THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 QUORSUM? 
 
 THE CRY OF HUMAN SUFFERING 
 
 ^ ^ocm 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK W. RAGG, M.A. 
 
 VICAR OF MASWORTH 
 FORMERLY OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
 LonHon 
 
 RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL & CO. 
 
 1894
 
 PR ^ 
 
 Co 
 THE LADY ROTHSCHILD 
 
 AND 
 
 THE HON. ALFRED AND MRS. TALBOT 
 
 YOU WHO HAVE ' KNOWN MY SOUL IN ADVERSITY ' 
 
 ADD THIS 
 
 TO MY MANY REASONS FOR AFFECTION AND ESTEEM 
 
 THAT YOU PERMIT ME 
 
 THE HONOUR OF DEDICATING TO YOU 
 
 THIS BOOK 
 
 Frederick. W. Ragg 
 
 Qi^-Lfe?i
 
 PREFACE 
 
 '\1 7HEREF0RE?' the question asked by 
 ' Reason, after the heart in anguish wakes 
 from its first dumbness, is followed by ' Where- 
 unto ? ' a question that if less passionate is perhaps 
 reiterated more. The answer to both questions 
 is given by a Voice that utters from the dark 
 something as in an unknown tongue the meaning 
 of which we can guess at only, but cannot fully 
 know. Ever since man's first rude cogitations in 
 Philosophy these questions have sought but have 
 not found a clear reply, nor does there seem in our 
 present limits of existence a likelihood of answer 
 that we can fully understand ; though, as is the 
 case with Science, it may very well be possible to 
 obtain approximations nearer and nearer to the 
 meaning of that tongue unknown. 
 
 But our emotions as well as our Reason have 
 their own way of asking these supreme questions,
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 and of seeking answer to them. And our emotions 
 have contact with Nature different from Reason's 
 and more mysterious, but not the less real con- 
 tact. And so have also Instinct and Belief. 
 To examine the mystery of the meaning and 
 destiny of human suffering as if it were a matter 
 of Intellectual Cognition only, and with Reason 
 only as the means of search, is surely like 
 sailing in search of a far polar strand with in- 
 sufficient supplies, and with means effectual only 
 for warmer seas, and not for the one long alternation 
 of day and night. When at the very best we can 
 gain only partial glimpses of the shore we seek, 
 it must be a mistake to leave behind what may 
 give aid where Reason fails — human instinct, 
 emotions, faith. Whatever may have been the 
 origin of these, they have their point to press. 
 Man is not Intellect only, man is more. 
 
 Where arguments appear in the succeeding 
 pages I do not put them forward as claiming to 
 be final : few arguments probably can have such 
 claim. But I intend them to speak with cogency 
 those thoughts which the heart's hunger feels as 
 pangs, and to speak them in the way in which
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 they present themselves to Foesy. To Philosophy 
 they come in somewhat different garb. The 
 characters pourtrayed will as I trust be found 
 modelled with reference to the truth of natural 
 form, but yet their clay I also trust has felt the 
 impress of the Ideality which ennobles fiction as 
 it ennobles sculpture; Ideality which only consents 
 to give shape to evil in so far as it is needed to 
 bring out or to bring forth good ; scorning as she 
 does to mould the unregenerate mud of the worst 
 human passions into shapes whose repulsiveness 
 no trickery of garb improves, no attitude ever 
 dignifies, and no large mouthing of tragic or 
 heroic mask can make exalted ; and then to 
 leave them for one only apparent purpose — the 
 exciting of a vulgar stare.
 
 TTia-Td . . . -payfidT(i)v eXey^o^ ov [iXiTTOjikviav. 
 Heb. xi. I.
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 LOVE grief and love and grief and love and grief, 
 -J The fugue that through the changeful lives of men 
 In all the generations ceaseless rings, 
 And raises up to heaven its complex chords, 
 Not to one time, nor to one melody set. 
 But wrought in millioned changeful staves and keys 
 To diapason like a voice of storm ; 
 A diapason which perhaps afar 
 
 May, entering some new medium's marge, be turned, 
 Through its refractive change of beat or note. 
 To one long harmony in which despair 
 Assumes the timbre hope, and sorrow joy. 
 
 Love grief and love and grief and love and grief — 
 The fugue that 7nay to other strain be changed. 
 Nay, ivill be changed — as held the faith of Him 
 Whose faith endured the bitterest assault 
 Of all that goads the hearts of men to grief — 
 And changing melt, as clouds melt bathed in light, 
 To love and joy and love and joy and love ; 
 Though it hereafter change to mellowed strain 
 
 B
 
 2 Quorsinn ? 
 
 Of triumph in the dawn of grander day, 
 It now rolls on its ceaseless notes, that throng 
 In roar which stuns the reason seeking cause. 
 That seeks in utter dark without the lamp 
 Wherewith the hand of faith by glimmer pale 
 Lights the uncertain path to guide her feet, 
 Else wandering useless in the dark and roar — 
 
 Rolls slow in minor movement of lament : 
 Grief love and grief and love and grief and love.
 
 THE WORK OF STORM 
 
 IT was the calm of summer afternoon ; 
 And pine and fir unto the sleepy breeze, 
 ^^^lich scarce their presence noted, offerings made 
 Of odours, and the slumber-laden turf 
 Lay dreaming in the light to murmured song. 
 Wherewith the cicala filled its stirless dream ; 
 Save where the forest dimness covered all. 
 Even in full light with never lifted shade : 
 Therein the long blade, scattered here and there 
 In solitude, reached upwards seeking light. 
 And thin through effort bent its weak length down, 
 Enforced to ponder on the strewed remains 
 Which years had showered from branches of the pines, 
 To moulder in the sloth of long decay ; 
 But scarce a breath was fluttered to the blade 
 To stir a thrill along its quivering length. 
 
 Along the pathway on the mountain side 
 Strolled, wandering slow, four friends who late had left
 
 4 Quorsuin ? 
 
 The labour-heavy air of dranta's banks 
 To seek new vigour near the Alpine snows. 
 Two led the way, but waited when at times 
 They found the others far behind, who stayed, 
 In frequent halt and frequent lingering, kept 
 By form of plant and structure, that to them 
 Were new. Of these was one to natural lore 
 Devote, to whom each plant of aspect new 
 Seemed almost pleading for his watchful eye 
 To turn upon it and to note its kind ; 
 The other as companion to his gaze 
 Beside him lingered, caring not for name. 
 Nor class, but caught by form and hue alone — 
 His heart's love poesy, and old romaunt. 
 And history of the long passed years, and art : 
 The brush, and also that which shapes the stone 
 To brow of thought and limb of strength, and lip 
 Of love restrained and dignity of calm, 
 Hight Runimont. Pale prophecies his face 
 Of future furrows showed in imprints dim, 
 That came before their rightful time of claim. 
 
 Slow upwards crept the way that to the four 
 At every turn and every step revealed 
 Some interest new, some ever fresh delight. 
 And even the heated air, to those whose wont 
 Was in a heavier clime, with freshness breathed, 
 Though brooding 'neath a burden heavy, slow,
 
 TJie \Vo7-k of Stonn. 
 
 That weighed upon the slumberous firs and weighed 
 Where sunlight glowed upon the heated rock, 
 On which the pensive harebell lower drooped 
 Than wont, and weary seemed the Alpine rose. 
 And even the fern which in the dim recess 
 Of hollow rock had nestled feebly hung 
 As hangs a loosened limb, hid not from heat 
 Though hidden from the open blaze of light. 
 
 Near where the path, from under shade of fir, 
 Came out to sunshine at the forest's verge 
 It turned a jutting crag, and wandered round 
 To track a hollow where the waters fell. 
 And spent their scattered mist to dower a rock 
 With sweet festoons of moss and graceful ferns, 
 And o 'er the rock there rose a mountain-birch 
 White-gleaming 'neath the dark of shadowing pine. 
 
 Here stood three sisters, listening as they stood 
 To the low music of the dripping fall, 
 And gazing on the sweet complexity 
 Of light and shade and lichen hue of dove 
 And orange, and the green of moss and fern 
 And blushing white of pine stem mounting up. 
 And grey of birch. Adream was Runimont ; 
 For that seemed all a dream through which he trod. 
 And only vision of his dreaming thought 
 Seemed those three sisters at the first, and part
 
 6 Quorsian ? 
 
 Of that dissolving dream through which he moved : 
 But when, in rearward of his friciHl, he passed 
 And met the eyes of her who hindmost stood, 
 Before her gaze had time to turn away, 
 A thrill from something in that maiden's eyes, 
 He knew not what, broke up his mood of dream 
 And made his heart with new surprise vibrate, 
 That caused him when some few steps on to turn — 
 Scarce knowing that he turned — and gaze intent 
 Until the winding pathway brought her face 
 Sidelong to his, though parted by the stream 
 And her retreating steps. Then moving on 
 He seemed as moving onwards from himself, 
 With steps like steps of one who moves in pain. 
 
 He saw her and he loved her. Face and form 
 Were hers that to the throbbings of his heart 
 Spake with the voice with which a sea-nymph's form 
 Amid the dream of waters spake of old, 
 When eyes peered wondering into azure depths 
 Of the Hellenic sea, and they who saw 
 Or thought they saw the beauty-radiant shapes, 
 Sought for the cause in parentage divine. 
 
 The voice a moment seemed to stun the throbs 
 To which it spake, and stun the very beat 
 Of his astonished heart, and then arose 
 Its rushing pulse to tumult throbbing fierce
 
 The Work of Storm. 
 
 That shook him through. And then a shiver passed, 
 
 And desolation, freezing all his soul. 
 
 He stood, and looking back again he saw 
 
 That form beneath the fir-shades pass from view, 
 
 And all the cicala song was ' lost ' and ' lost ' 
 
 And ' lost ' the rising sigh of breeze scarce breathed, 
 
 And voice of mountain stream the thunder ' lost ' ; 
 
 Shadow appeared to chill the very sun 
 
 Into whose blaze from out the shade he came. 
 
 And all the past by sudden gap fell far 
 
 To distant dimness. Gazing at the firs — 
 
 The unresponding firs— that gave no more 
 
 The consolation of one shadowy glimpse 
 
 Of her for whom his heart was uttering cry, 
 
 He stood — till hearing from afar the call 
 
 With which his distant friends his presence claimed, 
 
 He turned, like one asudden roused from sleep, 
 
 To join the group. 
 
 And now they passed the zone 
 Where the vain essays of the struggling woods 
 Advanced their ranks of stunted pioneers. 
 That stood, in hoary lichen tresses, stretched 
 As seeking with averted face for life 
 By bending from the wonted path of storms. 
 
 Here fell a foaming torrent, bridged across 
 By trunk of pine, rough-hewed to take the foot. 
 And on the hither and the further side
 
 8 Quorsum ? 
 
 Rock-guarded, while above the rock arose 
 The frontmost twain of pioneers, which, white 
 In skeleton rigidity of death. 
 Stood as memorials of themselves, and gleamed 
 In ghastly smile beneath the sunlight pale. 
 
 Past these the way led on, and past a crag 
 Whose brow bent forwards from its resting mates 
 To gaze into the valley's distant depth, 
 And offered at its top a resting place 
 On which they sat to view the mighty scene. 
 
 Far down, by distance hushed to moveless white. 
 The track of rushing torrent here and there 
 Marked with its streak the valley's floor. A fringe 
 Of trees, but broken, lay along the edge 
 Where from that floor grey precipices rose, 
 And held, far up their height, ledge-seated firs. 
 The inaccessible home of mountain birds 
 That screamed their safe defiance down the rocks. 
 For high above the ledges rose the wall 
 Stained hoar and dark by watery veils that dripped 
 In ceaseless fall. Above the wall arose 
 Rocks lifting up in pride their nursling pines 
 Towards the heaven, and o'er these pine-dark heights 
 Rock-pastures. And above them and beyond. 
 Crowning the whole with distant smile of hope, 
 Summits of snow so still, so soft, so far,
 
 The Work of Storm. 9 
 
 They seemed like dream traced on the hue of heaven. 
 
 Upon the rock the friends reposed to gaze. 
 Their thoughts at first in wonder's silence bound, 
 Until the Science-lover, ready first 
 With word to help the struggling of his thoughts. 
 Found utterance. Belford was the name he bore. 
 
 'What distant story sleeps in yonder scene ; 
 But even in sleep reveals its wondrous past 
 To Reason's slow-deciphering scrutiny ! 
 
 ' The soil wherein those aged forests root 
 Is of the mould that was of yore a race 
 Of older forests, dispossessed by these 
 Through creeping conquest. And the vanished race 
 Through the same gradual victory had won 
 Their hold in older mould of older dead, 
 Of lineage older than their own. So back 
 Leads lineage unto lineage, till far off. 
 In the dim ages of the distant past, 
 They take us to the childhood of that cliff 
 In its young garb of lowly plant, unscarped 
 As yet to precipice and ravine that now 
 Its age reveals. And in that lowly garb, 
 Foot after foot upheaved above the sea, 
 It rose — creation of the tossing wave — 
 Laid on its mother-continent, that died
 
 10 QuorsuJii ? 
 
 In giving birlh and nursed on its dead breast 
 The child, and in the ages long before, 
 Itself was nursling on the ancient knees 
 On which it grew to age of motherhood. 
 
 ' The latest these of lineaged continents : 
 On which look down in snowy high disdain 
 Yon fragments of a lineage older far ; 
 Stern remnants of the shores that primal seas 
 Fashioned, and in tlicir slow retreat left bare, 
 When earth's relapsing bosom drew them off. 
 And then uncounted years those pristine shores 
 Stood up and grew to continents that raised 
 Their mountain bulk, till earth beneath the load 
 Shuddered with age-long shudder, and let down 
 The burden for the hunger of the seas, 
 That rose and gnawed her birthlings thus exposed, 
 And laid upon their tilted flanks the race 
 Of lineage new. Now stand those primal shores 
 Raised up anew, and keep their distant height 
 Above the aspiring of the newer brood. 
 And snow, like peaceful uniini)assioned age, 
 Wreathes to concealment all, or all luil all. 
 The tracks of bygone passion, grief, and pain. 
 And fiery trial of their distant past. 
 In frigid changelessness they dure and dure, 
 And yet that seeming changelessness is change. 
 And not immortal dower of moveless age.
 
 The Work of Storm. 1 1 
 
 Those outlines crawl from mood to mood with steps 
 
 ^^^lich have long centuries for interval : 
 
 The inmost workings of yon mass — its thoughts — 
 
 That are long torturings of stony dream, 
 
 Drag on perpetual embryo through slow growth 
 
 Unto a birth that is eternal-far, 
 
 And need unnumbered bridges for their path 
 
 From one step of its reasoning to the next, 
 
 Yet all the while, as with unwearied strength. 
 
 It butts the logic of the chattering storm 
 
 And meets the challenge of the fiery sun 
 
 With fact that must be conquered bit by bit, 
 
 And strives to guard from ravenous decay 
 
 The treasured shapelings of the far off eld, 
 
 ^Vhich it within its stedfast clasp enfolds.' 
 
 * But is it then a creeping toil of thought. 
 As of the labour of a sluggard brain?' 
 The voice of Wake arose when Belford ceased. 
 Wake, man of massive brow and raven hair, 
 And lip of easy strength and eye that danced 
 In light, respondent unto word of lip — 
 Philosophy and mind his heart's delight. 
 ' Or is it as it seems to me a force 
 That needs large room and minutes that are years 
 For its huge movement, like an ocean driven 
 Through the long channel of some caverned rock. 
 What seems to us in Nature's action slow
 
 12 Qiiorsiun? 
 
 Is large, not sluggard : what intcrminate : 
 
 Not feeble movement but the march of strength, 
 
 Secure in progress. Cireater is the power 
 
 That dures and dures and dures, unspent through all, 
 
 'Hum thai which in some thunderous moment's roar, 
 
 Spendthrifts its all and spends itself in death.' 
 
