Once all-sufficient for men's needs, Are palimpsests that scarce disguise The tracings of still earlier lies, Themselves as surely written o'er An older fib erased before.
So from these days I fly to those That in the landlocked Past repose, Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes From bloom-flushed boughs untimely flakes;
Where morning's eyes see strange,
No crude perplexity of change, And morrows trip along their ways Secure as happy yesterdays.
Then there were rulers who could trace Through heroes up to gods their race, Pledged to fair fame and noble use By veins from Odin filled or Zeus, And under bonds to keep divine The praise of a celestial line.
Theu priests could pile the altar's sods, With whom gods spake as they with gods,
And everywhere from haunted earth Broke springs of wonder, that had birth In depths divine beyond the ken And fatal scrutiny of men;
Then hills and groves and streams and
Thrilled with immortal presences, Not too ethereal for the scope Of human passion's dream or hope.
Now Pan at last is surely dead, And King No-Credit reigns instead, Whose officers, morosely strict, Poor Fancy's tenantry evict, Chase the last Genius from the door, And nothing dances any more. Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do, Drumming the Old One's own tattoo, And, if the oracles are dumb, Have we not mediums? Why be glum?
Fly thither? Why, the very air Is full of hindrance and despair! Fly thither? But I cannot fly; My doubts enmesh me if I try, Each lilliputian, but, combined, Potent a giant's limbs to bind.
This world and that are growing dark; A huge interrogation mark, The Devil's crook episcopal,
Still borne before him since the Fall, Blackens with its ill-omened sign
Whichever box the truth be stowed in, There's not a sliver left of Odin.
Either he was a pinchbrowed thing, With scarcely wit a stone to fling, A creature both in size and shape Nearer than we are to the ape, Who hung sublime with brat and spouse By tail prehensile from the boughs, And, happier than his maimed descend- ants,
The culture curtailed independents, Could pluck his cherries with both paws, And stuff with both his big-boned jaws; Or else the core his name enveloped Was from a solar myth developed, Which, hunted to its primal shoot, Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root, Thereby to instant death explaining The little poetry remaining.
Try it with Zeus, 't is just the same; The thing evades, we hug a name; Nay, scarcely that, perhaps a vapor Born of some atmospheric caper. All Lempriere's fables blur together In cloudy symbols of the weather, And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas But to illustrate such hypotheses. With years enough behind his back, Lincoln will take the selfsame track, And prove, hulled fairly to the cob, A mere vagary of Old Prob.
Give the right man a solar myth, And he'll confute the sun therewith.
They make things admirably plain, But one hard question will remain :
If one hypothesis you lose, Another in its place you choose, But, your faith gone, O man brother,
Whose shop shall furnish you another? One that will wash, I mean, and wear, And wrap us warmly from despair? While they are clearing up our puzzles, And clapping prophylactic muzzles On the Actæon's hounds that sniff Our devious track through But and If, Would they 'd explain away the Devil And other facts that won't keep level, But rise beneath our feet or fail, A reeling ship's deck in a gale! God vanished long ago, iwis, A mere subjective synthesis;
A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears, Too homely for us pretty dears, Who want one that conviction carries, Last make of London or of Paris. He gone, I felt a moment's spasm, But calmed myself with Protoplasm, A finer name, and, what is more, As enigmatic as before;
Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease Minds caught in the Symplegades Of soul and sense, life's two conditions, Each baffled with its own omniscience. The men who labor to revise Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise, And print it without foolish qualms Instead of God in David's psalms: Noll had been more effective far Could he have shouted at Dunbar, "Rise, Protoplasm!" No dourert Scot Had waited for another shot.
And yet I frankly must confess A secret unforgivingness,
And shudder at the saving chrism Whose best New Birth is Pessimism; My soul- I mean the bit of phosphorus, That fills the place of what that was for
Can't bid its inward bores defiance With the new nursery-tales of science. What profits me, though doubt by doubt,
As nail by nail, be driven out, When every new one, like the last, Still holds my coffin-lid as fast? Would I find thought a moment's truce, Give me the young world's Mother Goose
With life and joy in every limb,
The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!
Our dear and admirable Huxley Cannot explain to me why ducks lay, Or rather, how into their eggs Blunder potential wings and legs With will to move them and decide Whether in air or lymph to glide. Who gets a hair's-breadth on by showing That Something Else set all agoing? Farther and farther back we push From Moses and his burning bush; Cry, "Art Thou there?" Above, below, All Nature mutters yes and no! "T is the old answer: we 're agreed Being from Being must proceed, Life be Life's source. I might as well Obey the meeting-house's bell. And listen while Old Hundred pours Forth through the summer-opened doors, From old and young. I hear it yet, Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet, While the gray minister, with face Radiant, let loose his noble bass. If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll Waked all the echoes of the soul, And in it many a life found wings To soar away from sordid things. Church gone and singers too, the song Sings to me voiceless all night long, Till my soul beckons me afar, Glowing and trembling like a star. Will any scientific touch
With my worn strings achieve as much?
I don't object, not I, to know My sires were monkeys, if 't was so; I touch my ear's collusive tip And own the poor-relationship. That apes of various shapes and sizes Contained their germs that all the prizes Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin. Who knows but from our loins may spring
(Long hence) some winged sweetthroated thing
As much superior to us As we to Cynocephalus ?
This is consoling, but, alas,
It wipes no dimness from the glass Where I am flattening my poor nose, In hope to see beyond my toes. Though I accept my pedigree, Yet where, pray tell me, is the key That should unlock a private door To the Great Mystery, such no more? Each offers his, but one nor all
Are much persuasive with the wall That rises now, as long ago, Between I wonder and I know, Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep At the veiled Isis in its keep. Where is no door, I but produce My key to find it of no use. Yet better keep it, after all, Since Nature 's economical,
And who can tell but some fine day (If it occur to her) she may, In her good-will to you and me, Muke door and lock to match the key?
And no great harm, unless at grave expense
Of what needs edge of proof, the moral
For man or race is on the downward
To dodge the primal curse and make it pay,
Since office means a kind of patent drill To force an entrance to the Nation's till,
And peculation something rather less Whose fibre grows too soft for honest Risky than if you spelt it with an s;
And there's a subtle influence that
Now that to steal by law is grown an art,
Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart,
And 'slightly irregular" dilutes the shame
Of what had once a somewhat blunter
With choker white, wherein no cynic We called it our Eden, that small patent
Years are creditors Sheridan's self could not bilk;
A spirited cross of romantic and But then, as my boy says, "What right
That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys,
For the goose of To-day still is Mem- As I sat musing what to say,
And yet who would change the old dream for new treasure?
Make not youth's sourest grapes the best wine of our life?
Need he reckon his date by the Almanac's
Who is twenty life-long in the eyes of his wife?
And how my verse to number, Some elf in play passed by that way, And sank my lids in slumber; And on my sleep a vision stole,
Which I will put in metre, Of Burns's soul at the wicket-hole
Where sits the good Saint Peter.
The saint, methought, had left his post That day to Holy Willie,
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