hosts of fact, - Legions new-found, or first assembled now, - In their due order. Lyell had not dared - To tell the truth he knew. He found in earth - The records of its vanished worlds of life, - Each with its own strange forms, in its own age, - Sealed in its own rock-system. - In the first, - The rocks congealed from fire, no sign of life; - And, through the rest, in order as they were made, - From oldest up to youngest, first the signs - Of life’s first gropings; then, in gathering power, - Strange fishes, lizards, birds, and uncouth beasts, - Worlds of strange life, but all in ordered grades, - World over world, each tombed in its own age - Or merging into the next with subtle changes, - Delicate modulations of one form, - (Urged by what force? Impelled by what dark power?) - Progressing upward, into subtler forms - Through all the buried strata, till there came - Forms that still live, still fight for life on earth, - Tiger and wolf and ape; and, last of all, - The form of man; the child of yesterday. - Of yesterday! For none had ever found - Among the myriad forms of older worlds, - Locked in those older rocks through tracts of time - Out-spanning thought, one vestige of mankind. - There was no human footprint on the shores - Whose old compacted sand, now turned to stone, - Still showed the ripples where a summer sea - Once whispered, ere the mastodon was born. - There were the pitted marks, all driven one way, - That showed how raindrops fell, and the west wind blew. - There on the naked stone remained the tracks - Where first the sea-beasts crawled out of the sea, - A few salt yards upon the long dark trail - That led through æons to the tidal roar - Of lighted cities and this world of tears. - The shell, the fern, the bird’s foot, the beast’s claw, - Had left their myriad signs. Their forms remained, - Their delicate whorls, their branching fronds, their bones, - Age after age, like jewels in the rocks; - But, till the dawning of an age so late, - It seemed like yesterday, no sign, no trace, - No relic of mankind! - Then, in that age - Among the skulls, made equal in the grave, - Of ape and wolf, last of them all, looked up - That naked shrine with its receding brows, - And its two sightless holes, the skull of man. - Round it, his tools and weapons, the chipped flints, - The first beginnings of his fight for power, - The first results of his first groping thought - Proclaimed his birth, the youngest child of time. - _Born, and not made?_ Born—of what lesser life? - Was man so arrogant that he could disdain - The words he used so glibly of his God— - _Born, and not made?_ - Could Lyell, who believed - That, in the world around us, we should find - The self-same causes and the self-same laws - To-day as yesterday; and throughout all time; - And that the Power behind all changes works - By law alone; law that includes all heights, - All depths, of reason, harmony, and love; - Could Lyell hold that all those realms of life, - Each sealed apart in its own separate age, - With its own separate species, had been called - Suddenly, by a special Act of God, - Out of the void and formless? Could he think - Even that mankind, this last emergent form, - After so many æons of ordered law, - Was by miraculous Hands in one wild hour, - Suddenly kneaded out of the formless clay? - And was the formless clay more noble, then, - Than this that breathed, this that had eyes to see, - This whose dark heart could beat, this that could die? - No! Lyell knew that this wild house of flesh - Was never made by hands, not even those Hands; - And that to think so were to discrown God, - And not to crown Him, as the blind believed. - The miracle was a vaster than they knew. - The law by which He worked was all unknown; - Subtler than music, quieter than light, - The mighty process that through countless - changes, - Delicate grades and tones and semi-tones, - Out of the formless slowly brought forth - forms, - Lifeless as crystals, or translucent globes - Drifting in water; till, through endless years, - Out of their myriad changes, one or two - More subtle in combination, at the touch - Of light began to move, began to attract - Substances that could feed them; blindly at - first; - But as an artist, with all heaven for prize, - Pores over every syllable, tests each thread - Of his most tenuous thought, the moving - Power - Spent endless æons of that which men call - Time, - To form one floating tendril that could close - On what it touched. - Who whispered in his ear - That fleeting thought? - We must suppose a Power - Intently watching—through all the universe— - Each slightest variant, seizing on the best, - Selecting them, as men by conscious choice - In their small realm selected and reshaped - Their birds and flowers. - We must suppose a Power - In that immense night-cleaving pageantry - Which men call Nature, a selective Power, - Choosing through æons as men choose through years. - - _Many are called, few chosen_, quietly breathed - Shadow-of-a-Leaf, in exquisite undertone - One phrase of the secret music.... - He did not hear. - Lamarck—all too impatiently he flung - Lamarck aside; forgetting how in days - When the dark Book of Earth was darker yet - Lamarck had spelled gigantic secrets out, - And left an easier task for the age to come; - Forgetting more than this; for Darwin’s mind, - Working at ease in Nature, lost its way - In history, and the thoughts of other men. - For him Lamarck had failed, and he misread - His own forerunner’s mind. Blindfold desires - Had never shaped a wing. The grapevine’s need - To cling and climb could thrust no tendrils out. - The environing snows of Greenland could not cloak - Its little foxes with their whiter fur. - Nor could the wing-shut butterfly’s inner will - Mimic the shrivelled leaf on the withered bough - So cunningly that the bird might perch beside it - And never see its prey. - Was it blind chance - That flashed his own great fragment of the truth - Into his mind? What _vera causa_, then, - What leap of Nature brought that truth to birth, - Illumining all the world? - It flashed upon him - As at a sudden contact of two wires - The current flashes through; or, when through space, - A meteorite for endless ages rolls - In darkness, and its world of night appears - Unchangeable for ever, till, all at once, - It plunges into a soft resisting sea - Of planet-girdling air, and burns with heat, - And bursts into a blaze, while far below, - Two lovers, in a world beyond its ken, - Look from a little window into the night - And see a falling star. - By such wild light, - An image of his own ambiguous “chance,” - Which was not “chance,” but governed by a law - Unknown, too vast for men to comprehend - (Too vast for any to comprehend but One, - Breathed Shadow-of-a-Leaf, who in each part discerns - Its harmony with the whole), at last the clue - Flashed on him.... - In the strange ironical scheme - Wherein he moved, of the Master-Dramatist, - It was his own ambiguous “chance” that slipt - A book of Malthus into his drowsy hand - And drew his drowsy eyes down to that law - Of struggling men and nations. - Was it “chance” - That in this intricate torch-race tossed him there - Light from one struggling on an alien track - And yet not alien, since all roads to truth - Meet in one goal at last? - Was it blind chance - That even in this triumphant flash prepared - The downfall of his human pride, and slipt - The self-same volume into another hand; - And, in the lonely islands of Malay, - Drew Wallace to the self-same page, and said - —Though only Shadow-of-a-Leaf could hear that voice,— - _Whose is the kingdom, whose the glory and power?