 ' True words you speak, but only partly true ' — 
 Thus Flaxton took the argument in turn, 
 A man to whom the mathematic skill 
 Of problem was a charm, whose eye from mood 
 Of thought scarce ever melted : lost it seemed 
 In gaze on problems looming from afar. 
 ' I'or Time is not the measure of a force, 
 l]ut Time and what within the time is wrought. 
 The mighty may be sudden as a rush, 
 The mighty may be slow as slowest crawl.' 
 
 ' But Time,' responded Wake, 'resolve me first 
 The meaning of that mystic concept Time, 
 That sometimes seems the page on which is writ 
 Creation's process, sometimes seems the mean 
 Aiul medium of reaction which affords 
 To every conscious and unconscious thing 
 Its movement's rate, and different unto each. 
 And sometimes seems a self-consistent thing. 
 The pulse of an eternal pendulum 
 Beating one stroke for all — resolve me Time.'
 
 The Work of Storm. 1 3 
 
 ' Nay, Wake, but leave such quest for other hours ; 
 Suffices now the writing on the page 
 That gives Creation's process,' Belford said, 
 ' Which is too vast, too complex, and too long 
 To offer chance to scrutinize the page 
 And mark its fabric. For its characters 
 Take all the observation of my thought. 
 And stare their undeciphered mysteries 
 Like words of scribes long ages dead, that wait 
 On ancient walls the unborn interpreter.' 
 
 And here they ceased, and Runimont no word 
 Had uttered, scarce a word had heard, his thoughts 
 Had wandered from the landscape, and beheld 
 The outlines of a maiden's face in front 
 Whose presence seemed, at distance, even so soon, 
 Of half a globe. And in the thrall of thought 
 Held bound, he listened, as it were to catch 
 The music of a voice as yet unheard. 
 
 Was that the roar of avalanche or voice 
 Of waking storm which on the stillness smote ? 
 To them, as new as was the scene, were new 
 The signs which curtain round the birth of storm 
 Among the mountains. All in vain the hour 
 Which they in leisured ease upon the crag 
 Had spent, had crowded signs before the eyes 
 That knew not how to read the portent given ;
 
 14 Quo r sum? 
 
 But now the roar, though uttered from afar 
 And low, enforced attention to its cause. 
 
 The air had grown from its pellucid calm 
 To visible, and languid in attempt 
 To hold the weight of the increasing murk, 
 And through the dimness which o'erveiled the snows 
 Upon the distant summits light poured thin 
 Infiltrating, and vapours, dragging low. 
 Began to dim the valleys' depth, and soon 
 Upon the crests behind the craggy seat 
 Came clouds that blotted out the yellow sun. 
 And rolled their thunder-threatening billows close 
 To wrap the stacks of stately rock and ridge 
 That intervalled the stacks. 
 
 Thus roused the friends 
 Rose to return, but hasted not at first. 
 Nor knew the need of haste. And half their way 
 Returning to the torrent-voiced ravine, 
 Where the dead pines no longer caught the sun, 
 Was yet untrod, when cloud, oblivion-like. 
 In front rolled down the hollows of the steep. 
 And wiped out all beyond from view. Awhile 
 Was stillness ; then a sigh titanic ran 
 Along the downward-driven clouds and leapt 
 The cliff and died. Then stillness came again, 
 And then some seconds more — and from the turf 
 And scrub and rock and stone and withered pine
 
 The Work of Storm. 15 
 
 Arose a wail low-noted, creeping, long ; 
 
 That smitten cried at stroke of clattering hail. 
 
 Then howl held howl in chase and swirl to swirl 
 Succeeding whirled its torrent vortices, 
 Of frozen drops that melted where they fell 
 Upon the mountain side, and swept in stream 
 The slope. And then anon the driven whirl 
 Of cloud was lit with streams of fire that leapt 
 From point to point and rock to rock, and brought 
 The crack of thunder shaking all the steep 
 With quiverings as of pain. 
 
 In ebbs of storm 
 The men pushed on ; its paroxysmal reels 
 Rolling around their blinded sight with force 
 That almost swept their footsteps from the path, 
 Made them to clutch at withered stump or bush 
 Or rock, or even to lie upon the path 
 Prone while the frenzy passed. At length they reached 
 The rock and twain of ghastly pines and fall, 
 And steep ravine which fierce-entreating storms 
 Of ages from the mountain's rocky breast 
 Had won as path to frantic cataract. 
 Here, foamless in its turbid mud, the wave 
 Beat the rough pine-bridge that in helpless dance 
 Sank, leapt, and sank. 
 
 But, as they neared it, came 
 A rush more swollen that above the rock.
 
 1 6 Quorsiitn ? 
 
 Whose hutting Iicld it, threw its bounding bulk, 
 And rolled it headlong down to depths unseen. 
 
 A moment ere from bafflement to plan 
 Their thoughts could turn, the men stood still. 
 
 The rush 
 Of waters wider than a strong man's leap 
 Ploughed the ravine far up as sight could reach, 
 And, some few yards below, the precipice 
 Stood upright o'er the valley's distant depth. 
 
 But almost ere the bafflement was past 
 The air was opened as with abysm of light, 
 Wherein the white dead pines above the crag 
 Seemed leaping wreathed around with torturing flame, 
 And on the ground the men in sudden fall 
 By thunder shock were thrown, unhurt save Wake, 
 Who for some moments silent lay, but rose 
 To greet with smile the faces looking down 
 Anxious upon him, and to plan with them 
 Return. * Lo liere return ' ! said Belford caught 
 By what at first seemed mocking their belief; 
 From rock to rock across the stream and jammed 
 Between opposing crevices one pine 
 Of those that fell was stretched. The hissing wave 
 Leapt striving u[) Init could not reach its bulk. — 
 A bridge — the storm's replacement of its spoil ! 
 And clambering o'er the rock which clamped the pine
 
 The Work of Storm. 17 
 
 They crawled by one and one in cautious haste 
 Across and reached their new-recovered path. 
 
 And soon the swift-retreating storm in front 
 Swept crosswise o'er the jutting ridge, and reached 
 The valley's further side and curdled dark 
 Upon their cliffs beyond, but o'er their path 
 Remained alone in sullen sobs that told 
 Of wrath unsatisfied, but yet allowed 
 Pursuance of an uneventful way. 
 
 At last the firs hung close about their path, 
 And through the league-long nave of gloomy trees, 
 Not now aroused to spread their trembling arms, 
 Moaning before the wind, but rustle-filled 
 With dripping drops, they hasted. Sobs at times 
 Passed through the trees and showered a thicker fall 
 And ceased, and left the branches drooping low. 
 And storm hung silent, grown to wreathing cloud 
 Shapeless and undefined — a stagnant grey 
 Of unrepentant murk. Yet even so 
 One sunbeam crept athwart the topmost trees 
 And fired the distant cliff; then slowly rose 
 And tinged the snow and clouds beyond the snow, — 
 Then let its slow regretful glory die. 
 
 What matters dying glory or the gloom 
 That shrouds it round ? Or even the distant gold 
 
 C
 
 I S Quorsinn ? 
 
 Seen and soon lost which spoke beyond the ga[) 
 Of caverned cloud a heaven and glowing sun ? 
 Just as it died they turned an angled wall 
 Of jutting rock. And Bel ford leading first 
 Uttered the indrawn sound of shar[) surprise, 
 Whereat the others looking forwards saw, 
 Beside a splintered fir, whose broken trunk 
 Blocked up the path a little distance on, 
 Two sisters bending anguished o'er a third 
 ^Vho lay beside them moveless. 
 
 As he looked 
 A clatter like the crash of grinding rock 
 Beat in the ears of Runiniont. His brain 
 A moment felt the sweep of dimness cross, 
 And staggering seized his limbs. The moment next 
 The voice within his heart was saying 'help' ! 
 And chased the staggering and the dimness forth, 
 The voice which sooner to the readier three 
 Had spoken, adding speed to speeding steps. 
 
 Help ! — but what help? No effort drew response 
 From that still form, and no returning pulse. 
 Not the least hindrance of the cold that crept 
 Stiffening the limbs replied with hope. AVhat help 
 But that which bore the dead and mourned with woe? 
 
 How fair the face that lay in livid death 
 Even though the glory of its eyes lay hid
 
 The Work of Storm. 19 
 
 In helpless shadow. Pencillings of love 
 And faith lay soft thereon, the silent tracks 
 Of whose high impress even in ruin charmed, 
 Hinting a past, as hints a stone inscribed 
 The history and the thoughts of elder time. 
 
 Who goes to listen to the living lips 
 Unto the keeping of her God consign 
 The dead ? Nay who refrains ? The hostel sent 
 Its host and guest ; and peasants thronged around 
 To whom the language of the rite was strange. 
 Sounds and not words — but yet did sympathy 
 Bestov/ a glimpse of meaning true though dim. 
 And those to whom the words were words that spoke 
 Recalling memories to crowd the note 
 With meaning, stood beside and heard the words 
 That seemed far-wandering from their native home. 
 
 And now above the grave the patient cross 
 Stands, emblem of the faith and hope of those 
 Who laid her there in her unbroken sleep. 
 Patient it stands and waits the expected sign 
 Which yet the unfulfilling years withhold.
 
 20 Quorsmn ? 
 
 Thereon the dawn that mounts to toil of day 
 Sheds its pale light, and from its figure throws 
 A shadow of half smile which touches not 
 The grave whose length is lit, like all the path 
 Of life from childhood seen, that gleams with hope. 
 
 But eve, who seeks afar in heaven her rest, 
 Throws from the cross the grave-long shadow laid 
 As shadow but of peace its whole length long. 
 And shadow but of peace the waning light 
 Of life throws sometimes o'er the past, its grave. 
 
 At morn faith-lit ; at evening sorrow-dark : 
 Speaks then the emblem of a hope that fails. 
 And at the bound of life forsakes its tale ? 
 Not so. It is the light that casts the shade. 
 The light which unenfeebled by the night 
 Travels in space afar beyond the night 
 To bring new dawn. And hope though chastened points 
 To newer dawn beyond the reach of death.
 
 II. 
 
 THOUGHT'S PROBLEM 
 
 DAY after day was dreary length of storm, 
 Xo gleam of sun nor glint of star nor smile 
 Of moon to break the clouded gloom of heaven ; 
 And only like the passing of a pang 
 An opened glimpse of mountain through the gloom. 
 And all the day and all the night swept on 
 The mountain winds, low shrieking in the chase 
 Of swarming drops of sleet and lagging cloud, 
 That crept for shelter from their ceaseless scourge 
 Round pinnacle and into dim recess 
 Of crevice that afforded short relief. 
 
 Besides the four the hostel's company 
 Was few. A priest, and one to whom were charm 
 Life's lowliest essays and that mystic realm 
 Their borderland between unlife and life. 
 And one whose skill availed to cross the firth 
 With iron road to take the rushing car ; 
 The four and these three all. The fifth day came,
 
 22 Quorsuvi ? 
 
 Enforcing, like its fellows, idle stay 
 
 Within the hostel, and the crawl of time 
 
 And ceaseless storm wrought friendships else unformed, 
 
 And loosed the lips to interchange of thought 
 
 And questionings after truth, which thus began : 
 
 Upon the blank of moving mist that swept 
 
 Before the casement Wake stood gazing long. 
 
 His thoughts were wanderers in the dark that holds 
 
 The meaning of existence and the scope 
 
 Of life of man. Across his view there passed, 
 
 Writ moving on the white of mist, the wrecks 
 
 Of moss and twig of fir by gust of wind 
 
 Propelled. And these he noted as he gazed. 
 
 But scarcely conscious of the things he .saw. 
 
 And spake aloud his thoughts, and did not know 
 
 He more than thought. Rut nil those dreary days. 
 
 And ever since the burial-hour, a face 
 
 Seemed gazing into his with pallid grief. 
 
 And through its leagues of distance looking close, 
 
 And broken wont and mood had voiced his thoughts. 
 
 'Are we no more than comrades of the moss, 
 At wanton torn by stroke of careless storm, 
 And drifted at its will ? And is it one 
 With riven rock and heart by anguish riven ? 
 And one with thought and that which has not thought ? 
 Is there for hope in midmost growth cut down 
 No solace more than that which waits the leaf,
 
 Though fs Problem. 23 
 
 Which, severed, needs no solace ? Can it be 
 That lives worn down by cares, that tread the heart 
 To hardness — lives whose trodden bareness yields 
 Not even the lowly produce of a weed, 
 End but in death's more barren wilderness ? 
 And lives there are that sorrow's winds have swept 
 To lie in mouldering waste, till nought remains 
 But framework stiff and hueless of the shape 
 Which was their early dower of seemliness — 
 Beyond the withered hope of faded leaf, 
 The skeletoned memorial of their past. 
 Have they no heritage ? And all the cries 
 Poured up in ceaseless roll through myriad years 
 By human hearts will then be notes to work 
 Some mighty harmony too great, too deep. 
 For aught that is not infinite to hear, 
 Yet are not unto that which hears and takes, 
 Notes claiming recompense for woe and pain ! ' 
 
 The murmur of his utterance reached the Priest, 
 Who near the window o'er a written page 
 Was bent. And at the first no meaning came 
 With murmur to his inattentive ear. 
 But soon the sound to meaning grew, the Priest 
 Looked up, and when Wake's thoughts to silence passed 
 From words he spoke. 
 
 ' A problem old is yours. 
 That from its cradle unto thought has clung,
 
 24 Qiwrsuin ? 
 
 And clings and looses not its hold ... to you 
 Comes it as visitant fresh, or does it seek 
 Familiar haunts amid your thoughts ? ' 
 
 And Wake, 
 Amazed to find a voice confront his thoughts, 
 Looked round and met the light of pale grey eyes 
 Upon him turned. But in the eyes a smile 
 Of kindness beamed, a beacon unto trust, 
 And waking from surprise he answered thus : 
 
 ' Not fresh indeed, but frequent visitant, 
 For in the tangles of the mazy path 
 Of seeming sequel and of seeming cause 
 In midst of which these helpless human hearts 
 Throb out their joys and griefs and wander lost ; 
 The purpose of whose being and whose death 
 Seems undiscoverable, do my thoughts 
 Search exit and find bafflement alone. 
 I lift the lamp of theory on the maze. 
 Or feign, to weave the stray appearances 
 Into one thought, some principle or law : 
 I find the weaving but a sandy web, 
 That mocks me with its dust and no sure clue 
 To track a plan that, complex, still were plan.' 
 
 And then a moment's shyness and the dawn 
 Of what was scarce a blush o'erspread his face, 
 And (juicker somewhat flowed the words he spake.
 
 TJiouzht's Problem. 25 
 
 '<b 
 
 ' And haps like that a week agone which cast 
 
 The sudden weight of aimless suffering 
 
 As bolt to sink the bark of natural joy, 
 
 Bring back the questioning as a taunt of pain 
 
 That stings the feeble hopelessness the more, 
 
 But till your words surprised me, unaware 
 
 Was I my thoughts had voiced themselves to speak.' 
 
 ' But is there other gate,' the Priest replied, 
 ' Than bafflement for Reason seeking way 
 In that which lies beyond the Reason's ken ? 
 What more is man amid the whole of things. 
 What more the reason and the mind of man 
 Than is the snail amid the complex folds 
 Of mountain mass, of which its feeble path 
 Tracks out some tiny fragment crawling slow ? 
 And deem you man can see what place is held 
 In Nature by occurring incidents, 
 More easily than the feeble snail can trace 
 With vision horn-enthroned the mountain form ? 
 Naught less than view omniscient can embrace 
 So vast a whole ; and only mind whose grasp 
 Is equal to omniscience form a plan 
 To mate the vastness of the mighty whole.' 
 
