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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,

nothing

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

seas

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

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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,

and

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

us

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?

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away,

And no great harm, unless at grave expense

Of what needs edge of proof, the moral

sense;

For man or race is on the downward

path

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way

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;

wrath,

And there's a subtle influence that

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Now that to steal by law is grown an art,

Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart,

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And 'slightly irregular" dilutes the shame

Of what had once a somewhat blunter

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stones?

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With choker white, wherein no cynic We called it our Eden, that small patent

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baker,

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Years are creditors Sheridan's self could not bilk;

A spirited cross of romantic and But then, as my boy says, "What right

Ages

grand,

has a fullah

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That we missed them makes Helens of plain Ann Elizys,

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IV.

For the goose of To-day still is Mem- As I sat musing what to say,

ory's swan.

VII.

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

measure

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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