_ - - O, exquisite irony of the Master, there - Unseen by both, their generous rivalry - Evolved, perfected, the new thought for man; - And, over both, and all their thoughts, a Power - Intently watching, made of their struggle for truth - An image of the law that they illumed. - - So all that wasting of a myriad seeds - In Nature’s wild profusion was not waste, - Not even such waste as drives the flying grains - Under the sculptor’s chisel, but was itself - A cause of that unending struggle of life - Through which all life ascends. - The conqueror there - Was chosen by laws inexorably precise, - As though to infinite Reason infinite Art - Were wedded, and had found in infinite “chance” - Full scope for their consummate certainties,— - Choice and caprice, freedom and law in one. - Each slightest variant, in a myriad ways, - That armed or shielded or could help its kind, - Would lead to a new triumph; would reveal, - In varying, subtler ways of varying still; - New strokes of that divinest “chance” of all - Which poet and sculptor count as unforeseen, - And unforeseeable; yet, when once achieved, - They recognise as crowning law with law, - And witnessing to infinitudes of Power - In that creative Will which shapes the world. - O, in that widening splendour of the mind, - Blinder than Buffon, blinder than Lamarck, - His eyes amazed with all that leapt to light, - Dazed with a myriad details, lost the whole. - He saw the law whereby the few were chosen - From forms already at variance. Back and back - He traced his law, and every step was true. - And yet his _vera causa_ was no Cause, - For it determined nothing. It revealed, - In part, how subtler variants had arisen - From earliest simpler variants, but no more. - - ... - - Subtler than music, quieter than light, - The Power that wrought those changes; and the last - Were all implied and folded in the first, - As the gnarled oak-tree with its thousand boughs - Writhing to heaven and striking its grim roots - Like monstrous talons into the mountain’s heart - Is pent in one smooth acorn. So each life, - In little, retold the tale; each separate man - Was, in himself, the world’s epitome, - A microcosm, wherein who runs may read - The history of the whole; from the first seed - Enclosed in the blind womb, until life wake - Through moons or æons of embryonic change - To human thought and love, and those desires - Which still grope upward, into the unknown realms - As far beyond us now as Europe lay - From the first life that crawled out of the sea. - - There lies our hope; but O, the endless way! - And the lost road of knowledge, endless, too! - That infinite hope was not for him. One life - Hardly sufficed for his appointed task, - To find on earth his clues to the unknown law, - Out-miracling all miracles had he known, - Whereby this lifeless earth, so clearly seen - Across the abyss of time, this lifeless earth - Washed by a lifeless ocean, by no power - But that which moves within the things we see, - Swept the blind rocks into the cities of men, - With great cathedrals towering to the sky, - And little ant-like swarms in their dark aisles - Kneeling to that Unknowable. - His to trace - The way by inches, never to see the whole, - Never to grasp the miracle in the law, - And wrestling with it, to be written by light - As by an Angel’s finger in the dark. - Could he have stood on that first lifeless coast - With Shadow-of-a-Leaf, and seen that lifeless brine, - Rocks where no mollusc clung, nor seaweed grew; - Could he have heard a whisper,—_Only wait._ - _Be patient. On one sure and certain day,_ - _Out of the natural changes of these rocks_ - _And seas, at last, a great ship will go by;_ - _Cities will dusk that heaven; and you shall see_ - _Two lovers pass, reading one printed book,_ - _The Paradiso_.... - Would he have been so sure - That Nature had no miracles in her heart - More inconceivably shattering to the mind - Than madness ever dreamed? For this, this, this, - Had happened, though the part obscured the whole; - And his own labour, in a myriad ways, - Endlessly linking part to part, had lost - The _vera causa_ that Lamarck had known, - The one determining Cause that moved through all. - - -IV - -THE PROTAGONISTS - - The mist cleared. As an airman flying, I saw, - Between the quiet wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - Far down, a coiling glitter of willowy streams, - Then grey remembered battlements that enclosed - Gardens, like nests of nightingales; a bridge; - An airy tower; a shadowy dome; the High; - St Mary’s delicate spire. - A sound of bells - Rose like a spray of melody from the far - Diminished fountains of the City of Youth. - I heard and almost wept. - The walls grew large - And soared to meet me. As the patterned streets - Break into new dimensions, passing from sight - While the airman glides and circles down, they rose, - And the outer City, vanishing, revealed - The secret life within. At once I passed - Through walls of stone on those ethereal wings; - And, as an unseen spirit might survey - A crowded theatre from above, I saw - A packed assembly, gazing, hushed and still, - At certain famous leaders of that hour - On their raised daïs. Henslow in the midst, - Their president, gentle, tolerant, reverent, kind, - Darwin’s old tutor, scientist and half-saint; - Owen beside him, crabbèd as John Knox, - And dry as his dead bones; bland Wilberforce, - The great smooth Bishop of Oxford, pledged and primed - To make an end of Darwin, once for all. - Not far away, a little in shadow, sat - A strange young man, tall, slight, with keen dark eyes, - Who might, in the irresponsible way of youth, - Defend an absent thinker. Let him beware. - There was a balance of power in science, too, - Which would resent disturbance. He’d be crushed - By sheer weight of authority, then set, - Duly submissive, in his proper place. - His name was Huxley. - A square close-crowded room, - It held, in little, a concentrated world, - Imaging, on a microcosmic stage, - The doubts, the fears, the jealousies, and dull hates - That now beset one lonely soul at Down; - But imaging, also, dauntless love of truth - In two or three, the bearers of the fire. - - Henslow, subdued, with twenty reticent words - That, in their mere