 ' This last I hold as true,' was Wake's reply, 
 ' But in its slimy contact with the ground 
 The snail pursues a prostrate path with eyes
 
 26 Qnorsuvi ? 
 
 'Vo which their vantage horn-enthroned can give 
 
 No view but tactual. Reason soars ; and man, 
 
 By her uphfted, leaves sensation's soil 
 
 And looks upon the girdling Infinite. 
 
 And if there be to Nature's whole a plan, 
 
 And if there be a Reason which has planned, 
 
 And we in that High Reason have but share 
 
 Smaller than small : or if the course of things 
 
 Have method such that Reason can translate 
 
 That method into language of her own, 
 
 As from her own not too remote to give 
 
 Interpretation, we meseems might gain 
 
 Some glimmering of the plan, and hold some hope 
 
 To find an exit from the labyrinth 
 
 Closed else to exit. Seen afar there seems, 
 
 When search in realms inanimate is made, 
 
 A gate and way that leads unto the gate, 
 
 But when the search is turned to seek the law 
 
 That rules the throng of life, aghast we meet 
 
 A spectre fronting that but flaunts the roll 
 
 Of hope and life and purpose unfulfilled.' 
 
 ' 'Tis Reason and Feelings jointly argue thus,' 
 So spake the Priest. ' Reason, it seems to me, 
 Can in its own domain but thus conclude : — 
 " What ends has in some kind fulfilled its course," 
 But then if Reason in her own domain 
 Can soar — thoui^h rather I should term it climb,
 
 Thought's Problem. 27 
 
 A volant climb with hold upon the steeps — 
 
 Still when she searches regions not her own, 
 
 With her own powers alone of search, she gropes ; 
 
 She sees but part, and takes the part for all. 
 
 And in that realm where you would have her search, 
 
 'Tis only when she mounts the chariot-fire 
 
 Of faith and gazes thence with vision wide, 
 
 That she beholds in just relationship 
 
 The separate portions of the outline vast. 
 
 ' The Feelings leading Reason point to lives 
 In numberless multitudes as unfulfilled ; 
 But from that vantage point which Faith affords, 
 O'er widened circle of fulfilment's rim 
 She looks and sees the far-off light that shows 
 How immatureness of a Pisgah death 
 Exceeds attainment of a Promised Land.' 
 
 But Wake, unsatisfied, made answer thus : — 
 ' Nay surely every tract is Reason's own 
 And doth not Reason, all unaided, grasp 
 The widest view of things ? In careful path 
 To search the tracts of natural working close. 
 Though she from close may make her scrutinous gaze, 
 It is her native way where-through to gain 
 The view of wide-embracing law. A bridge 
 She thus constructs to reach the far unknown 
 By step and step, assured of all the way,
 
 28 Quorsuni f 
 
 And builds colossal fabrics that, in strength 
 Secure, attest the triumph of her toil.' 
 
 ' But if she do uplift such pathway high,' 
 The Priest replied, ' in realms of Natural lore, 
 The cantilevers of her progress rise 
 From piers whose base is in unfathomed sea, 
 In depths that save to Faith are unexplored ; 
 For what men place whereon to lay the pile. 
 And name assumptions, have the name as sheath. 
 But in their inmost structure are Belief 
 Or are the closest kindred of Belief.' 
 
 At this the man of Science with no word 
 Looked up and steadfast gazed upon the Priest, 
 But listened to the argument thenceforth. 
 
 ' There is such basement,' thus resumed the Priest, 
 ' In Science even for that which, most secure. 
 Is steadied unto fact's accomplishment. 
 And in the problem-depth of life and mind 
 It is not strange that there is need no less 
 Of such a basement. But therein the hopes 
 And agonies of men, and broken lives. 
 Impelled, as Reason is, to seek wide law; 
 Impelled, as also Reason is, to lay 
 Their base on dark assumptions unbeheld : 
 Show not it may be proof which counts as proof
 
 Thought's Problem. 29 
 
 At Reason's bar, but force upon the mind 
 
 Such weighty evidence as of Belief 
 
 Builds a conviction adamantine-strong, 
 
 As Reason builds her fabrics on such base ; 
 
 And that which unto Reason's self is proof, 
 
 Is not Belief's, nor is Belief of her, 
 
 But, both supreme within their rightful realms, 
 
 Allied they hold an unimperilled sway : 
 
 But if you disenthrone Belief you drag 
 
 The war of ruin into Reason's realm. 
 
 And wreck the homes and lands of human Hope. 
 
 ' And though we know not what is unfulfilled, 
 Nor what has had fulfilment as in part. 
 It is methinks at best a part alone 
 That is fulfilled. For even the fullest life 
 Points only on. Still more points on the life 
 Whose sole fulfilment here has been of pain. 
 And if conjecture only gives such hope — 
 Conjecture — that can give no settled shape 
 Of plan, nor hint of knowledge as secure, 
 This is but as it is with Natural things. 
 Each bud is dowered with embryo dower that shapes 
 Its future, though to us the dower of one 
 Be indistinguishable from the dower 
 Of other, till sufficient length of growth 
 Reveals its separateness of destiny.
 
 30 Qnorsutn ? 
 
 'The lives of those whose uncomplaining steps 
 Went downward from one suflTering to a worse, 
 With scarce a smile of aught that seemed like love 
 To light the shadow of their gloom of life, 
 And scarce a clasp of aught that bore the limbs 
 Of pity, whilst their own hearts' altar-fire 
 Of self-renunciation sent abroad 
 Its glow of generous feeling and its light 
 Of pardon for their torturers : these speak 
 Claim for belief in something more beyond 
 To add fulfilment to the lives which thus. 
 Except in suffering, were unfulfilled. 
 A voice of claim that mounts to thunderous roar. 
 When after comes the cry of countless crowds 
 Crushed by the foot of human cruelty 
 With iron tread — not willing martyrs these. 
 For cause that lights the heart to meet its fate, 
 But simple sharers in the woe passed down 
 By wailing generations as their dower. 
 
 ' Science to seek revealment of a law 
 Adds fact and fact and groups to large array. 
 And from the array draws forth her argument : 
 Thus group, nay, mass all instances of woe 
 To their colossal crowd — bewilderment 
 Is all that Reason, by herself, can give 
 As answer to the mystery which presents 
 Such awful front. But therewith comes a pain.
 
 Thoughfs Problem. 31 
 
 A formless voiced conviction uttering cry, 
 
 That has no rest until Belief comes forth 
 
 To paint the life of man with destiny 
 
 In further hope when this life's sun is set ; 
 
 And leaning on Belief the fainting heart 
 
 Of Reason gains a strength to face despair. 
 
 Assumption and assumption only — thus 
 
 You term that strange conviction. And I grant 
 
 The name. It is assumption chosen to build 
 
 The only fabric fitted to the need — 
 
 What other way does Science tread but this ? '
 
 THE PRIEST'S TALE 
 
 BUT hear a tale of sorrow that may give 
 Pattern of all. Perchance it seems at first 
 A tale that might outsadden even the sad — 
 It has a thousand and a thousand mates. 
 
 ' There lived a maiden beautiful in form, 
 Whom in the woman's fulness of her growth, 
 The rapture of a passion to relieve 
 The sufferer's pain led often forth to tend 
 The helpless sick. It seemed that worst disease 
 And loathsomest was like a voice that said 
 Within her " Come," and with the virgin-thrill 
 Of pure maternal love she soothed their pain. 
 And when upon her native land the storm 
 Of war with licavy throng of sequent woes 
 Broke — then she sought the camp and tended there. 
 And ever, where she nursed, an angel's face 
 Seemed present to the gaze of wounded men 
 Half swooning in their pain ; an angel's hand
 
 TJie Priest's Tale. ^l 
 
 Seemed touching them in dream, and in her words 
 Flowed what was Hke communicated strength 
 To strengthless hearts. The dying left a smile 
 To live upon the silence of his face 
 If he but held her fingers as he died ; 
 And whoso, in the hour when fever led 
 Feelings and thoughts tumultuous in revolt, 
 Met the command of her calm gaze and lip, 
 In him the frighted heart of Reason checked 
 The panic of its pulses for awhile, 
 And held deUrium's raving tightly back. 
 
 ' There was a day when dubious battle dragged 
 Noonwards its desultory length of fight. 
 And, seizing quick advantage on one wing 
 Found isolate in stress of war, the foe 
 Poured through masked movements unexpected storm. 
 So well that avalanche of iron death 
 Was channelled on its unsuspecting aim. 
 That from the squadron's head in rapid swathe 
 Some moments swept the leaders down in death 
 Save one — and he the youngest — all but boy. 
 But calm and penetration seemed to well 
 Even like clear intuition in his brain. 
 And give its outward sign of head erect 
 Asudden, and of eye whose rapid glance 
 Was firm in keenness. One clear path he saw 
 To save disaster ; onward sweep to gain 
 
 D
 
 34 Quorsjun ? 
 
 Delay for others, death for him and his. 
 
 And lifting up the flag he pointed on 
 
 And crying " Forwards ! " urged his champing steed. 
 
 ' His squadron read his thought. A moment more 
 The fire of exaltation made each face 
 An altar for its burning ; self-devote, 
 With triumph as of victory from their throats 
 Pealing, the squadron swept as foaming wave 
 Advances from the ocean's open deep 
 Storm-driven to crash on some low cliff. A roar 
 Of guns responsive drowned the shout. The flag 
 Held forwards staggered in the staggering hold 
 Of him who led — but even as he fell 
 He gathered all his strength to stay his fall — 
 'Twas like the upward rush of flickering flame 
 At dying — closed and wordless \vere his lips. 
 But face towards his men he stretched his arm 
 And pointed onwards with the flag — then sank. 
 The fierceness of a silence sterner still 
 Than shout of self-devotion held the ranks, 
 All other promptings from their stormy hearts 
 Were driven by anger forth, their fury broke 
 Upon the astonished foe in rush unchecked 
 Even by the murderous rain of bolts that struck 
 Their path and strewed it thickly with their dead. 
 
 ' Palsy and fear broke down the enemy's aim
 
 T]ic Priesfs Tale. 35 
 
 And shook their strength, and where but now the gun 
 Roared out were left the groans of wounded men 
 And silence of the dead. The charge had turned 
 The tide of battle. Reining in to wait 
 Advancing help and make pursuit secure 
 The squadron halted, and behind them rose, 
 Like voice of roaring waters, cheers that spoke 
 The coming of their comrades, and the pride 
 Of loud applause — one third alone could hear — 
 Death-deaf in blood the rest o'er whom it rolled. 
 
 ' The ensign lay, his grasp upon the flag. 
 Moveless but breathing still ; and tender hands 
 Conveyed him to the place where each his turn 
 The wounded waited for the surgeon's aid. 
 And seeing him proud lips and prouder hearts 
 Refused attendance till his swooning frame 
 Was wreathed in coil of bandage o'er the wound. 
 
 ' Slow to his brain crept dim sensation back 
 And when his feeble thought assuming strength 
 Gave meaning to the picture which his eyes 
 Beheld, but only meaningless before, 
 He saw with wonder steahng through his soul 
 That maiden-offering of untiring watch 
 And patient care and ever ready help — 
 Symbols of selfless conquest of the heart, 
 And turning of its weakness into strength
 
 ^6 Qitorsjnn f 
 
 To bear the toil whose loathsomeness by glow 
 
 Of pure devotion's noble flame was lit, 
 
 Even to the clothing of its hideousness 
 
 In l)iight surprise of interest. Just as eve 
 
 Pours gently on some shapeless mass its veil 
 
 Of tender light, and remedies defect 
 
 Or tortured shape with hallowedness of glow. 
 
 ' And day succeeding day revealed the scene 
 Unchanged, and wonder grew to love whose strength 
 Captured the forces of his heart. 
 
 The maid 
 Received, not otherwise than as the wont 
 Of grateful thought, at first the signs of love. 
 But when themselves her shrinking feelings knew 
 In presence of the gaze of love, her heart 
 Sent forth its hurrying force to mount the guard 
 Of blush upon her face, then gave the sign 
 Which meant recall, and left the face as pale 
 As if it were ungarrisoned of life. 
 
 ' I'ut not a word he spake of love nor breathed 
 His longing nor made effort that should woo ; 
 For duty gazed in every glance she gave 
 And spake in every utterance of her voice 
 And said " Forbear ... is it a time to woo ? 
 Thy country hath its need of her and thee."
 
 The Priest's Tale. 37 
 
 ' But, from the moment when she felt the stir 
 Of that new consciousness, a thrill kept pale 
 Her face and marked more firmly on her lip 
 The line of clear resolve and kept her eye 
 Restrained and cold. And he, when first he saw, 
 Felt fear and doubt in writhing struggle smite. 
 As on some perpendicular wall of rock 
 The howling waters take their rushing aim 
 And falling back w-rithe on their rising selves : 
 But sternly does the rock confront with calm 
 That ceaseless hounding. So with purpose fixed 
 His will the strife confronted. 
 
 And the hour 
 Of parting came, and when that hour was come, 
 Was but a moment's falter in her tone, 
 A moment's anguish kindled in her eye. 
 And but a moment's putting forth of hand 
 To clasp, with consequence of quick recall, 
 A moment's pallor ; but from these he gained 
 A strength which made a fortress of his heart 
 And high resolve of love. Before that hour 
 His country claimed his duty, w'hich now rose 
 In resurrection-strength new-dowered with life 
 As duty to his country and to her. 
 
 ' Long time unequal to the invader's strength. 
 Resource and valour struggling stedfast on 
 Battled in vain. From camp to leaguered town
 
 38 Quorsuvi ? 
 
 The ranks in sullen slow retreat were led. 
 Therein, in scorn to yield, they held at bay 
 Their insult-breathing foe, and all the crash 
 And wreck of deadly bolt with patience faced. 
 Awaiting long-delayed relief, and bore 
 The pangs that come with hunger's fierce blockade, 
 Till man and man, as famine struck them down, 
 Smiled in the confidence of noble death 
 Bequeathing to the comrades whom they left 
 The hope of victory by enduring on. 
 
 ' But in a night whose darkness held a dark 
 That passed its natural dark came on the end. 
 Famine made incomplete the sentry's ring ; 
 For here and there, with arms in hand, the dead 
 Was watch. And from the city traitors passed 
 A sentry's silent corpse, and gave the foe 
 The secret signal where their rush unchecked 
 Could carry bloodless the unguarded wall — 
 
 * A dark of horrors passing natural dark ; 
 For shriek of flying woman and the groan 
 And gurgle of the dying gave first note 
 Of treachery and assault. 
 
 Midnight . . . and fear . . . 
 Midnight . . . and cry of horror, shame, and pain, 
 Spreading from home to home, and street to street, 
 And even church to church.
 
 The Priesfs Tale. 39 
 
 Midnight . . . and laugh . . . 
 And yell that rose from savage throats of men, 
 Mad in the growing thirst of horrid deed, 
 Spreading from home to home and street to street, 
 And even church to church, where deeds of crime 
 Profaned the very altar steeped in blood. 
 
 ' Midnight . . . and shriek of pain and yelling laugh 
 That closed around the wards where shrunken forms 
 Watched o'er the sick. The maiden at their head. 
 Whose will was struggling gaunt with clasp impaired 
 To master all the unreadiness of sloth, 
 That crept with famine's pallid blood through Umb 
 And thought ; and wounded men their helpless fear 
 Gasped forth at sound of that ill-omened roar. 
 But in such hour throned queen by calm o'er fear 
 She kept their panic bound. 
 