formality, seemed aware - Of silent dark momentous currents flowing - Under the trivial ripple of use and wont, - Called on Daubeny, first, for his discourse - On Sex in Flowers, and their descent through time. - Daubeny, glancing over his glasses, bowed - And twinkled a wise physician’s rosy smile, - As one of his many parts; an all-round man, - Sound Latinist and an excellent judge of wine, - Humanist and geologist, who had tracked - Guettard through all his craters in Auvergne, - And, afterwards, with a map in his right hand, - And Ovid’s ‘Ars Amoris’ in his left, - Traced the volcanic chains through Hungary, - Italy, Transylvania, and returned - To Oxford, as her botanist at the last, - With silvery hair, but otherwise unchanged, - Oxford in bloom and Oxford to the core. - Swimming serene in academic air, - With open mind and non-committal phrase - He proved he knew how little all men know; - And whoso kept that little to himself - Could never be caught tripping. - Then he smiled, - And so remained the wisest of them all. - - For half an hour the sexes of the flowers - Danced from his learned discourse, through the minds - Of half his feminine hearers, like a troop - Of Bacchanals, blowing kisses. - In the crowd - I saw, at the whimsical chuckle of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - The large-eyed spinster with the small pursed mouth, - Eliza Pym of Woodstock, who desired - To know about the wild flowers that she drew - In delicate water-colours for her friends. - She sat bolt upright, innocently amazed - And vaguely trepidant in her hooped green gown. - What? Even the flowers? How startling was the sound - Of pistil! Awed, intent, she caught at clues; - Meticulously quivering at the thought - Of bees; and blushing deeply when he spoke - In baritone of male virtue in the rose. - Through all, the evasive academic phrase, - Putting out vaguely sensitive tentacles - That instantly withdrew from what they touched, - Implied that he could view, quite unperturbed, - All theories, and remain detached, aloft - Among the gods, in philosophic calm; - Nay, by his critical logic was endowed - With something loftier. - What were gods to him, - Who, being ephemeral, mortal, born to die, - Could, over the port of Corpus and All Souls - Mellowed in classic cellars, quiz the powers - That doomed him, as the aristocrat of thought - Looks through ironical lorgnettes at the might - Of Demos round his tumbril. They lived on, - Wasting their nectar, wrecking worlds on worlds. - He had risen, at least, superior to all that. - He held it somewhat barbarous, vulgar, crude - To wallow in such profusion as the gods. - All this implied, not spoken; for he found - His final causes in his dry pressed flowers; - Proved that he knew—none better—all the tribe - Who had dragged a net of Latin through the fields; - Proved that some flowers, at least, had never changed - Through many centuries. The black-seeded poppy - Was known to Homer. He rolled out the lines. - Almonds, the bitter-kernelled and the sweet, - Were tasted by the prophets; and he found - White-seeded sesamum, in the night of time, - Among the old Egyptians.... - He showed that, while his library was vast, - Fragrant with leather, crested, tooled, and gilt, - He had closed the Book of Nature, and, on the whole, - Despite his open mind, dismissed the views - Of this—er—new philosopher, with a smile - That, don-wise, almost seemed to ask aloud, - “Who is he, after all?” Not one of _us_. - Why weigh his facts, then, further, since we hold - The official seals of truth in this our time. - Such men are always wrong. They come and go. - The breeze would soon blow over. - All this implied, - Not spoken, in that small dry steady smile, - Doctor Daubeny gathered up his tails - And made one definite and emphatic point - By sitting down, while some eight hundred hands - Acclaimed his perfect don-hood. - Henslow rose, - A little nervously. Had much pleasure, though.... - And turned to Mr. Huxley. Would he speak? - A whisper passed, a queer new stillness gripped - The expectant crowd. The clock ticked audibly - _Not yet, not yet!_ A sense of change at hand - Stole through the silence, like the first cool breath - That, over a great ship’s company at night, - Steals through the port-holes from the open sea. - Then, with sure foresight, seeing the clash to come, - The strange young man with the determined mouth - And quick dark eyes rose grimly, and flung down - A single sentence, like a gyve of steel - Wrenched from the wrists to set the strong hands free - For whatsoever need might rise, if clock - And _Zeitgeist_ changed their quiet _Not Yet_ to _Now_. - “_A general audience, sir, where sentiment_ - _May interfere, unduly interfere,_ - _With intellect_”—as a thin steel wire drawn tight - By an iron winch, the hush grew tense and rang - Low, hard, clear, cold—“_is not a fitting place_ - _For this discussion_.” - Silence, and the clock, - Two great allies, the surest of them all, - Dead silence, and the voice _Not Yet, Not Yet_, - A cough, the creak of the chair as he sat down, - A shuffle of feet, the chairman’s baffled face, - Then little indignant mutterings round the hall, - Turning to gasps of mockery. Insolence?—no,— - Sheer weakness, full retreat! - The Bishop raised - His eye-brows, looked at the dense disflattered crowds, - And had no further fear. The battle was won. - Victory, of the only kind he knew, - Was in his hands. Retreat must now be turned - Into full rout. He glanced at Owen,—met - His little sardonic smile with a wise nod, - As if to say, “Ah, just as we foresaw.” - Excited clerics caught the flying hint - And whispered, eyes agog—“You noticed that? - He’s a great man, the Bishop? What a brow! - And Owen, too. Of course, they know; they know; - And understand each other, thick as thieves.” - Then Owen rose; waved Huxley’s empty excuse - Remorselessly aside; and plunged right on, - Declaring there were facts, whereby the crowd - Could very fitly judge. - The crowd’s own feet - Tapped a benign applause. - Then came the facts, - Facts from a realm that Huxley had made his own. - _The brain of the gorilla_—some one turned - A faint hysterical laugh into a sneeze— - _Linked it more closely to the lowest groups_ - _Of QUADRUMANA_. - “Quadru—what-did-he-say?” - Whispered Miss Pym unconsciously to herself, - “Mana, four-handed,” clerical whiskers breathed, - With Evangelical titillance in her ear, - “Apes, monkeys, all the things that climb up trees. - Says the gorilla’s more like them than us.” - “Thank you.” Eliza Pym inclined her head - A little stiffly. - Had the world gone mad? - Was some one in the background trying to find - A pedigree for mankind among the brutes? - Absurd, of course, and yet—one must confess - How like they were in some things. Unto each - A mouth, a nose, two eyes, flesh, blood, and bones - Of the same pattern. - Comic enough, and weird; - But what became of Genesis, then, and God? - If all these whiskered men but one or two - So utterly disbelieved it, why discuss - Degrees of kinship? Surely the gulf was fixed - Wide as the severance between heaven and hell. - Then, in one dreadful gleam, she seemed to see - The rows of whiskered listeners, darkly perched, - Herself among them, on long swaying boughs, - Mesmerised, and all dumbly staring down - With horrible fascination at great eyes, - Green moons of cruelty, steadily smouldering, - In depths that—smelt of tigers; or the salts - Unstoppered by the vicar’s wife in front. - - Smile at Eliza Pym with Shadow-of-a-Leaf; - But only if your inward sight can see - Her memories, too—a child’s uplifted face, - The clean white cot, the fluttering nursery fire; - Old days, old faces, teaching her those lines - From Blake, about a Lamb. Yet that—why that - Might be the clue they lacked in all this talk - Of our dumb kinsfolk. If she could but speak - And—hint it! Why don’t Bishops think of things - Like that, she wondered. - Owen resumed his chair - With loud applause. - That grim young man again, - Huxley, was on his feet, his dark eyes lit - With thrice the vital power of all the rest. - In one cool sentence, like a shining lance, - He touched the centre of his opponent’s shield, - And ended all the shuffling, all the doubts - Of where he stood, how far he dared to go, - If truth required it. He could not accept - Those facts from any authority; gave direct - Unqualified contradiction to those facts; - And pledged himself to justify this course, - Unusual as it seemed perhaps—elsewhere. - “Elsewhere,” and as he said it, came a gleam - Into his face, reflected from the heights - Where a tribunal sits whose judgment holds - Not for the fleeting moment, but all time. - - “Elsewhere”—the Bishop smiled. He had not caught - That gleam. “Elsewhere” was only another sign - Of weakness, even timidity perhaps, - And certainly retreat, not from the truth - (He felt so sure of that) but from the might - And deep resources of the established powers - Whose influence ruled the world. - “Elsewhere” for him - Meant Saturday, and here. The lists were set, - The battle joined, and the great issue plain,— - Whether the human race came straight from God, - Or traced its dark descent back to the brute, - And left his creed a wreck of hollow towers, - The haunt of bats and owls. His time to strike - Would come on Saturday. Pleadings of “elsewhere” - Would not avail. He set his jaw. Please God, - He meant to drive this victory crashing home, - And make an end of Darwin once for all. - So closed the first strange scene. - The rumour spread - Everywhere, of the Bishop’s grim intent. - Saturday’s crowd, an hour before its time - Choked all the doors, and crammed the long west hall. - Black-coated members of all shades of thought, - Knowledge and doubt and bigotry, crushed their sides - In chair-packed rows together (Eliza Pym - Among them, with her startled innocent eyes). - A bevy of undergraduates at the back, - Quietly thoughtful, held their watching brief - For youth and for the future. Fame to come - Already touched the brows of a rare few - With faint leaf-shadows of her invisible wreath: - Green, the philosopher, gazing at the world - With youth’s aloofness, and that inward light - Which shines from Oxford still; not far away - The young historian of the coloured stream - Of outward life, the ancestral pageantry - Of England, and its tributary rills - Flowing in dawn-gleams out of the mists of time. - There, too, in front, with atavistic face - And Vandyke beard, so oddly like the king - Who loved Nell Gwynne, sat Admiral FitzRoy, - Late captain of the _Beagle_, quite prick-eared - With personal curiosity. Twice he told - His neighbour that, by George, he wouldn’t ha’ missed - This Donnybrook Fair for anything. He had sailed - With Darwin round the world. They used to call him - The old philosopher. Heard the bosun once, - Pointing the officers out—damned funny it was!— - “That’s Captain FitzRoy. That’s the second mate; - And _that_”—pointing a thumb at Darwin’s back— - “_That’s_ our Fly-Catcher!” - Best of fellows, too, - But queer. He’d tell you, in the simplest way - —As if it meant no more than pass the salt,— - Something that knocked you endways; calmly shift - A mountain-range, in half a dozen words, - And sink it in the sea. - In fact, FitzRoy - Felt it his duty more than once, by George, - To expostulate; told him plainly he’d upset - _Genesis_ and the Church; and then there’d be - The devil and all to pay. And now, by George, - He’d done it; and her Majesty’s Admiral - Had come on purpose, all the way from town, - To hear and see the end of it. - So he said, - Not wholly understanding why he came,— - The memory of a figure rapt and bowed - Over a shell, or finding in the rocks, - As though by wizardry, relics of lost worlds; - Moments that, by a hardly noticed phrase, - Had touched with orderly meaning and new light - The giant flaws and foldings in the hills; - Moments when, in the cabin, he had stared - Into the “old philosopher’s” microscope, - And seen the invisible speck in a water-drop - Grow to a great rose-window of radiant life - In an immense cathedral. - Vaguely enough, - Perhaps in the dimmest hinterland of his mind, - There lurked a quiet suspicion that, after all, - His queer old friend _had_ hit on something queer. - Three places off, his face a twinkling mask - Of keen Scots humour, Robert Chambers glanced - Quietly at his watch, to hide a smile - When some one who had “written the Vestiges,” - And only half denied it, met his eye. - - The vacant platform glared expectancy, - And held the gaze now of the impatient crowd. - - Then Henslow led the conquering Bishop in. - Two rows of clerics, halfway down the hall, - Drummed for their doughty champion with their heels. - Above, in each recessed high window-seat, - Bishop-adoring ladies clapped their hands. - - The rest filed in, mere adjuncts, modest foils. - Hooker and Lubbock and Huxley took their chairs - On Henslow’s left. The beautiful gaitered legs, - By their divine prerogative, on his right, - So carelessly crossed, more eloquently than words - Assured the world that everything was well, - And their translation into forms of speech - A mere formality. Next to the Bishop sat - A Transatlantic visitor with a twang, - One Doctor Draper, his hard wrinkled skin - Tinged by the infinite coffee he absorbed, - A gaunt bone-coloured desert, unassuaged. - He was a grim diplomatist, as befits - A pilgrim of the cosmos; ready at Rome - To tickle the Romans; and, if bishops ruled, - And found themselves at odds with freeborn souls - Outside the Land of Freedom, he’d befriend - Bishops, bring in the New World, stars and all, - To rectify that balance, and take home - For souvenir, with a chip of the pyramids, - The last odd homages of the obsequious Old. - The president called him for his opening speech. - He stood and beamed, enjoying to the full - The sense that, with his mighty manuscript, - He could delay the antagonists for an hour. - He cleared his throat. He took from a little box - A small black lozenge, popped it into his mouth, - Leisurely rolled it under a ruminant tongue, - Then placidly drawled his most momentous words: - _“Proh-fessur Henslow, Bishop Wilbur-force,_ - _Members, AND friends, in this historic hall,_ - _I assk first, AIR we a fortooitous_ - _Con-course of atoms?”