 ]\Iidnight . . . and yell . , . 
 A sea of howls that through the hall below 
 With sudden loudness broke and drowned the crash 
 Of shattered doors, and clamoured up the stairs. 
 And faces lit with murder-glare burst in 
 Upon the ward, agape in midmost yell ; 
 But lip and lip grew still of them abashed 
 At sudden sight of nurse and wounded men, 
 Till on the face of one a baleful smile 
 Revealed some purpose dawning on his thought 
 That lit the fierce brutality within ;
 
 40 Quorsuni f 
 
 He sheathed his sword, and stepping forth he seized 
 And strove to whirl tliat maid in dance around, 
 And ' dance ' and ' dance ' the yelHng crew cried out, 
 And started in pursuit of maids that shrank 
 Before the red pollution of their touch. 
 
 'She shrank not, but with foot upon the floor 
 Firm-driven, the eagle's greatness of disdain 
 Lighting her eyes, she stood. Her face turned front 
 Like pale Athene's calm magnificence 
 Of marble scorn upon the hands reached out 
 To grasp her waist, which, when they touched, the swell 
 Of indignation rolled the feebleness 
 Of famine back beneath its risen flood, 
 And on his face her folded fist smote full 
 A blow that checked at first, then after roused 
 His madness unto more. The oath which left 
 His lips made all tlic li[)s of wounded men 
 That heard shriek on him all their helpless wrath ; 
 Forgetful of their weakness some essayed 
 To rise in her defence, and opened thus 
 Their wounds anew, and fell in faintness back ; 
 And one, his sword arm gone, arose, and took 
 In his left hr.nd a crucifix, and neared 
 With tottering steps of feebleness, and held 
 The emblem up before the ruffian's face 
 Who smote the crucifix, and uttered curse 
 On that and on the Christ, and on the hand
 
 The Priesfs Tale. 41 
 
 That held, and keeping grasp upon the maid 
 
 He drew his sword, and to its shoulder short 
 
 Sawed the arm through which, when the crucifix 
 
 Was forced from out his grasp, the wounded man 
 
 Had placed as barrier about the maid. 
 
 Then, from the pallets of the wounded shrieked. 
 
 Rose curse on curse of those that could not aid 
 
 And saw his fiendish purpose unrestrained, 
 
 And shrieks began from lips whose shrieks began 
 
 As of the sane, but closed in idiocy ; 
 
 And some in that vain cry gasped out their last. 
 
 ' Calm in the uproar like the voice of doom 
 The near cathedral's bell pealed slowly, one, 
 Scarce heard, and heard, scarce noted in that room 
 Amid the shrieks. But ere the bell-clang died 
 The din of clattering feet came through the door, 
 And when the clang grew silent all the room 
 Except for maniac groans low-voiced, was still ; 
 And the dead ruffians strewed the court below. 
 
 ' For voice of doom had changed the course of war. 
 The dark which cast on massacre its mask 
 Had thrown a covering on approach of friends 
 That found the enemy on rapine bent 
 Unwary. From the captured camp their rush 
 Of quick surprise tracked up the path of blood, 
 And cry and shriek and wanton fire begun
 
 42 QiiorsHui 7 
 
 Were guides for those who slew in act itself 
 
 Of pillage, pillager ; and rising moon 
 
 Gave its pale light to work complete success. 
 
 'And he whose heart presaged where he should find 
 The maid, had led to that cathedral square 
 And up into the ward his ready band. 
 
 ' They raised the maiden's helpless form, that stunned 
 Lay bleeding, placed her on a couch and wiped 
 The stains of blood, and watched the slow return 
 Of conscious thought, which came before they deemed 
 That consciousness was near. She looking up 
 Bewildered saw the ensign's face above 
 Fixing its anxious gaze upon her face, 
 And staring round for help to comprehend 
 Such seeming dream she met the signs that brought 
 Distraught remembrance of the horrors passed ; 
 And in dismay before one thought that heaped 
 Its terrors on her, will half lost its rein. 
 She sought in their denial of her fears 
 What piteous silence could not give. Her cry 
 Of sudden anguish, never stilled again 
 In ears of those who heard, broke forth. She turned 
 To him who stood beside, and flung her arms 
 Around his neck, and drew his face to hers 
 And kissed, and kissing held as one who drowns ; 
 Then loosed her clutch, and sank in swoon that woke,
 
 The Priesfs Tale. 43 
 
 But woke with Reason gone. She lived and pined, 
 And monthly sicklier grew, and in the hour 
 When that was born which came, in murmur spoke 
 The name of him she loved, and feebly groped 
 As one in darkness feeling lone — and died.'
 
 IV. 
 CHAOS OR PLAN? 
 
 BV this the listeners added one to one 
 Had grown in number, till the silence round 
 Showed all the room attentive. As the tale 
 Came to the sorrow of its end, a sound 
 Not sob nor word, nor yet by mean of word 
 Expressible ; a breath of moving pain 
 Escaped the lips of all the listeners. 
 
 * By one know all,' the Priest went on. ' The talc 
 
 In all its horror does not more than touch 
 
 The skirts of outrage crowded on its stage 
 
 By war — held secret back by hand of shame 
 
 From lip, but not from memory of those 
 
 That have beheld the scenes or mixed therein. 
 
 I who began, to end it as a priest, 
 
 A soldier's course have heard the howl of fright 
 
 When moving guns by scourge-lashed steeds were dragged 
 
 Across the wounded lying low in blood : 
 
 Have heard the wail of helpless men die down
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 45 
 
 In roar of flames : have heard — -I hear it still — 
 The cry of shrinking woman in the grasp 
 Of man outfiending in his deed the fiend : 
 Have heard the shriek of tortured child ring out 
 Amidst the blasphemies of the drunken sack, 
 And savage laughter raised to greet the pain : 
 Have seen such deeds as pale the blush of shame 
 And make belief to stagger smitten in pain. 
 
 ' If pain unrecompensed be justified : 
 More reason is to hold it justified, 
 Inflicted on those ready to inflict, 
 If immaturity of hastened death 
 Incompensate : — it should be so in those 
 Who hold for use the instruments of death. 
 But even therein the undeserving throng 
 Of victims in mid life cut down or left 
 With life-long grief or mutilated frame 
 Or stain of ineffaceable shame flings out 
 Such argument against the will that leads 
 Or blinks the leading of unrighteous lot — 
 If there be nought but present life of man — 
 As turns upon the heart and gores its way 
 To force conviction in, that something more. 
 Which death has power to hide but not annul, 
 Remains to give completion and redress 
 To life that unfulfilled is closed in woe.
 
 46 QuorsHvi f 
 
 Anil war owns only part of liuman pain 
 And only part of human cruelty 
 Endured but undeserved. 
 
 The argument 
 From these, from all, is more than Reason's own — 
 Is more than that her own domain can hold, 
 The wider-bedded rock is that which holds 
 Both Reason's soil and Instinct's whole domain. 
 
 ' Without the hope which this conviction brings 
 The fairest life of man is unfulfilled. 
 But with it that which, unfulfilled the most, 
 Cries out its unfulfilled necessity 
 As part of more fulfilment, even in part. 
 In falsehood of its seeming is fulfilled.' 
 
 But when he ended Runimont began. 
 ' But all the world, the world is full of woe. 
 And even with hope of compensation given 
 In some new life, in some far after world, 
 I cannot trace the meaning of its need. 
 There is, I know, a voice whose accents speak 
 The glory of endurance and resolve ; 
 And death with smile of rapture met by those 
 Whose martyred limbs are tortured for some cause, 
 Which they regard as truth, bears witness clear 
 To exaltation in career of pain 
 Resolved upon by noble thought and kept.
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 47 
 
 But fill the roll of martyrdom, and write 
 
 In that high volume noble wifehood's pain 
 
 That stainless shrinks, for duty and her child, 
 
 From even a wish that seems apostacy 
 
 To vows before the altar spoken and God ; 
 
 And enter to the lowest rank all claim 
 
 To suffering for some royal thought, and grant 
 
 That sequel of endurance in such sort 
 
 Is filled with exaltation and a heaven 
 
 In hallowing pureness and embrace of God — 
 
 Embrace too high for mortal save as pain 
 
 And kiss of death. And grant as somehow need 
 
 For such result, such anguish, still remains 
 
 The crowd of useless woes that throngs the earth, 
 
 Increased in some wise more by that which vaunts 
 
 Its path of progress — civilisation's self — 
 
 ^Vhose pleasures and whose mere necessities 
 
 Have bloodless murders for their ministrants 
 
 More crowded than the blood-low heaps of war. 
 
 The throng of woes, unheeded but unplanned, 
 
 Flung wanton in amongst the hearts of men, 
 
 And seeming for no clear redeeming end, 
 
 Is heaped to countless by the miseries 
 
 That cruelty with purposed blow inflicts. 
 
 And of such corn the harvest soil of earth 
 
 Seems to continual reaping over full.' 
 
 And here he ceased as in mid rush of word.
 
 48 Quorsuni f 
 
 lUit, as he ceased, began the Engineer, 
 A man to whom the toil of men and men 
 Themselves were instruments, a kindly man, 
 And much considerate of the lives whose days 
 Were spent in working out his schemes and will. 
 
 ' For every shadow there must be a light, 
 And there can be no misery but has joy 
 At hand, though in some garb at first unknown. 
 Endurance has its thrill you grant, if so, 
 Then woe has use. And even without regard 
 To compensation in some life to be. 
 Some glimmerings of its use methinks are clear ; 
 Without the spur with which it taunts the heart 
 Good were not brought from evil, nor from lack 
 Sufficiency ; discomfort wakens plan 
 And rouses thought, except for whose advance 
 Thus forced, man were even yet the chattering heir 
 Of mumbled cogitations not released 
 From swathing-bands of imbecility. 
 And i)ain is but discomfort's sterner mien. 
 And woe the sternest attitude of pain. 
 Thus where the earth gives promise, but gives up 
 Reluctant in tlic yielding, what she bears. 
 And toil and thought were needed to subdue 
 Her stubborn mood, has man to higher power 
 Of mind progressed through effort need enforced. 
 Nor other where the challenge of a path
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 49 
 
 That now is ease and now to save from death 
 And loss needs all resource of ready brain 
 Is offered by the restless-tempered sea. 
 And ever where is need of plan and scheme 
 To raise or keep a home that love with love 
 May share, the sense of deprivation wakes 
 The understanding to its exigence 
 And spurs its path. 
 
 But, you will say, reward 
 Follows not effort, with impartial step 
 And seems at limes as fickle as unjust — 
 I know it — but we are not dowered to know 
 Where fails the solid rock of certain claim 
 Beneath the face of its apparent plea, 
 Nor all defect that spoils its written deeds. 
 Nor know we even how oft defeat may serve. 
 Used right, as means for final victory. 
 Nor always know when what has seemed defeat 
 Is but the shadow of a true success. 
 
 ' But deprivation and its sterner moods 
 Have other roll to show than climb enforced 
 To ever newer heights before unseen, 
 Or dim attainment in the distance far. 
 For if in anywise enjoyment comes 
 It most securely comes with pain's release. 
 Even when release refuses every hope 
 Of lengthened term. And side by side with toil 
 
 E
 
 50 Quorsiim ? 
 
 Moves somewhat of reward^for in the end 
 The aim of toil attained, though it biiiig joy 
 Brings not tliat joy which urges to attain 
 Before attainment bids the effort cease — 
 The hunting ground is greater than the feast. 
 
 ' Nor could you level unto evenness 
 All kind of toil, that unto all should come 
 One fixed result and meed. To work such scheme 
 Were need to disenthrone advance and place 
 Stagnation on the throne advance had held. 
 
 ' But misery on the life most toilsome lays 
 Her heaviest ban, I know your thought replies, 
 And drags the lowliest down but spares the high — 
 A flood that slays the flower, but leaves the tree. 
 But if you speak of toil of limb not brain 
 I know not that your thought is fully true. 
 
 'And thougli the path of Progress is with stones 
 That are the woes of human hearts, made firm 
 For her advance, the need for this is less 
 Tlian it would seem. Unthrift it is which gives 
 To covetise its greatest chance to work 
 The will that lays those stones of misery down. 
 And iliat which is the surest seed that sown 
 Brings woe its crop is thriftless uncontrol 
 Of wish or passion. In itself the heart
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 51 
 
 Bears its own destiny of love or hate, 
 Of suffering poverty or secure content 
 That bids oppression kneel before its door. 
 
 'And with whatever ardency you list, 
 If you shower benefit of gift or heart 
 In hope to spur the thriftless unto thrift, 
 Or rouse desire in thoughtless Penury 
 To have within its home what seems to you 
 No less than need, if life be worth its name, — 
 Unless you hold the secret key which first 
 Opens the way for knowledge of the need 
 To enter in, you have for your reward, 
 The moment when in doubt you stay your hand. 
 As you behold your boon to be no boon 
 But only more incentive unto waste, 
 The ringing mockery of ungrateful curse. 
 
 'And evil though it seem that due reward 
 Is scant, with niggard hand, and comes to few, 
 The evil is less evil than it were 
 If oftenest and not seldomest reward 
 Came lavish with her gifts, to shower them down 
 On that which cares not to put effort forth. 
 For worse unthrift and worse than even unthrift 
 Would follow on unworthy wish to gain 
 Secure result without the mean of toil.
 
 52 Qiiorsum ? 
 
 'Vou think me hard? You think perchance result, 
 If sucli, is but unnatural consequence 
 Of Progress wrongly pushing her advance? 
 
 'Then let me point you to the page whereon 
 Of old was written the death of Him whose life 
 Reveals as clear as any other thought 
 The wish to lavish on the misery 
 And woe and weakness of the race of man, 
 And on the labour- wasted lives of men, 
 Its unrewarded store of benefit, 
 Its flowing sympathy, its healing touch. 
 
 'And with what gratefulness of loud acclaim 
 Was He received when something more than gift 
 Stood forth as purpose of His life and love? 
 A\'hen rousing unto nobler life the heart, 
 And nobler aim, was patent as His thought? 
 
 ' The acclaim was " Crucify ! " the thanks, the scoff 
 At dignity of fortitude in pain, — 
 In that it was magnanimous of gift 
 That life was failure, though without such bent 
 No life may be effective unto good. 
 And it was only as williin its grasp 
 Holding the torch to light the ashen heart 
 And kindle into thrill its smouldered fire. 
 While in the soul it waked a sense of lack
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 53 
 
 By lifting up in front the pictured thought 
 Which showed the glory of the perfect form 
 Manhood might reach ; and adding to this sense 
 Of lack a longing pulsed with beating hope ; 
 That even such lofty life attained its aim, 
 And chained success as slave unto its power, 
 Nor that, before it reached the bourne of death. 
 
 ' 'T is only so that gifts, no longer toys 
 For minds to waste with childhood's false esteem, 
 Achieve their due success. For in themselves 
 First must men have desire and sense of need. 
 Else that which comes to greet them is but spurned ; 
 Nor is there bond at all to bind the heart 
 Of him who has received to him who gives, 
 Like that which binds the heart of him who gives 
 To him to whom he gives— until the frost 
 And winter of ingratitude, severe 
 With pang of cold contraction, snap the bond. 
 
 ' Change all, and give a universal dower 
 That strangles effort ; wipe from out the heart 
 All emulation — and a slumbering world 
 Of level tracts of arid, seedless dust. 
 And dull, dead flat of moveless, tideless sea, 
 Is all the poor creation of your wand. 
 
 ' I speak not as disparaging the schemes
 
 54 Quorsuin ? 
 
 Planned by philantliropy with heart in pain 
 To wipe disgrace of squalor from the world, 
 And pillow helpless suffering on her breast. 
 The heart of Progress weak without them stops 
 In stupor. But they cancel not the need 
 Of spur with woe as point to urge to toil.' 
 