_ Half unconsciously, - He struck at once to the single central heart - Of all the questions asked by every age; - As though he saw what only Shadow-of-a-Leaf - Had watched last night, as in a crystal globe, - That scene preparing, the interweaving clues - Whose inconceivable intricacy at length, - By “chance,” as blind men call it, through the maze - Of life and time, at the one right juncture brought - Two shadows, face to face, in an Oxford Street, - Chambers and Huxley. “You’ll be there to-morrow.”— - “No, I leave Oxford now.”— - “The enemy means - To annihilate Darwin. You will not desert us?”— - “If you say that, I stay.” - Each to his place - Had moved in his own orbit, like a star, - Or like an atom, free-will at one with law, - In the unplanned plan of the Master-Dramatist, - Where Doctor Draper blindly played his part - And asked his pregnant question. He droned on, - For one enormous hour, starkly maintained - That Europe, in its intellectual life, - By mere “fortooity,” never could have flowered - To such results as blushed before him there - In that historic hall of halls to-night. - If Darwin thought so, he took leave to stand - Beside them, and to smile the vast calm smile - Of Arizona’s desert distances, - Till all such dragon thoughts had coiled away. - He took his chair. The great debate began. - For prelude came a menacing growl of storm. - A furious figure rose, like a sperm-whale, - Out of the seething audience. A huge man, - With small, hot, wicked eyes and cavernous mouth, - Bellowed his own ferocious claim to speak - On economic grounds. He had subscribed - His guineas, ringing guineas of red gold, - Ungrudgingly for years; but prophesied - Withdrawal of all such guineas, on all sides, - From this Association, if it failed - To brand these most abominable views - As blasphemous, bearing on their devilish brows, - Between their horns, the birth-mark of the Beast. - This last word hissed, he sank again. At once, - Ere Henslow found his feet or spoke a word, - Up leapt a raw-boned parson from the North, - To seize his moment’s fame. With sawing arm - The Reverend Dingle, like a windmill, vowed - He’d prove upon the blackboard, in white chalk, - By diagram—and the chalk was in his hand— - “That mawnkey and mahn had separate pedigrees. - Let A here be the mawnkey, and B the mahn.” - Loud laughter; shouts of “mawnkey!” and “sit down” - Extinguished him. He sat; and Henslow quelled - The hubbub with one clarion-clear demand, - Dictated, surely, by the ironic powers - Who had primed the Bishop and prepared his fall: - _“Gentlemen, this discussion now must rest_ - _On scientific grounds.”_ - At once there came - Calls for the Bishop, who, rising from his chair, - Urged by the same invisible ironies, - Remarked that his old friend, Professor Beale, - Had something to say _first_. That weighty first - Conveyed the weight of his own words to come. - Urged still by those invisible ones, his friend - Dug the pit deeper; modestly declared, - Despite his keen worn face and shoulders bowed - In histologic vigils, that he felt - His knowledge quite inadequate; and the way - Was made straight—for the Bishop. - The Bishop rose, mellifluous, bland, adroit. - - A gesture, lacking only the lawn sleeves - To make it perfect, delicately conveyed - His comfortable thought—that what amazed - The sheepfold must be folly. - Half the throng, - His own experience told him, had not grasped - The world-inweaving argument, could not think - In æons. Æons, then, would be dismissed - As vague and airy fantasies. He might choose - His facts at will, unchallenged. He stood there - Secure that his traditions could not fail, - Basing his faith on schemes of thought designed - By authorised “thinkers” in pure artistry, - As free from Nature’s law as coloured blocks - That children play with on the nursery hearth, - And puzzle about and shift and twist and turn - Until the beautiful picture, as ordained, - Comes out, exact to the pattern, and reveals - The artificer’s plan, the pattern, as arranged, - By bishops, politic statesmen, teachers, guides, - Who hold it in reserve, their final test - Of truth, for times like this. He had been so sure - Of something deeper than all schemes of thought - That he had all too lightly primed himself - With “facts” to match their fables; hastily crammed - Into his mind’s convenient travelling bag - (Sound leather, British) all that he required,— - Not truth, but “a good argument.” He had asked - Owen, who hated Huxley, to provide it; - And he had brought it with him,—not the truth, - Not even facts, those unrelated crumbs - Of truth, the abiding consecrated whole. - He had brought his borrowed “facts,” misunderstood, - To meet, for the first time in all his life, - Stark earnest thought, wrestling for truth alone, - As men on earth discerned it. He had prayed, - With something deeper than blind make-believe, - _Thy will be done on earth_; and yet, and yet, - The law wherein that will might be discerned, - The law wherein that unity of heaven - And earth might yet be found (could he but trust - The truth, could he believe that his own God - Lived in the living truth), he waved aside. - These others had not found it, but they kept - One faith that he had lost. Though it should slay them, - They trusted in the truth. They could not see - Where it might lead them. Only at times they felt - As they deciphered the dark Book of Earth - That, following its majestic rhythm of law, - They followed the true path, the eternal way - Of That which reigns. Prophetic flashes came. - Words that the priest mechanically intoned - Burned upon Huxley’s keen ironical page - Like sudden sapphires, drawing their deeper light - From that celestial City which endures - Because it hath foundations: _Shall I come_ - _Before the Eternal with burnt offerings?_ - _Hath not the Eternal showed thee what is good,_ - _That thou do justly and mercifully, and walk_ - _Humbly with the Eternal?