 'And yet how mean the total of result.' 
 Thus Runimont again took up the thread — 
 ' The wounded in the struggle meets a fate 
 More hard than that pursues malingering feet, 
 And unto few is life a prize or joy, 
 But unto most the making for that few 
 Their prize secure is pain and woe and toil : 
 I speak of what the world pursues as prize 
 And labours even fiercely to achieve. 
 Such prize, I know it well, is not the whole, 
 Is sometimes even a thing for high disdain, 
 But it, as object most pursued, brings most 
 The woe upon the rearmost in the strife — 
 What need, I ask, what need that human aim 
 Should be so intertwined with human woe? 
 Is it a purpose or necessity 
 Or careless ordering in the source of law, 
 Or chaos, where the movement of the wreck 
 Which fills it, is the last that order felt 
 When order dying gave to chaos birth ? '
 
 Chaos or Plan? 55 
 
 And here he paused. And then the Priest once more — 
 "Tis true indeed' responded, 'that distress 
 And pain and deprivation are the spur 
 By which the race of man is roused to climb 
 The difficult path of progress through the mist, 
 ^Vhen emulation also lights the way. 
 But true it is that these have also laid 
 Effort — and oft — in weary, hopeless death. 
 
 'And true that all the lengthy history seems. 
 As by some strange necessity, instinct 
 With what to us appears as useless woe. 
 
 ' But can this point to other than the hope 
 Of some new life which gives fulfilment's chance. 
 Of some new soil in which the seed, renewed, 
 Of human hope and toil may start again 
 With chance to gain development denied 
 In this condition, which as embryo 
 Serves to bring forth what tendencies the needs 
 Of that hereafter seek with high demand ? 
 
 'o' 
 
 ' If pain and toil and risk of limb and death 
 Attend to ban all schemes of human thought, 
 If even the skill of Medicine while it seeks 
 To stem the current of disease helps on 
 The inevitable misery, and saves 
 The weaker life to hand its weakness down
 
 56 Qnorsian ? 
 
 As guerdon to its child, what use is all — 
 If that alone which here is seen is all ? 
 
 ' The soul of Medicine aims I know to tear 
 The clinging roots of virus and disease 
 P'rom out their seat in the thick soil of man : 
 'Tis but a noble dream that hath not crossed 
 The mystic bound which parts the world of dream 
 From fact and life. And granted that it cross 
 And stand amid fulfilments of the years 
 Of far-off time — what solace for the throng 
 Whose lot fills up the interval with woe? 
 
 'And how if even fulfilment of the dream 
 Assures not earth effacemcnt of her woe ? 
 But shadows forth a struggle, life to life, 
 A fiercer slaughter than disease led on, 
 Without the hallowed pulse of pity's heart 
 To soften down its woe. Efface Belief: — 
 The far result is but the crowded earth 
 Fashioned to one vast city, passion-filled, 
 And thick with that which is the direst curse 
 Of cities, cast upon their weakest hordes, 
 A lifeless life like dusk that has no sun 
 Nor evening star nor hue nor glow, nor gives 
 A promise forth of even the moon of night ; 
 But blanks and blacks unto the utter dark : 
 And men in useless struggle for the aim
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 57 
 
 Of equal space and equal share and chance, 
 
 Bent to the sensual, blind to scope of Faith, 
 
 Dragged through the struggle by their chosen chiefs. 
 
 And skulking in the ruined earth as thralls 
 
 Of some few tyrannies, that hold for rein 
 
 And bit each new design and artifice 
 
 Twisted from Science and from natural lore 
 
 As instruments of multitudinous death 
 
 Or multitudinous torture — • So I dream 
 
 The fair Elysium of a crowded earth 
 
 Torn from all faith in all but what it sees. 
 
 ' But if some Power could sudden from the crowd 
 In days which are to us not dream but fact 
 Weed those whose idle blood or thriftless hearts 
 Bring sequel unto friend and kin, of want. 
 And all whose dust-dry hearts know only self 
 For purpose of existence, and look down 
 With careless eyes upon the pangs that stood 
 As steps by which they mounted unto ease 
 And silken sloth ; and all whose thoughts deceit 
 Has formed to tentacles of hideous fraud ; 
 And all the vice whose aim lies o'er a path 
 Of hearts downtrodden to poisonous mud of shame ; 
 There still remains one cloud to pour its woe 
 Upon the sunlit soil of such a scene : 
 Mistake brings suffering oft as deep as crime, 
 And hearts that have love's weakness, not its strength.
 
 58 Qnorsiiin ? 
 
 Nurse seeds of vice to breed new crop of wrong, 
 Nor is there an uprooting of the tares 
 Without therewith uprooting of the corn. 
 
 'Then is the prospect dark and nought but dark? 
 It seemed not so to Him whose faith supreme 
 Sought, through that supreme suffering of the Cross, 
 The solving of the mystery of pain. 
 
 * Therein He held for Faith a steady lamp, 
 Where all earth's best before had only held 
 A flickering flame, that showed but could not light 
 The deep whereon their eager hearts were led 
 By impulse irresistible to embark 
 To seek the solving of the mystery. 
 
 'And even grant that earth in days to be 
 Might be Elysium, and the far-off throng 
 Reap harvest of a woeless tide of joy, 
 The harvest won by generations gone. 
 Through tears and blood and suffering, for that hour 
 And them who on their distant sires in scorn 
 Will turn their eyes, or pity, or with feet 
 Tread thoughtless down their dust and seek no name, 
 Nor spend a solitary regretful sigh 
 Upon the mighty epitaph writ large 
 Over the tomb of generations past, 
 " These lived, these suffered, and in nameless dust 
 I'ulfiUed their fate, for future men there-through
 
 Chaos or PlaJi ? 59 
 
 To gain the light for which themselves had died : " 
 What compensation for the toil that won 
 Such high result, except to share the prize ? 
 What help but hope that there is plan beyond, 
 And this which present consciousness can grasp 
 And share is fragment only of the whole, 
 And the great whole is that of One who knows 
 And notes the needs and meed of every part 
 As deeply as He knows the general bent 
 And movement of the whole, a plan not less 
 But more a plan that it is vast.' 
 
 'You seem,' 
 The man of Science here joined in, ' to say 
 Since life and pain are bound in breakless chains, 
 And life has sometimes immaturity 
 Of end, that some continuance of life 
 Is sequel ; so through life and life you lead 
 Perhaps to immortality as bourne. 
 I might believe it too, more proof its voice 
 Sounding in unison, if men alone 
 Bore pain. But pain is attribute of life 
 In lowly forms as well as highest grade ; 
 You should extend your immortality 
 To all if it be granted unto some. 
 Or if not pain, but pain unjustly brought, 
 Is that stern deep in which you lay the rocks 
 Of your new world, or life too soon cut short. 
 Which seemed to merit or to need extent
 
 Co Quo r sum ? 
 
 Prolonged, is to receive such conseciuence, 
 
 Either you frame new meaning to "unjust," 
 
 Or wreathe round ininiatureness such a cloud 
 
 As dims all certain traces of its shape, 
 
 Or where from man to monad down can end 
 
 Your line of claimants? Where to monad down 
 
 The form which has not that same ground of claim ? ' 
 
 'The claimants end, it seems to me,' replied 
 The Priest, ' where reason fails to give or grasp 
 The thought, at such a point as whatsoe'er 
 Of reason or of fancy is, knows naught. 
 Nor aught conceives of thought of other life, 
 Nor has the longing which begets the thought; 
 But where the concept takes within the mind 
 A shape, if in that mind is dower besides 
 Of choice between the wish that draws and will 
 That fences in ; of judgment that decides 
 For one as right against the other wrong : 
 In beings holding this as heritage 
 The instinct pointing onwards lives as part 
 Of thought that knows itself as thought, and will 
 That knows itself distinct from its resolves. 
 In these arises capability 
 Of newer pain, a pain pursuing will 
 That steels itself to face for principle 
 A fate of torture which it else could shun.
 
 Chaos or Plan ? 6 1 
 
 These surely claim some compensation more 
 Than that which is the due of simple pain.' 
 
 So in the maze of that dark mystery 
 Which girdles all the realm of life their thoughts 
 They led. But eve had come, and with the eve 
 The clang that spoke the hostel's table spread. 
 And as the eve proceeded slowly grew 
 The increasing light, the silent clouds rolled back 
 Before the glowing calm, and left the heaven 
 And bared the glistening snows, yet here and there 
 In tender drapery hung. As sculptor's hand 
 Lays bare the dream of limbs divine that rose 
 Before his thought, and wreaths the harmony 
 Of robe around the harmony of limb. 
 
 And high the inaccessible whiteness rose 
 Of those huge summits mounting up to heaven, 
 Td-oi" And seemed at once to hold themselves afar, 
 
 And in their clearness to have deigned approach. 
 Blending the sense of near and sense of far. 
 
 'B 
 
 Then the sun sank behind the violet-dark 
 
 Of jagged peaks cut clear upon the light 
 
 Of pallid sky, and soon a misty shade 
 
 Hung blue around the downward throngs of firs 
 
 And clad the steel-grey rocks, and reached the foot
 
 62 Qiiorsiiin ? 
 
 Of glacier clutching close the awful steep 
 And forced to brink of falling; then across 
 The verge of downmost snow. 
 
 But far on high 
 The mountain tops in pureness looking forth 
 Unto the hues of heaven stood glory-wreathed 
 Ineffable in burnishing of gold, 
 And inin-lL-d rose and i)ur[)le-softened shade; 
 As by reception of the ethereal glow 
 Rapt unto melting with internal fire 
 That lit without consuming. 
 
 So themselves, 
 Above the chaos of the rocks that strewed 
 The tortured bosom of the darkening earth 
 They lifted, passing in seraphic thrill 
 Of light, like hope that sees a hidden sun, 
 Into the shadow of entombing night.
 
 V. 
 
 GRAPPLE WITH GRIEF 
 
 A YEAR ago the path to high success 
 Had seemed to Runimont his destined way, 
 But casting down her palms and turning short 
 Success disowned her path which sickness seized 
 And strewed it o'er with her encumbering thorns. 
 
 A year ago there was a face he saw 
 
 Which filled his heart with thrills of love, yet filled 
 
 With all the chillness of mysterious fear ; 
 
 But out from under shade of fear crept hope, 
 
 And seemed to bring the sapphire into heaven, 
 
 And light the world with hallowed light of joy. 
 
 A year ago and hope just risen fell : 
 
 Words from the lips of Wake that swept his brain, 
 
 As when tornado fells the forest, fell 
 
 Upon his ears, and showed a passionate hope 
 
 Already formed in his companion's heart 
 
 That sought for love's fulfilment where his own
 
 64 Q nor sum ? 
 
 Had felt the longing for fulfilment rise. 
 Villi to his unsuspecting friend no sign 
 Gave Runimont, and spake no word to show 
 That in another heart than Wake's the love 
 Had risen whose loss would darken all his life. 
 Yet did the crashing tempest of his thoughts 
 At first wake thunders in his brain, and raise 
 Emotion's battling tumult in tiic heart, 
 That flashed llic fury of its lightnings forth. 
 But out from all the clattering anguish spake 
 One thought with calm, and kept the calm of tone 
 Amid the multitude of hissing thoughts 
 That with excited din chased sleep away, — 
 A thought which held forth friendly aid to lift 
 His heart from out the turmoil of the wreck : 
 Never should wish nor word of his nor deed 
 Effect the misery of his friend. Resolve 
 As armour battle-proof encased the thought. 
 
 But even so Resolve may hold the heart 
 And bar the gate to its assailant foe 
 Until the hour which gains its longed for aim, 
 Vet in the very citadel itself 
 Bring on the famine which within works woe 
 And fevered rising of revolt. 
 
 And waste 
 Had laid on Runimont its heavy hand ; 
 His check was paler still that heretofore
 
 Grapple with Grief. 65 
 
 Was pale : his power of thought too soon each day 
 
 Was spent as fire that blazes out its life, 
 
 And toil, whose length not hours but minutes spanned. 
 
 Reached its exhaustion's hmit all too soon. 
 
 And all the dreary tide of longer day 
 
 Lay leaden on the dragging of his path 
 
 Through desert that gave flowerless wide expanse 
 
 To answer to the sunless waste of cloud. 
 
 Once more the friends had met. The meeting place 
 And point of earliest halt an inn that stood 
 Above a river's bank, and from its height 
 Looked down upon the waves of green-grey flood 
 Rushing in foamy turbulence of path 
 Below the jubilant thunder of cascade. 
 Across the flood rose here and there a crag 
 By castle crowned, or group of pines, to raise 
 The dull monotony of vineyard-slope 
 To higher strain. 
 
 Short halt was purposed here 
 To visit scenes thronged thick with old romance 
 And buildings in whose crumbling worn remains 
 Spoke echoes of their worn and crumbled past. 
 But Runimont, unequal to the day, 
 Unhappy if his weakness should debar 
 His friends from aught of interest or delight 
 Had stayed behind alone. 
 
 And evening came, 
 
 F
 
 66 Qi/ofsinn ? 
 
 And he to meet and welcome their return 
 Strolled slowly on the river's lofty bank 
 And gazed upon the impetuous rush below, 
 So glad and so victorious and so strong 
 In joy of bounding plenitude of life — 
 Wide contrast to the weary course of his — 
 He felt a wail within his heart that came 
 In wail of words and left his parted lips. 
 
 ' Roll on, oh stream— thou hast at least a course — 
 A destined path. And though thy pitiless banks 
 Hem thee and torture that thou ravest thus. 
 They cannot stay the victory of thy flow. 
 Thou bearest in that glorious rush as dust 
 The comminuted pride which once was rocks 
 Crowned adamantine on the mountain's height, 
 And spoiled by glacier-fountains slowly-stern. 
 And tossed unto thine issuing infancy 
 To bear afar or fling aside in scorn. 
 Thou stayest the encroaching of the plundering sea, 
 Meeting it with those spoils from mountains torn. 
 Thou hast a destined course, oh happy stream ! 
 Happy to have a fate whose struggles hew 
 Its ample path. My heart lies like a waste 
 Of stone and reed and willow channelled thiek 
 With aimless wanderings of uncertain flow, 
 That now lie dry of thought, and now fill up 
 With waves of gurgling woe — but have no aim.
 
 Grapple zvitJi Grief. 6^ 
 
 O for the triumph of a rushing flood 
 
 To sweep, the stone-strewn level of its thoughts, 
 
 And give to its meandering misery 
 
 A destiny of hope whose torrent strength 
 
 Rolls down the impetuous foam of victory. 
 
 O happy stream ! 
 
 What lies upon the foam 
 Like dull red glow of fire, and steals aslant 
 The rocks ? And on the dusky green of trees 
 It lays its tinge. 'T is thou, departing Sun ! 
 x\rt thou but anguished light that thou dost send 
 On wave and rock and tree a hue that seems 
 The hue of pain ? The storm-throes rending deep 
 Thy bosom which incessant quiver holds 
 And fiery qualm . . . wouldst thou they fling their light 
 To stain, but not to glad the thing it meets ? 
 
 ' Lo where the quivering orb nears like a bark 
 The level shore of far horizon-rim, 
 The massy clouds aglow, the sky aglow 
 With that red pain. . . . And now the shore is near — 
 Is nearer . . . close . . . and the red hero writhes 
 In Nessus garment which distorts his shape 
 And bows his form that doubles on itself 
 Rolled up in anguish — and he sinks as one 
 Who gasps in death ! 
 
 And, even sunk, he weaves 
 O'er the pale sky such dreams of gorgeous hue
 
 6S Quorsum ? 
 
 On cloud and spreading mist, as follow him 
 Like the high thoughts and memories which thrill 
 The breast of sorrow weeping noble death. 
 
 ' How envious round the glory of that light 
 Creep up yon clouds and crowd, invidious-dull. 
 To sweep the memories of its glow away, 
 Forerunners these of vengeful night. O night. 
 Vengeful but vengeful sad that veilest earth 
 In dream — the dream of one whose thoughts brood dark 
 Upon the past, wast thou not, night, for rest ? 
 Bring rest, not dread, then ; quiet, not distress 
 Of fevered brain, bring dream that is not fierce 
 W'iih lightning throes, bring slumber that may lull 
 And linger — not the startling of a crash 
 Clamouring like ruin almost as the hand 
 Of sleep lays touch to soothe that whirl of pain — 
 The rush of thoughts that light the brain with fire.' 
 
 The near approach and voices of his friends 
 Made then soliloquy to cease, and soon 
 Was either arm in friendly hold received, 
 And in the tenderness that gives the grasp 
 A softness which betokens strength was kept. 
 And voices shaded with a love reserved 
 Yet deep told over all the day's events.
 
 VI. 
 
 THE SERAPH-CALL 
 
 THAT eve they sat around the Priest, and begged 
 Rehearsal of some tale to pass the hour 
 While eve was darkening to the deep of night. 
 
 Awhile he pondered, then he thus began : 
 
 ' The roll of waters rising in low wave, 
 And glancing in the grey clear light of eve, 
 Crept on the shore with long low rumble, calm, 
 Repeated, deep. And in that saddened roll 
 So full, so muffled, sweUing speaks a voice 
 As of a mighty sorrow borne not quelled 
 But borne — so long, so well, so patient borne 
 It seems to roll its sympathy to soothe 
 The heart impatient at its spur of grief. 
 
 'And near the rolling tide a maiden sat 
 Not listening to its voice, yet hearing all 
 As distant rumble on the shore of thought.
 
 70 Quorsmn ? 
 
 For in her heart was wail and bitter grief, 
 And on her lips were words of wailing pain. 
 
 ' " He kissed me. ''V was but meeting of the lips 
 For his heart came not with the kiss — his heart 
 I know was with another and his thought 
 Pictured another's face before his face. 
 Felt other lips approach his lips — not mine — 
 His heart was with another — not with me — 
 And when my eyes looked into his I saw 
 Beneath their hueless veil the distant gaze 
 Of thought adream — afar from all of m,e. 
 
 ' " How could his heart be false — be false and turn 
 The coldness of its thoughts drained bare of love 
 On me who gave him never cause for change? 
 That limpet clings with stedfast trustfulness, 
 And neitlier gentle wave with wooing voice 
 Nor surging tempest can unfix its trust, 
 Nor aught but death, and thus my heart on thee — 
 On thee my rock — if only to itself 
 That rock be true, its limpet-hold would keep, 
 
 ' " O love, my heart is full — is full of thee, 
 But in it, like the wintry cry of wave, 
 A moan is asking, 'Canst thou, couldst thou change?' 
 
 ' " O but what l)ing thing ail ihou, ni)' tongue,
 
 TJic Seraph-Call. Jl 
 
 That speakest thus of falseness and of change ? 
 What prompted thee, my heart, to give my tongue 
 Rein to betray in word suspicion's thought ? 
 Canst thou suspect, yet deem that thou art true ? 
 Yet criest thou thus because thou boldest true ! 
 My heart is true, my heart is love alone, 
 And yet it shivers through and through with doubt." 
 
 ' Thus doubt, and anger at the very doubt. 
 And fear, and love that rising with a scourge 
 Smote and drove forth the fear, and doubt, then sunk 
 To bitter wail, in turn held up the lash 
 To scourge her heart. She sate beside the tide 
 That rumbling clambered up the sounding shore. 
 But short way from her home. The hour was past 
 Unto whose stroke no lover's footfall gave 
 The answer of appointment kept, long since 
 Was past, and first her heart unto itself 
 Had feigned such reason and excuse as love 
 Could seek to give a meaning to delay. 
 Then other and then other, till the stream 
 Recurred in useless and repeated flow. 
 Then came slow blank, and then remembered change 
 Of voice and mien that late seemed his she loved. 
 And doubt and torture drove her to the shore 
 To pace beside the waves with restless feet ; 
 Then to sink weary gazing towards the deep.
 
 72 Qiiorsnni ? 
 
 'And still he came not. 
 
 Then at length, by tread 
 Of steps approaching roused, she turned and saw 
 Her sister near, and at her sister's side 
 One she scarce knew, and only knew as friend 
 Of him who had not come. 
 
 In act to turn 
 She caught too soon their looks before disguise 
 Could mask them. He as from her lover brought 
 Excuse of absence, but she heard the note 
 Which told the lips were conscious that they spoke 
 A foreign tongue of unaccustomed sound. 
 And spurned the words that left them as they spake. 
 
 'And then through pointed question, and reply 
 Which sympathy and sorrow veiled in part. 
 She drew the tale of wrong that turned her doubt 
 To fiercest certainty. The man was false, 
 Was false, was traitor, and was hers no more ! 
 
 * Her form rose towering o'er its wont, in scorn 
 That flung the indignation from her eyes 
 In rapid flash, and then from rigid height 
 To limpness sank. She uttered fortli a cry, 
 Long moaning like the moaning of the wave 
 That crept towards her feet, and strove to give 
 Its limpid kiss. Then suddenly she turned 
 And trode as one who felt the ground she trode
 
 The Seraph-Call. 73 
 
 Strewn o'er with villanies of human thought, 
 
 For foot of high disdain to trample down, 
 
 And spake no word, but in that speechless scorn 
 
 Entered her home, and straight within her room 
 
 Enclosed, in dark and silence passed the hours, 
 
 Entreaty-deaf, until her fevered brain 
 
 Poured forth its train of phantoms, and drove wild 
 
 Its raving thoughts upon her shrieking tongue. 
 
 'And, when a moon had passed, a shadow pale 
 In weakness tottered from that room, to give 
 One weary promise of recovering strength, 
 Then in her sister's clasp of fondness died, 
 Who last survived, but broken and alone, 
 The loved ones she had nursed on beds of death. 
 
 ' But he who had accompanied her steps 
 When pity bade him feign excuse for one 
 Who made not even excuse for broken vow ; 
 And shared her sorrow for her sister dead 
 Found love for her alight within his heart. 
 But veneration trimmed the lamp of love, 
 And, though it fed and kept the flame aglow. 
 It fenced its burning unto steadiest light. 
 Nor would he enter on the sacred ground 
 Of grief too soon, till time had somewhat worn 
 Its barrier, and made open way within. 
 And then with reverent step his love pressed on,
 
 74 Qitorsiiin ? 
 
 And found reward for worship offered long, 
 
 That brought fulfilling of the altar vow 
 
 In noble bliss and loving duty shown, 
 
 And high example and incentive given 
 
 To those whose hearts with love increased the bliss, 
 
 A maiden and a boy — these two, and life 
 
 Was to their parents as a dream of joy 
 
 At ten years' end fulfilling still its course. 
 
 ' 'Twas night, and through the spray and mist and cloud 
 Hung low to trail the climbing foam shot up 
 Fire-pinioned signals of distress at sea. . . . 
 
 * Darkness and fury of the unseen sea. 
 And dim white tracks that crawl the yawning black 
 Which booms in thunder on the trembling shore — 
 Who calls for help across the raging dark? 
 
 ' Who calls ? \\\\?X matter who? The call is there . . . 
 And hearts obeyed the call. Two hours of black, 
 Night's deepest, gone, slow glimmerings filtered through 
 Where clouds hung heavy o'er the hidden rise 
 Of moon that dimly showed the moving deep. 
 Twice on the crash and thunder of the foam 
 The lifeboat, launched, was sideways flung ; thrown o'er 
 The second time upon the shore, it crushed 
 The lives of two who manned. And then once more 
 Righted for effort new it waited those 
 AVhose hands .should take the oars the dead had held
 
 Tlie Seraph-Call. 75 
 
 ' Brave hearts were round, but certain seemed the end, 
 And useless death as sequel of attempt 
 Even in the very act of starting foiled. 
 
 'Another signal rose athwart the cloud, 
 And sicklied o'er the glimmering shore with light 
 That seemed beseeching to keep unrevealed 
 The unready limbs and faces of the throng. 
 
 ' The two stood watching on the midnight shore. 
 Upon her husband's arm her wifely love 
 Leaned close — but wordless as to lip her heart 
 Was crying unto him whose heart replied 
 In silent answer stronger far than word. 
 
 ' " / bid thee go ? How can I bid thee go ? 
 /keep thee back ? How can I keep thee back ? 
 In every call from man a woman calls, 
 And voice of sister, mother, child, or wife. 
 And voice of these to »iafi sends forth its call." 
 
 'A moment, and in answer to her thoughts 
 About her neck her husband's arms were flung, 
 And lips unvoiced on lips unvoiced impressed 
 A lingering kiss — the voice that dared not say 
 " Farewell " choked in their choking throats. She felt 
 His parting steps. She saw him climb and take 
 A vacant oar. She heard the cheer which spake 
 Even through the howl of storm. And then she saw
 
 'jG QuorsHin ? 
 
 A sliadow take the one remaining oar, 
 Then heard another cheer. 
 
 The slow bulk moved 
 And crawled awhile, and then was mixed with foam. 
 And with the foam was leaping on the waves, 
 And this time, victor of the surging surf. 
 The boat pursued its way. This time seemed hope 
 To answer need. But when the rocking dark 
 Of what they strove to reach was near, a cry 
 Howled piercing on the howling wind. And less 
 The black thing grew, and less, and disappeared. 
 And wreck in fragments boiled upon the surge. 
 
 * What thing was that upon the lifeboat's prow 
 Rolled thumping ? Spar and form of man thereon ? 
 They dragged the form from out the tempest's foam 
 Across the bulwarks. Then again looked forth, 
 But watching long saw nought but barren surf. 
 And nought could hear but storm which fiercer grew, 
 Till howl of scjuall and dark of rushing rain 
 Swept wildly down and shorewards drove the boat — 
 No hope to rescue more, and strength o'ertaxed 
 Seemed scarce sufficient to secure return, 
 And in a pause of squall they turned the prow 
 Homewards for shore. But storm again renewed 
 When shore was close its passion, and the coil 
 Of wave, almost in sight of her who watched, 
 Wrapped round the oar her husband held and flung
 
 TJie Seraph-Call. yj 
 
 The haft about his face. He strove to seize 
 
 Its random-tossing shaft that smote and dashed 
 
 Upon the buhvarks him who strove, and broke 
 
 His arm, and when the boat just after thumped 
 
 The strand and sideways swung and then was heaped 
 
 Upon the surf aside, he, flung forth, fell. 
 
 And, on the rock his head struck, moveless lay. — 
 
 From out the creeping foam they dragged him dead. 
 
 And she whose anguished eyes beheld the corse 
 
 Lifted her eves from that dead face, as men 
 
 Began to bear him homewards — and she saw 
 
 The face of him whose rescue was to her 
 
 Such cost. It was the traitor's face she saw. 
 
 'Alone and dreary — dreary and alone ! — 
 The day the dimness of a long eclipse : 
 The night the shimmering of continual dream. 
 The morrow, length and dearth, and dearth and length 
 Whose far-off end leads but to other dream 
 And other morrow's length and dearth and length — 
 What shudder comes with thought of far-off days 
 And far-off months, and that eventless far 
 Which lies beyond the end of many months, 
 And length and dearth, and length and dearth through all ! 
 No light of joy illumes that distant rim. 
 There is no beacon to such sea but death. 
 The lightless hope which stands to mark the shore, 
 And take into the dimness of the dark
 
 /S Quorsmn ? 
 
 Tliat which but now was unto those behind 
 A visible life — and now is memory's dream. 
 
 'Alone and dreary — dreary and alone ! — 
 Yet in the dark of thought arose a light 
 Like the waned moon which leads the coming dawn, 
 But rose as if behind embanking cloud. — 
 Alone and dreary, yet not all alone. 
 The twain, the treasures of the dead and hers 
 Still left. In them again the dead arose 
 As living still. In them came back the light 
 And — brought to winter day in them — the weeks 
 Began to rise from slow monotony 
 To varying note. In them the months and years 
 Clothed their flat wastes with varied scene and hue. 
 
 ' But ever seemed to her the rushing sea 
 To fill with wails and voices of the dead. 
 And night when scarce a breath disturbed the air 
 Even listening calm to ocean's slumberous roar 
 Seemed ever on the point to rise in howls 
 And lash the sea and slay the dead anew. 
 
 ' She left the taunting coast to seek abode 
 Away from sea and wave and shore and tide, 
 That never more the night witli horrid voice. 
 And cold wet shingle clattering to the wave. 
 Bring back the hour of horror and the death.
 
 The Seraph-Call. 79 
 
 'And with return of power to brain and life 
 Her heart sought ease in solace of distress 
 As one who thus with kneeling wish besought 
 Cessation of the grief of grieving hearts, 
 And when she could not beg release poured forth 
 The fulness of a passionate sympathy, 
 That sought for pardon for the prayer which failed. 
 
 'And as maturity of growth produced 
 In the memorials of her husband's past 
 The upright carriage of his noble thoughts. 
 And chivalrous pride of self-devoting deed, 
 And brought reminders of the buried lips 
 In voice that spoke the same melodious love, 
 Life seemed once more to catch its morning light. 
 And upwards mount in forenoon's growing glow. 
 And peace to fill the wind that soothed the flowers 
 And win the fragrance they with longing poured ; 
 And even when, summer gone, the autumn sky 
 Crowded its glories round the setting sun. 
 The autumn leaves with blossoming of death 
 Refulgent spoke a voice which, though not hope's, 
 Seemed to fall on the silence of her heart 
 Like echo from a voice that once was hope's 
 Uttered afar and in the past, but now 
 An echo only, speaking from that past. 
 
 ' Night came, not noon, upon that morning peace.
 
 So Onorsti)!! ? 
 
 'An arrow's flight from where she dwelt event 
 Had brought the man whose face recalled the past, 
 Nor had a month upon his nearness lapsed 
 When wrapped in gleaming tongues of rising flame 
 His home made night red mock of day, and cry 
 Rose round and up of " fire," that sliakcs the limbs 
 Of those it wakes from sleep with sudden fear. 
 
 ' Her son had heard the shout and woke and saw 
 Faces of anguish in the upper rooms 
 That gazed through casements if below appeared 
 Help from the awful death. 
 
 He hasty tlirew 
 His clothes about his limbs and rushing forth 
 Met by her room the mother he adored. 
 
 ' " Must you go too ? " A moment welling up 
 Her woman's anguish swept before its strength 
 The sober judgment of her soul. Her son 
 With widened eyes of wonder took the words. 
 Astonished at the emotion new and strange ; 
 But while he gazed the sudden storm was o'er. 
 She bade him go and do his father's deed, 
 That was his father's child in noble thought, 
 And breathed a blessing with her parting kiss ; 
 Then turned, and in her room on bended knee 
 Fell down. And tears of anguish weltered hot 
 Between the trembling fingers placed to hide
 
 The SerapJi-Call. 8i 
 
 Her torturing shame before her present God ; — 
 He then had deigned, from His supremest throne, 
 The exaltation of a seraph touch 
 KindUng forgiveness and the thrill of help 
 And benison of an injurer in his need. — 
 And she, with self's unready bars had met 
 The coming of that holiest messenger ! 
 
 ' Her anguish rained its flood within her heart 
 Upon her prostrate thoughts that dared not rise 
 And ask forgiveness, nor even prostrate dared 
 To kiss the sacred footprints of her Lord. 
 