_ - - O, irony of the Master-dramatist, - Who set once more those lists; and sent His truth - Unrecognised, as of old, to fight for life - And prove itself in struggle and raise once more - A nobler world above the world out-worn, - Crushing all easy sophistry, though it stood - Garbed as the priest of God. - The Bishop seized - His diplomatic vantage. The blunt truth - Of Huxley’s warning offered itself to him - As a rash gambit in their game of—tact. - He seized it; gracefully smoothed the ruffled pride - Of that great audience, trained in a sound school - To judge by common-sense. - His mobile face - Revealed much that his politic words concealed. - His strength was in that sound old British way— - Derision of all things that transcend its codes - In life, thought, art; the moon-calf’s happy creed - That, if a moon-calf only sees the moon - In thoughts that range the cosmos, his broad grin - Sums the whole question; there’s no more to see. - In all these aids, an innocent infidel, - The Bishop put his trust; and, more than all, - In vanity, the vacant self-conceit - That, when it meets the masters of the mind - And finds them bowed before the Inscrutable Power, - Accepts their reverence and humility - As tribute, due acknowledgment of fool’s right - To give the final judgment, and annul - The labour of a life-time in an hour. - Dulcetly, first, he scoffed at Darwin’s facts. - “Rock-pigeons now were what they had always been. - Species had never changed. What were the proofs - Even of the variation they required - To make this theory possible? We had heard - Mysterious rumours of a long-legged sheep - Somewhere in Yorkshire (laughter). Let me ask - Professor Huxley, here upon the left - (All eyes on Huxley), who believes himself - Descended from an ape (chuckles of glee), - How recently this happened.” - The Bishop turned, - All smiling insolence, “May I beg to know - If this descent is on your father’s side, - Or on your mother’s?” - He paused, to let the crowd - Bellow its laughter. The unseen ironies - Had trapped him and his flock; and neither knew. - But Huxley knew. He turned, with a grim smile, - And while the opposing triumph rocked and pealed, - Struck one decisive palm upon his knee, - And muttered low—“_The Lord hath delivered him_ - _Into my hands._” - His neighbour stared and thought - His wits were wandering. Yet that undertone - Sounded more deadly, had more victory in it, - Than all the loud-mouthed minute’s dying roar. - - It died to a tense hush. The Bishop closed - In solemn diapason. Darwin’s views - Degraded woman. They debased mankind, - And contradicted God’s most Holy Word. - Applause! Applause! The hall a quivering mist - Of clapping hands. From every windowseat - A flutter of ladies’ handkerchiefs and shrill cries - As of white swarming sea-gulls. The black rows - Of clerics all exchanging red-faced nods, - And drumming with their feet, as though to fill - A hundred-pedalled organ with fresh wind. - The Bishop, like a _Gloire de Dijon_ rose - With many-petalled smiles, his plump right hand - Clasped in a firm congratulatory grip - Of hickory-bones by Draper of New York; - Who had small faith in what the Bishop said - But heard the cheers, and gripped him as a man - Who never means to let this good thing go. - Motionless, on the left, the observant few, - The silent delegates of a sterner power, - With grave set faces, quietly looking on. - At last the tumult, as all tumult must, - Sank back to that deep silence. Henslow turned - To Huxley without speaking. Once again - The clock ticked audibly, but its old “Not Yet” - Had somehow, in that uproar, in the face - Of that tumultuous mockery, changed to _Now!_ - - The lean tall figure of Huxley quietly rose. - He looked for a moment thoughtfully at the crowd; - Saw rows of hostile faces; caught the grin - Of ignorant curiosity; here and there, - A hopeful gleam of friendship; and, far back, - The young, swift-footed, waiting for the fire. - He fixed his eyes on these—then, in low tones, - Clear, cool, incisive, “_I have come here_,” he said, - “_In the cause of Science only_.” - He paused again. - Then, striking the mockery out of the mocker’s face, - His voice rang out like steel— - “I have heard nothing - To prejudice the case of my august - Client, who, as I told you, is not here.” - At once a threefold picture flashed upon me, - A glimpse, far off, through eyes of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - First, of a human seeker, there at Down, - Gathering his endless cloud of witnesses - From rocks, from stones, from trees; and from the signs - In man’s own body of life’s æonian way; - But, far above him, clothed with purer light, - The stern, majestic Spirit of living Truth; - And, more august than even his prophets knew, - Through that eternal Spirit, the primal Power - Returning into a world of faiths out-worn. - - Once more, as he spoke on, a thousand years - Were but as yesterday. If these truths were true, - This theory flooded the whole world with light. - Could we believe that the Creator set - In mockery all these birth-signs in the world, - Or once in a million years had wrecked His work - And shaped, in a flash, a myriad lives anew, - Bearing in their own bodies all the signs - Of their descent from those that He destroyed? - Who left that ancient leaf within the flower? - Who hid within the reptile those lost fins, - And under the skin of the sea-floundering whale - The bones of the lost thigh? Who dusked the foal - With shadowy stripes, and under its hoof concealed - Those ancient birdlike feet of its lost kin? - Who matched that hoof with a rosy fingernail, - Or furled that point within the human ear? - Who had imprinted in the body of man, - And in his embryo, all those intricate signs - Of his forgotten lineage, even those gills - Through which he drew his breath once in the sea? - - The speaker glanced at his antagonist. - “You think all this too marvellous to be true; - Yet you believe in miracles. You think - The unfolding of this complicated life - Around us, out of a simple primal form, - Impossible; yet you know that every man - Before his birth, a few brief years ago, - Was once no more than a single living cell. - You think it ends your theory of creation. - You say that God made _you_; and yet you know - —And reconcile your creed with what you know— - That you yourself originally”—he held up - A gleaming pencil-case—“were a little piece - Of matter, not so large as the end of this. - But if you ask, in fine, - Whether I’d be ashamed to claim descent - From that poor animal with the stooping gait - And low intelligence, who can only grin - And chatter as we pass by, or from a _man_ - Who could use high position and great gifts - To crush one humble seeker after truth— - I hesitate, but”—an outburst of applause - From all who understood him drowned the words. - He paused. The clock ticked audibly again. - Then, quietly measuring every word, he drove - The sentence home. “I asserted and repeat - A man would have no cause to feel ashamed - Of being descended through vast tracts of time - From that poor ape. - Were there an ancestor - Whom I could not recall without a sense - Of shame, it were a _man_, so placed, so gifted, - Who sought to sway his hearers from the truth - By aimless eloquence and by skilled appeals - To their religious prejudice.” - Was it the truth - That conquered, or the blind sense of the blow - Justly considered, delivered, and driven home, - That brought a crash of applause from half the house? - And