 ' But the young heart went forth, the danger thrill 
 Rousing his daring purposes. And thrice 
 His courage rescued from the smoke and flame 
 Their shrieking spoil. He entered for a fourth, 
 The last remaining life to snatch from death. 
 But they who saw him cross the fence of flame 
 Saw one who passed in sacrifice to God. 
 
 'They faltered out unto the mother's ear 
 The tale, and saw the gleam of pride flash forth 
 A moment from her eye, then duH itself 
 Unto the lead of swoon. Delirium's dream 
 Of fire and shriek of her who felt her son 
 
 G
 
 82 Qnorsum ? 
 
 Aflame was swoon's awaking, day and day, 
 Wasting her till her life was all but gone. 
 15ut life groped back its way and brought its mate 
 Reason to hold awhile its throne. 
 
 Not long 
 
 She waited for the triumph-car of pain, 
 Her call for high translation unto rest.'
 
 VIL 
 
 DUTY'S DEMAND FOR VICTIMS 
 
 THEN ceased the voice of him that told the tale, 
 And they who listened sat with silent lips, 
 Till soon the hour for slumber coming near 
 Drew to their several chambers all the group. 
 
 And sweet was night with its soft balm of wind 
 Moving and sinking back to rest, as waked 
 Awhile from dream, then passing back to dream. 
 And its high moon watching like pallid nurse 
 With hopeful smile the sufferer's transient sleep, 
 Her tranquil light lit up the feathery foam 
 And rolling wave, and gemmed the dews of pines, 
 And shimmered o'er the far horizon's peaks, 
 And dreamed amidst the mists that here and there 
 Rose o'er the stream like spectral floating forms. 
 Such night as in the memory lives and brings 
 When even the course of rolling years is gone 
 A fragment of its peace. 
 
 For Runimont
 
 84 Qiiorsum ? 
 
 Not peace but restless stream of rushing thought 
 
 Filled all the midnight hours, till glint of dawn 
 
 Was now not far to come. He rose and left 
 
 His useless couch, and through the casement peered 
 
 Upon the sleeping scene. The moon was low. 
 
 And long the shadows. Night was dreaming down 
 
 Itself in utter calm that seemed to taunt 
 
 The restless anguish of his fevered brain. 
 
 And on the window-pane his low voice moaned. 
 
 ' They were too sweet — but yet I would not rouse 
 Those lost dead hours again. But nevermore 
 To me can come the thrills of such a joy, 
 Nor evermore the stillness of such rest ; 
 But like the vanished sun they leave behind 
 A spectre of themselves, to haunt the night 
 \\'ith pallid glow that deepens into black 
 The thronging shadows. Night of night it sinks 
 With darkness, not with rest, upon my heart. 
 
 ' Why were w^e made to bear this load of woe ? 
 And what avail, from night to night, to bear 
 The fever of this fire — and no relief, 
 r>ut ever torture newly garbed comes forth, 
 Or newly weaponed with some scourge to smite? 
 If it were only pain, I know wherewith 
 To meet the pain, if but this ceaseless rush 
 Of driven thought like hound lash-stung to speed
 
 Dntys Dcuiand for Victims. 85 
 
 Would stay its furious course. 
 
 Dost thou so haste, 
 O setting moon, to sink below the earth 
 And leave the scene to helpless utter dark 
 Too deep for shadows, and the shuddering night 
 To silence, not to peace ? Is that the end ? 
 And is that end a parable of death — 
 Silence not peace ? 
 
 What cause why thoughts so oft, 
 Regard it as the first of things to shun. 
 And yet regard it as a tempting sleep ? 
 If death be rest, why should we dread repose ? 
 If pain in other guise, why seek that pain ? 
 
 ' Rest and no hope beyond . . . the wakeless sleep 
 Of all of faculty ... of feeling . . . thought . . . 
 Of all that could be conscious . . . even this 
 Creeps like a shudder . . . not a thrill of peace. 
 
 ' If death ends all what purpose in the web — 
 And meaning — of the life of men ? Distress, 
 Evil, and pain, lit up by golden threads, 
 Weaved in, of hope ! If only here that gold 
 Is ours 'tis tawdry tinsel that soon blacks, 
 And all the threads lose hue, and there remains 
 Only the web, dull, useless for its aim. 
 Life calls for joy — response unto the call 
 Is pain. Life prays its prayer for aim fulfilled :
 
 f<6 Quorsiim ? 
 
 Response unto the prayer is aim's defeat; 
 
 And yet through all a voice imperative 
 
 Requires through these incentments goodness reached 
 
 As death-wound earned in struggle, and sends thrills 
 
 As if from fever of diviner life, 
 
 Of self-devotion that for sole reward 
 
 Receives its pulse of joy at doom. And oft 
 
 Grow yearnings only deeper when repressed, 
 
 And the heart struggling with itself lives life 
 
 The keener for the struggle, and by act 
 
 Of burying love that would emblossom it 
 
 Roots it the more securely. Still the voice 
 
 Demands the self-devotion, and the bar 
 
 Secured to fasten in the yearnings chained 
 
 Within their cell the heart, and then the grave 
 
 For sepulchre of love, — with voice so stern 
 
 Demands, as makes refusal to be cost 
 
 Of reverence that to self is due from self. . . . 
 
 The shrine of virtue stands from age to age, 
 
 And hearts are that which feeds its altar-fires, 
 
 Hearts into which the Priestess I)ut\ thrusts 
 
 The knife to slay. She claims the lofty-souled, 
 
 '['he best, as food for that high altar-flame. 
 
 But leaves the ignoble dust of selfish hearts 
 
 To work their will and make of life a feast ; 
 
 And pom[) and vanity and slanderous tongue 
 
 Of fiiclion heap their tinsel on their names. 
 
 And scribe such epitaphs upon their tombs
 
 Diitys Demand for Victims. ' Sy 
 
 As make the silence holier of the graves 
 Of those who for the sake of duty died 
 In secret— in that secret whence the voice 
 Of prayer goes upward to its secret God . . . 
 Yes holier, though the graves hold nameless dust 
 For path of those that tread, but know it not, 
 Therein the lost remains of lofty life. 
 
 ' Yet on the pale face of the broken in heart 
 I have beheld a glory that surpassed 
 Even beauty's self, a chaster radiance lit 
 When hope — despair re-risen — sad hope that dreams 
 Of life to be has touched with wand that heart, 
 And spoken of more than death beyond the bourne 
 Of death, and stirred its impulses to strive 
 To higher than themselves. 
 
 Can it be dream, 
 A dream with which God mocks the hearts of men ? 
 And has He formed them thus to feign and build 
 Ideal forms of loveliness and thoughts 
 Wherewith His passionless gaze should feast itself, 
 And take no heed of all the writhing shapes 
 Which build and perish in the fateful toil, 
 Except to taunt them by a lying gift 
 Of hope to soothe the weariness of woe 
 In the death-struggle with their misery, — 
 Deluding them therewith to mortal pain ?
 
 88 Quorsum f 
 
 ' It cannot be ! I know not what forbids, 
 But there is //lai which bars and bans the thought, 
 And speaking in the heart it reasons thus : 
 That what to man has seemed, in spite of men, 
 The highest and the noblest of their deeds, 
 And loftiest of their thoughts is, in itself, 
 The mortal copy of immortal form, 
 A poor a feeble rudiment and sign 
 Of some completeness, some perfection held 
 As soul of soul in Him who leads there-through 
 The onward march of man. The True in us 
 Is in no lesser sense the True in Him ; 
 And uprightness for sake of which He bids, 
 Through instinct, man to follow path of pain 
 Is part of Him. Truth His, and uprightness. 
 How should the Upright and the True delude?'
 
 VIII. 
 THE PROBLEM OF DESPAIR 
 
 THE morrow from the cataract and stream 
 They took their way, and reached a hostel throned 
 Crag-high above the floor of emerald lake 
 That slept far down beneath its mountainous guard. 
 And from the hostel over ridge and gap 
 Of rock-walled valley stretched the view to heights 
 Whose distance blended white of snow and tinge 
 Of glacier green to pallid grey. And close 
 Were Alpine pastures mown for autumn swathe 
 And, down below, the green of clustered fir 
 Spire-pointed in their myriad tips that rise 
 With heavenward aspiration ever true. 
 
 A love like woman's love, and tenderness 
 Like woman's thought held Runimont and Wake. 
 A bond, the strongest of the bonds that held 
 The band of friends, where every bond was strong. 
 Companioned years and interchange of thought 
 And search together into problems veiled
 
 QO QiiorsHin f 
 
 In mystery had opened heart to heart, 
 
 And added unto this in Runimont 
 
 The fire of self-renouncing love leapt up 
 
 111 fuhiLSs that consumes with rapid glow 
 
 The heart in wliich it lives, and thus his love 
 
 Had wrapped his friend in arms which all their length 
 
 Put forth their ivy-strength of clasping roots ; 
 
 And Wake with all the fondness of regret 
 
 Beheld the sickness-waste which paled his friend 
 
 And fevered all his thought, and seemed to point 
 
 Unto an hour of parting, whose mere hint 
 
 Brought shudder through him, and his love the more 
 
 Clung unto what in accents so distinct 
 
 Seemed to be speaking of departure soon. 
 
 'Twas morn of gentle air and tranquil sky 
 Blue in the deep-hued intervals of clouds, 
 That when at times they hid the glowing sun. 
 Took at their rim the light and poured it forth, 
 And let the gentle trailing of their shade 
 Cross the far snow. And where the shadows left 
 The snow, it beamed as with the smile that lights 
 The grateful face of one receiving joy. 
 
 And Runimont contemplating the scene — 
 Not from the hostel far — upon a rock 
 Was seated. Further strolling on his friends 
 Had wandered. He, his brush in hand, essayed
 
 TJie Problem of Despair. 91 
 
 To limn some thought of that whereon he gazed, 
 
 And shadow out impression of the form 
 
 And hue and light. But vain had seemed attempt. 
 
 His feeble brush was drag unto the wheel 
 
 Of his impetuous thought. At length annoyed, 
 
 He laid it down. The mountain tops had signed 
 
 Unto the wandering clouds to clothe their snow 
 
 "With stoles that here and there hung heavy o'er. 
 
 And heavier o'er the heaven the cloud-groups hung 
 
 His thought, set free from stroke of hand and brush, 
 Made of the mountain height and cloud her path 
 To other height and other cloud and steep. 
 
 ' The hold of Truth, oh Christ, in massive clouds 
 Lies like an Alp embanked, and on its peak 
 Men's thoughts borne rolling through long centuries 
 By aspiration's storm or wail of woe 
 Themselves have flung, but its stern strength stands up 
 Impenetrate, and keeps them drawn around 
 And wreathed in its attraction close ; and they. 
 Turned into tears by its impassive cold 
 And icy touch, roll round and round and fall 
 In weariness upon its foot, thrust back 
 To whence they rose to rise with effort new, 
 And with their ineffectual wings to strive 
 And lift themselves towards the Zenith height. 
 But, far above, the empyrean spreads,
 
 92 Quorsitm ? 
 
 That infinite-far wliich Truth's stern height regards 
 
 Awful and vast and blank . . . unreachable. 
 
 And Thou hast part in all the destiny 
 
 Ami thought of man, oh Christ, and comest with hope 
 
 Upon the wilderness that gave no track, 
 
 But closed the searcher in its deadly sand. 
 
 'Yet rises dread at sight of Thee that fronts 
 The hope whose face smiles sweetly at Thy side. 
 
 ' What if Thy teaching of the life to be 
 Came like a bleeding sweat forced out by pain 
 At seeing life's injustice and its wrong ? 
 What if the love-strong throbbings of Thy heart — 
 Its justice and its pity — gave the thought 
 As of despair, and if bewilderment 
 Of yearning, clutching at the heart and mind, 
 Gave such intensity to hope as brought 
 The concept forth — so sadness and despair 
 Aroused the extasy to ]i\ing blaze 
 As lightning from the midnight cloud of doubt? 
 
 'Yet grant it. ^^'hat has Reason that denies 
 Perception of the truth to pain, to love, 
 To pity, and to justice and despair ? 
 That these should have no hands by which to fmd 
 Its rocks, which in the utter dark that blinds 
 The Reason, hold ihem ready to the grasp
 
 TJie Problem of Despair. 93 
 
 Of the worn swimmer in thie swirling stream ? 
 And so Thy dower of these, divinely great, 
 Found and revealed the Truths divinely true?' 
 
 The morning passed, him musing, noon was near, 
 And his eye fell on his unfinished sketch 
 And idle brush. They imaged out his thoughts 
 And even his life. The hues were there — the tools — 
 But faltering where its sweep should limn with power 
 The hand that held, and feeble, where its stroke 
 Should give the final touch of light and life. 
 
 &* 
 
 Wake's voice in foremost leading of his friends 
 Recalled his thoughts from dream. The sketch that lay 
 Beside him idly, brought applause from all — 
 Even incomplete. But on the weary face, 
 So lost in sad reflection, read the Priest 
 Suggestion of the thoughts whose impress lay 
 Thereon and veiled it, as the moon the sleep 
 Of billows when thin clouds enfold her face. 
 
 "Tis failure and is incomplete, you say, 
 And incomplete it is ' — so spake the Priest. 
 ' Yet here I see the distance-softened peak 
 And ghostly light that rims the upmost line 
 Of summit-crowning snow where, curling o'er, 
 It overhangs its throne of precipice. 
 And gazes down upon the sea of ice.
 
 94 Quorsum ? 
 
 And smiles, receiving from that icy breast 
 
 The sunlight thoughts of its tumultuous joy ; 
 
 And here are clouds that at command of wind 
 
 Move delicately-hung in mellow air, 
 
 And shadows sleeping under rocks that jut 
 
 And take the light. And here are trees that seem 
 
 In act to take suggestions of the breeze ; — 
 
 Though incomplete the half, when such, is more 
 
 Than many wholes. And even thus the life, 
 
 Which seems to human eyes to reach no aim, 
 
 Nor gain reward but failure, may be more 
 
 Than life which seems to gain its destiny. — 
 
 If it be true to its high aim of Truth, 
 
 That life shows forth the Master's outline limned 
 
 \\' ith strength and power, while others, side by side 
 
 With that, are feeble strokes of lesser men.' 
 
 And Runimont with eye but not with lip 
 Gave answer. For his eye was turned to gaze 
 Upon the speaker's face as if it saw 
 Some near approach of strand before concealed.
 
 IX. 
 
 LEPROSY AND LOVE 
 
 UPON the rock again in afternoon 
 They sat and looked upon the gorge below, 
 That widened from far distance, in the front, 
 In blue of shadows cast by roofing cloud 
 Which now but here and there gave gap for light. 
 A little time and one long beam of sun 
 Lit up a hill that in the gorge's depths 
 Stood chapleted with ruin, that it gleamed 
 Pictured upon the shadowy scene beyond, — 
 A living present on a past, part dim 
 And part effaced. Even in the distance clear 
 The ruin stood as ruin, not as rock. 
 Or doubtful whether of the twain it were. 
 
 'A legend,' said the Priest, 'of elder time 
 That ruin owns. A haughty race and fierce, 
 The race that held it, driven to this retreat 
 By foreign sword, which in the lower vales, 
 Together with the harvest of the soil,
 
 96 Qiiorsiiin ? 
 
 Reaped harvest of the hearts which owned tlie tilth. 
 But round their lord the remnant drew and made 
 Of yonder crag the hold, from which in day 
 Of curtained cloud and dark of night they swept 
 Through gorge and forest on their foe, and snatched 
 From under the remorseless stranger's hand 
 Sister and orphaned child and wife, made slaves, 
 Grief-silent, on the hearths that unto them 
 Were full witli memories of sweet love anil home. 
 And round yon hold they built new homes, and sowed 
 New slopes of grain, and crowned the craggy steep 
 With castle walls, and did their lord's behest. 
 And held him as their sire and were as sons. 
 