more (for even the outright enemy - Joined in that hubbub), though indignant cries, - Protested vainly, “Abominable to treat - The Bishop so!” - The Bishop sat there dumb. - Eliza Pym, adding her own quaint touch - Of comedy, saw that pencil shine again - In Huxley’s hand; compared it, at a glance - Of fawn-like eyes, with the portentous form - In gaiters; felt the whole world growing strange; - Drew one hysterical breath, and swooned away. - - -V - -THE _VERA CAUSA_ - - And yet, and yet, the victor knew too well - His victory had a relish of the dust. - Even while the plaudits echoed in his ears, - It troubled him. When he pondered it that night, - A finer shame had touched him. He had used - The weapons of his enemy at the last; - And, if he had struck his enemy down for truth, - He had struck him down with weapons he despised. - He had used them with a swifter hand and eye, - A subtler cunning; and he had set his heel - On those who took too simply to their hearts - A tale, whose ancient imagery enshrined - A mystery that endured. He had proclaimed - A fragment of a truth which, he knew well, - Left the true Cause in darkness. Did he know - More of that Cause than _Genesis_? Could he see - Farther into that darkness than the child - Folding its hands in prayer? - More clearly far - Than Darwin, whom he had warned of it, he knew - The bounds of this new law; bade him beware - Of his repeated dogma—_Nature makes_ - _No leap._ He pointed always to the Abyss - Of darkness round the flickering spark of light - Upheld by Science. Had Wilberforce been armed - With knowledge and the spiritual steel - Of Saint Augustine, who had also seen, - Even in his age, a ladder of life to heaven, - There had been a victory of another kind - To lighten through the world. - And Darwin knew it; - But, while he marshalled his unnumbered truths, - He lost the Truth; as one who takes command - Of multitudinous armies in the night, - And strives to envisage, in one sweep of the mind, - Each squadron and each regiment of the whole, - Ever the host that swept through his mind’s eye, - Though all in ordered ranks and files, obscured - Army on army the infinite truth beyond. - The gates of Beauty closed against his mind, - And barred him out from that eternal realm, - Whose lucid harmonies on our night bestow - Glimpses of absolute knowledge from above; - Unravelling and ennobling, making clear - Much that had baffled us, much that else was dark; - So that the laws of Nature shine like roads, - Firm roads that lead through a significant world - Not downward, from the greater to the less, - But up to the consummate soul of all. - He could not follow them now. Back, back and back, - He groped along the dark diminishing road. - The ecstasy of music died away. - The poet’s vision melted into a dream. - He knew his loss, and mourned it; but it marred - Not only his own happiness, as he thought. - It blurred his vision, even of his own truths. - - He looked long at the butterfly’s radiant wings, - Pondered their blaze of colour, and believed - That butterfly wooers choosing their bright mates - Through centuries of attraction and desire - Evolved this loveliness. For he only saw - The blaze of colour, the flash that lured the eye. - He did not see the exquisite pattern there, - The diamonded fans of the under-wing, - Inlaid with intricate harmonies of design; - The delicate little octagons of pearl, - The moons like infinitesimal fairy flowers, - The lozenges of gold, and grey, and blue - All ordered in an intellectual scheme, - Where form to form responded and faint lights - Echoed faint lights, and shadowy fringes ran - Like Elfin curtains on a silvery thread, - Shadow replying to shadow through the whole. - - Did eyes of the butterfly wooer mark all this,— - A subtlety too fine for half mankind? - He tossed a shred of paper on to his lawn; - He saw the white wings blindly fluttering round it. - He did not hear the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, - _Was this their exquisite artistry of choice?_ - _Had wooers like these evolved this loveliness?_ - - He groped into the orchestral universe - As one who strives to trace a symphony - Back to its cause, and with laborious care - Feels with his hand the wood of the violins, - And bids you mark—O good, bleak, honest soul, - So fearful of false hopes!—that all is hollow. - He tells you on what tree the wood was grown. - He plucks the catgut, tells you whence it came, - Gives you the name and pedigree of the cat; - Nay, even affirms a mystery, and will talk - Of sundry dark vibrations that affect - The fleshly instrument of the human ear; - And so, with a world-excluding accuracy— - O, never doubt that every step was true!— - Melts the great music into less than air - And misses everything. - Everything! On one side - The music soaring endlessly through heavens - Within the human soul; on the other side, - The unseen Composed of whose transcendent life - The music speaks in souls made still to hear. - He clung to his _vera causa_. In that law - He saw the way of the Power, but not the Power - Determining the way. Did men reject - The laws of Newton, binding all the worlds, - Because they still knew nothing of the Power - That bound them? The stone fell. He knew not why. - The sun controlled the planets, and the law - Was constant; but the mystery of it was masked - Under a name; and no man knew the Power - That gripped the worlds in that unchanging bond, - Or whether, in the twinkling of an eye, - The Power might not release them from that bond, - As a hand opens, and the wide universe - Change in a flash, and vanish like a shadow, - As prophets had foretold. - He could not think - That chance decreed the boundless march of law - He saw in the starry heavens. Yet he could think - Of “chance” on earth; and, while he thought, declare - “Chance” was not “chance” but law unrecognised; - Then, even while he said it, he would use - The ambiguous word, base his own law on “chance”; - And, even while he used it, there would move - Before his eyes in every flake of colour, - Inlaid upon the butterfly’s patterned wing, - Legions of atoms wheeling each to its place - In ever constant law; and he knew well - That, even in the living eye that saw them, - The self-same Power that bound the starry worlds - Controlled a myriad atoms, every one - An ordered system; and in every cloud - Of wind-blown dust and every breaking wave - Upon the storm-tossed sea, an infinite host - Of infinitesimal systems moved by law - Each to its place; and, in each growing flower, - Myriads of atoms like concentred suns - And planets, these to the leaf and those to the crown, - Moved in unerring order, and by a law - That bound all heights and depths of the universe, - In an unbroken unity. By what Power? - There was one Power, one only known to man, - That could determine action. Herschel knew it; - The power whereby the mind uplifts the hand - And lets it fall, the living personal Will. - - Ah, but his task, his endless task on earth, - Bent his head earthward. He must find the way - Before he claimed the heights. No Newton he; - Though men began to acclaim him and his law - As though they solved all mysteries and annulled - All former creeds, and changed the heart of heaven. - No Newton he; not even a Galileo; - But one who patiently, doggedly laboured on, - As Tycho Brahe laboured in old days, - Numbering the stars, recording fact on fact, - For those, who, after centuries, might discern - The meaning and the cause of what he saw. - Visions of God and Heaven were not for him, - Unless his “facts” revealed them, as the crown - Of his own fight for knowledge. - It might be - The final test of man, the narrow way - Proving him worthy of immortal life, - That he should face this darkness and this death - Worthily and renounce all easy hope, - All consolation, all but the wintry smile - Upon the face of Truth as he discerns it, - Here upon earth, his only glimmer of light, - Leading him onward to an end unknown. - Faith! Faith! O patient, inarticulate soul, - If this were faithlessness, there was a Power, - So whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that shared it with him; - The Power that bowed His glory into darkness - To make a world in suffering and in death, - The passionate price that even the Omnipotent - Must pay for love, and love’s undying crown. - - He hardly heard the whisper; could not hear it - And keep his own resolve. He bowed his head - In darkness; and, henceforth, those inward gates - Into the realms of the supernal light - Began to close. - He knew that they were closing; - And yet—was this the dark key to Creation?— - He shared the ecstasy also; shared that sense - Of triumph; broke the Bread and drank the Wine - In sacred drops and morsels of the truth; - Shared, in renouncement of all else but truth, - A sense that he could never breathe in words - To any one else, a sense that in this age - It was expedient that a man should lose - The glory, and die this darker new-found death, - To save the people from their rounded creeds, - Their faithless faith, and crowns too lightly won. - - ... - - O, yet the memory of one midnight hour! - _Would that she knew. Would God that she knew now...._ - Truer than all his knowledge was that cry; - The cry of the blind life struggling through the dark, - Upward ... the blind brow lifted to the unseen. - - He groped along the dark unending way - And saw, although he knew not what he saw, - Out of the struggle of life, a mightier law - Emerging; and, when man could rise no higher - By the fierce law of Nature, he beheld - Nature herself at war against herself. - He heard, although he knew not what he heard, - A Voice that, triumphing over her clashing chords, - Resolved them into an infinite harmony. - Whose was that Voice? What Power within the flesh - Cast off the flesh for a glory in the mind, - And leapt to victory in self-conquering love? - What Voice, whose Power, cast Nature underfoot - In Bruno, when the flames gnawed at his flesh; - In Socrates; and, in those obscure Christs - Who daily die; and, though none other sees, - Lay hands upon the wheel of the universe - And master it; and the sun stands dark at noon? - These things he saw but dimly. All his life - He moved along the steep and difficult way - Of Truth in darkness; but the Voice of Truth - Whispered in darkness, out of the mire and day, - And through the blood-stained agony of the world, - “Fear nothing. Follow Me. I _am_ the Way.” - So, when Death touched him also, and England bore - His dust into her deepening innermost shrine, - The Voice he heard long since, and could not hear, - Rose like the fuller knowledge, given by Death - To one that could best lead him upward now, - Rose like a child’s voice, opening up the heavens, - _I am the Resurrection and the Life_. - - - - -X—EPILOGUE - - - Up the Grand Canyon the full morning flowed. - I heard the voices moving through the abyss - With the deep sound of pine-woods, league on league - Of singing boughs, each separate, each a voice, - Yet all one music; - _The Eternal Mind_ - _Enfolds all changes, and can never change._ - - _Man is not exiled from this Majesty,_ - _The inscrutable Reality, which he shares_ - _In his immortal essence. Man that doubts_ - _All but the sensuous veils of colour and sound,_ - _The appearances that he can measure and weigh,_ - _Trusts, as the very fashioner of his doubt,_ - _The imponderable thought that weighs the worlds,_ - _The invisible thought that sees; thought that reveals_ - _The miracle of the eternal paradox—_ - _The pure unsearchable Being that cannot be_ - _Yet IS, and still creates and governs all;_ - _A Power that, being unknowable, is best known;_ - _For this transcendent Being can reply_ - _To every agony, “I am that which waits_ - _Beyond the last horizon of your pain,_ - _Beyond your wildest hope, your last despair,_ - _Above your heaven, and deeper than your hell._ - _There is not room on earth for what ye seek._ - _Is there not room in Me?”_ - _Time is a shadow_ - _Of man’s own thought. Things past and things to come_ - _Are closed in that full circle. He lives and reigns;_ - _Dies with the dying bird; and, in its death_ - _Receives it to His heart. No leaf can fall_ - _Without Him; who, for ever pouring out_ - _His passion into worlds that shall attain_ - _Love in the highest at last, returns for ever_ - _Along these roads of suffering and of death,_ - _With all their lives upgathered to His heart_ - _Into the heaven of heavens. How else could life_ - _Lay hold on its infinitude, or win_ - _The strength to walk with Love in complete light?_ - _For, as a child that learns to walk on earth,_ - _Life learns these little rhythms of earthly law,_ - _Listens to simple seas that ebb and flow,_ - _And spells the large bright order of the stars_ - _Wherein the moving Reason is revealed_ - _To mans up-struggling mind, or breathed like song_ - _Into the quiet heart, as love to love._ - _So, step by step, the spirit of man ascends_ - _Through joy and grief; and is withdrawn by death_ - _From the sweet dust that might content it here_ - _Into His kingdom, the one central goal_ - _Of the universal agony. He lives._ - _He lives and reigns, throned above Space and Time;_ - _And, in that realm, freedom and law are one;_ - _Fore-knowledge and all-knowledge and free-will,_ - _Make everlasting music._ - Far away - Along the unfathomable abyss it flowed, - A harmony so consummate that it shared - The silence of the sky; a song so deep - That only the still soul could hear it now: - _New every morning the creative Word_ - _Moves upon chaos. Yea, our God grows young._ - _Here, now, the eternal miracle is renewed_ - _Now, and for ever, God makes heaven and earth._ - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF EARTH *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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