 ' Rude festival to greet the finished toil 
 Of rude abode was over. On the hearth 
 The log-fire died ; the rocky dwellings round 
 Were silent in the stillness of the night. 
 The castle's mistress on her pallet lay, 
 No couch of ease, beneath the stony vault 
 Strewn on tlie bareness of the stony floor ; 
 And to their close the months were drawing near 
 Of bearing that sweet burden which is hope. 
 Sleep first kept far— then hovered near, then fled, 
 As taunting her who sought its [)roffcrcd boon, 
 Until her thoughts to paths unwonted turned : — 
 The time to be, the fate of that new home 
 And those who owned the fastness. Men, that day,
 
 Leprosy and Love. 97 
 
 Had greeted its completion as defence 
 
 Of them and theirs, defenceless else. Her lord 
 
 Asleep beside her, thought of pride to all. . . . 
 
 Would rampart of defence be sometime changed 
 
 To tyrant's keep ? And that which should of her 
 
 Be born be in the far-off years the curse 
 
 And not the boon of hearts, and blessing change 
 
 To iron-throated hate, and hail the fall 
 
 Of walls round which the new rejoicing song 
 
 That day and eve had wandered up ? 
 
 'Twas thus 
 She mused and dreamed. And then her thoughts, too clear, 
 From dreamy turned to wakeful, kept wide-eyed 
 Her hours of rest, till, weary grown, she sank 
 In longer spell of slumber. Then half-waked 
 She saw the narrow ray of moonlight, fenced 
 By casement, streaming through the room. A shape 
 Was in the pallid ray, whose garments seemed 
 As floating on the fluttering light, and hair 
 Enwreathing like a floating cloud its neck 
 And heaving breast. And voice in murmur, first, 
 With far off tone and meaning dark she heard 
 Repeating and repeating some refrain. 
 Which when she grew more wakeful clearer spake. 
 And told that when for justice love of power 
 Should own that dwelling, then Gehazi's bane 
 Would end the race, and ruin lay its hand 
 For ever on the castle's empty walls. 
 
 H
 
 qS Qnorsum ? 
 
 ' Dread roused her unto fullest wakefulness : 
 She started up and sat. No form was there, 
 And nought but moonlight moving on the mist, 
 That through the casement's gap had wandered in. 
 She rose, and looking through its opening saw 
 A silver sea of moving mist, whose waves 
 Just reached the aperture and cast their crests 
 Into the gap, to spread them in the room — 
 A sea of shapes without her fancy saw. 
 Of spirits moving clad in white, and one, 
 She thought, had come within to speak her dream ; 
 And, high above, the moonlight lit the lines 
 Of glimmering glacier-billows, and her thoughts 
 Traced there a long array of angel-throngs 
 Mounting in white a pathway up to heaven. 
 
 ' Smile was the welcome that her lord bestowed, 
 Receiving from her lips at morn the tale — 
 No ghostly voice had vexed his heavy sleep — 
 Yet smile glassed over inner fear that rose 
 As if of warning given by spectral lips. 
 
 * The son next day was born to whom he left 
 His heritage of risk, who handed on 
 To after-generations of his race 
 The legend of the warning, which kept back 
 The pride of power in those whose power increased, 
 Until the sixth succeeded as the heir —
 
 Leprosy and Love. 99 
 
 Sole child of parents who to early graves, 
 Before his youth had reached maturity, 
 Were borne. And he grew on to uncontrolled, 
 Having no will by curb of which his heart 
 Might learn how proud obedience elevates. 
 
 ' Battle and rocky climb in chase of bear 
 Or chamois, and the wolf-hunt — these his joy — 
 And forth from wife and child his heedless will 
 Dragged the reluctant, unreturning steps 
 Of many left in death, laid low in fight ; 
 Or prey of faintness when their strength o'erborne 
 Forsook them on the mountain's weary height; 
 Or left as mangled corse below the ledge 
 Scaled in precipitous chase. But those he led 
 He made a terror to the land around ; 
 A band whose fierce endurance filled, with deeds 
 That startled, every lip and every ear, 
 And every heart with hate. And envy rose 
 Among the powerful, snarling at his might. 
 
 ' The daughter of a baron, power-enthroned. 
 Some distance off, on castled steep, awoke 
 New passion and imperious in his heart ; 
 At lordly group of tournament beheld. 
 And when refusal of the maiden's hand, 
 And scornful message from her father's lips, 
 Were answer to the burning of his love,
 
 1 00 Qiiorsiim ? 
 
 His tempest-rush upon the baron's home 
 Broke o'er the ramparts ere defence was formed, 
 Or warning given. His cragsmen found a path 
 Into the very midst of noisy feast, 
 And left the hall the home of solitude, 
 Where in the horrid silence of decay 
 Retainer gazed his lifeless gaze on lord, 
 And lord on lady, and the mother held 
 Her stony clasp around her stony child. 
 And on the board the part-consumed remains 
 Of feast lay mouldering mid the staring dead. 
 
 'The maiden, carried to his mountain hold 
 And dumb at heart, in daze of sudden fear 
 And horror made his bride, one only child, 
 A maiden, bore, whose arms entwined and kiss 
 And love's young sweet caress brought back awhile 
 Like echoes, fragments as of something lost, — 
 The thrills of life and love. But ere her years 
 Reached ten, the child to uncompanioned hours 
 And lonely thoughts was left, and moaned the loss 
 Of mother whom the kindred-riever death 
 Had snatched, and wandered o'er the embattled wall, 
 Or through the hall and dismal chambers, lost. 
 
 'And pity, like a dawn from out a dark 
 Which theretofore had never known a dawn, 
 Stole to the father's heart. His thoughts began.
 
 Leprosy and Love. loi 
 
 Regardful of the child, to follow her, 
 Then clung about her in continual hold ; 
 Then poured his torrent force of wilful heart 
 Its rushing strength on its new goal. A love — 
 The she-bear's love — of savage parent strength 
 Consumed him. Ever close beside him kept, 
 He taught his child to tread the dizzy ledge, 
 Taught her to tame the steed, and led her forth 
 Companion of his paths to join the hunt ; 
 And, save when need blew hoarsest, and the call 
 Warwards rang loudest out its trumpet-note. 
 Eschewed the impassioned longing of his past. 
 
 ' Thus reached the maiden's years to womanhood, 
 The shapeling of her mother's high descent, 
 But dowered with somewhat of her father's will 
 And rugged love. 
 
 But woe were his, whose hopes. 
 Unfavoured of the father, sought the child, 
 And made essay to win. And yet the maid 
 Won worship and a reverence gained of few ; 
 But worship that unkneeling dared not show 
 Even the light movement of a whispered word. 
 
 ' One, only, felt the baron's welcoming hand 
 Consenting stretched. A man her father's peer 
 In somewhat of his savage wilfulness. 
 But him with scornful gaze, and lip that spoke
 
 102 Quorsitin? 
 
 Repulsion and disdain, she heard. Endowed 
 With instinct keen, and trained to keener still, 
 She pierced the thick disguise that wrapped his acts, 
 And through the mask which bore the guise of love 
 Saw the true face of heartless low desire. 
 
 ' Guest often in the castle hall, and oft 
 Upon his daughter by her father urged. 
 She turned the more abhorrent from the thought 
 Of him ami loathly clasp that flouted love. 
 And all the sullen efforts to compel 
 By which her father made the bitter days 
 Drag heavily, no entrance could compel 
 Within refusal's outposts. From his guest 
 As hostess she with due acceptance took 
 The bidden dues from guest to host, and there 
 Her will raised up a fence of cold reserve. 
 Forbidding more approach. Persuasion next 
 Which, like a tongue less natural than learnt 
 Was spoken, followed in her father's mouth 
 And, foiled, was changed to savage tongue of threats. 
 Whose loudness rang, as all things else, in vain. 
 
 'And vain besides was guard about her steps 
 In secret placed to note if otherwhere 
 Her love inclined. For, orphaned of the care 
 And refuge of a mother's heart, her eye 
 Had learned to read the writing on the face
 
 Leprosy and Love, 103 
 
 Of false and faithful. Warily and well 
 She searched before she trusted. 
 
 More there was 
 Which helped the maid. For in the peasants' huts 
 The motherless found many mothers' hearts 
 Where often want and pain had known her help, 
 And hearts of women there divining much 
 But silent, found the way to soothe their grief 
 For her, in watchful service secret shown. 
 And even within the castle's walls were those 
 Whose mask of true compliance, worn to stay 
 The baron's wrath and penalty, concealed 
 Devotion unto her and deeds of help. 
 And fear on her behalf in these discerned 
 Among their lord's retainers those in whom 
 Confiding were betrayal. They who watched 
 In watching guarded, giving secret sign 
 Which said beware, when danger seemed at hand ; 
 And, placed for overthrow, if there were he 
 To whom her heart was given, in faithful love 
 Were false unto the purpose of their watch. 
 
 ' For unto them through means not all of her. 
 But yet of her in part, by step and step 
 The secret of her love became revealed, 
 And then device of willing hearts contrived 
 The meetings whose low whispered words of love 
 Made glad the long remainder of the hours.
 
 I04 Qitorsiim? 
 
 And gave the strength to bear the long restraint 
 
 Of absence. Even within the present ken 
 
 Of him lier father chose and of himself, 
 
 Her father, moments passed whose secret signs, 
 
 Read only by the two, were eloquent 
 
 With comfort and the benison of love. 
 
 And times not few, the legend says, were those 
 
 \\'herein discovery made so close approach 
 
 As all but trode the shadow of retreat. 
 
 * But jealousy has eyes on every rock. 
 And ears for every whisper even of air ; 
 And they who always on uncertain ledge 
 Of danger tread must sometime suffer fall. 
 There came an hour, at end of several moons, 
 In which the victim's steps were tracked, and word 
 Suspicion-winged, directed to the truth. 
 The baron's thoughts. The note of warning came 
 From those who watched, of danger now supreme. 
 
 ' Her lover, warned, assumed the palmer's cross, 
 Nor made delay : expedient fore-arranged 
 Between the lovers if event the need 
 Should bring ; hope faintly whispering that delay 
 And absence would perchance attain their end. 
 
 'Antl there was parting — meeting but to part — 
 Which pity and fidelity arranged.
 
 Leprosy mid Love. 105 
 
 And peril had no accents to forbid ; 
 The meeting of two shadows in the dark — 
 The grasping of a hand scarce seen, and lip 
 In voiceless pressure meeting Hp that held 
 With stern repression even whisper back — 
 And after — leagues and sea and years that seemed 
 To widen out the time to measureless length, 
 Before those hands and lips should feel again 
 The joy of hallowing touch. 
 
 When distance gave 
 Security of life to him she loved, 
 The maiden sought to bend the baron's will : 
 Revealing all the passion of her love, 
 And pleading with a voice and eagerness 
 That rang from wall to wall, and filled the room 
 With cry which seemed to clutch the very stones, 
 Yet found no entrance to her father's heart. 
 
 ' Storm followed on the pleading, on his lip 
 Whitening, and in his thunder-shaded eye 
 Lighting a glare of fury. Stamping foot. 
 And fist tight-clenched, and roar of howling word, 
 Made quake the hearts of all within the walls 
 That, daring not to listen, heard. But hers 
 Felt bubblings of a wrath her will trode down, 
 That knew its strength and steeled itself to more. 
 
 ' The pilgrim's path untraced, and not the cross
 
 I06 Qiiorsuni ? 
 
 Of pilgrimage, was shelter from the wrath 
 That sought assuagement in the pilgrim's death. 
 
 'Nor came relenting even with lengthening time ; 
 His wrath burnt on, but yet the maiden's will 
 Was not a metal easy to the flux 
 Nor leaf to ready shrivelling. Siege he deemed 
 Long-placed would force surrender, but he feared 
 Lest forceful haste should tempt her, sudden stirred 
 By desperation, to the leap of death. 
 
 ' But at the ending of a barren year. 
 That showed no sign of fruit to effort's toil, 
 The baron made from his high walk of wrath 
 Descent to plea. More hard was plea to bear 
 Than even wrath. But, changeless still, her face 
 In love's pale firmness spoke in unison 
 With what her lips responded. " Unto him 
 My troth was given — to him my troth I keep." 
 
 'And then concealing from her that his plan 
 Was changed, her father's craft devised report 
 Spread by the lips of one whose steps approached 
 The fastness, as returning from the East, 
 That sore disease and lingering death had seized 
 Her lover, travel-worn in slow return. 
 And words of feigned farewell conveyed to her, 
 As if by promise made unto the dead,
 
 Leprosy and Love. 107 
 
 Were hurled to wound her stedfastness ; and proof 
 Was forged in confirmation of his death. 
 
 ' She stopped the passage to beUef, and spurned 
 The words as false, and even overborne 
 With witness gave not way. " If he be dead," 
 She said, " I am the more betrothed to him. 
 He died as mine, and / as his will die." 
 
 ' One method more the father's anger tried 
 To force compliance. From her side he moved 
 Those whose long service had its secret tear 
 Of feeling for her grief, and all to whom 
 She might impart a word, and have reply 
 Of sympathy. And chain of close restraint 
 He placed about her. 
 
 Then the maiden sank 
 And wasted in disease till, prostrate laid, 
 She stirred within her father's heart a fear 
 Which thrust awhile his mood of anger back. 
 And weeks of sickness tended by the hands 
 Of those his fear restored unto her aid. 
 Gave back her limbs to movement and to air : 
 But with the feebleness of ruined health. 
 
 ' Her whilom power was gone, and with that power 
 The throne of calmness crumbled. Freedom given 
 Anew was ineffectual to its hope ;
 
 io8 QuorsHDi ? 
 
 It gave not back the vigour of the past, 
 And in a sort the baron gained his end. — 
 The maiden gave a cold assent to yield, 
 If tidings came not proving false the death, 
 And on the dearth of news a stated day 
 Should pass. 
 
 Day rose to re-enkindle low- 
 Hope that the day before had quenched, and quench 
 At night the hope it lit. The morn prescribed 
 Came, and the flame of hope was ashen-cold. 
 
 'And unadorned for bridal — for once more 
 The indignation which insouled her past 
 Raised high its front— she let herself be led 
 Unto the chapel's dim-lit altar step 
 Listless, with thoughts unlistening and afar. 
 
 'The priest's sonorous voice began the rite. 
 That on her heart as on the chapel walls 
 Unmeaning fell. IJut ere the vow was reached 
 That bound the bridal, there was at the door 
 A stir of the retainers, giving path 
 With murmurs to a leprous form that trode 
 Even to the entrance, where in fear they stood 
 Drawn back as from a spectral visitant. 
 
 ' The muffled movement caught the baron's ear. 
 Who, turning, saw the leper. As he gazed
 
 Leprosy and Love. 109 
 
 Back came to memory what in burial hid 
 She long had kept — the legend long before 
 Told to his childhood's listening. Panic-smitten 
 He paled as one who sees a sudden form 
 Which with its spectral fingers gives the sign 
 To follow to the mystery of death; 
 And, leaning on the arcaded wall, sank down 
 Upon the sounding floor whereon the clang 
 His armour made was requiem to his fall. 
 And stared his lightless stare of horror — dead ! 
 
 ' Meanwhile had sunk the utterance of the priest, 
 Who from the staring baron door-wards gazed. 
 And saw the living corpse of leper stand ; 
 And at the altar all, and even the maid, 
 Turned round in wonderment to know the cause. 
 
 'And by what instinct she her lover knew. 
 Disguised beneath that scale-white skeleton, 
 No tongue has told. But while her father's corse 
 Was yielding unto its dead weight, her rush 
 Had reached the leper — round his neck her arms 
 She flung, and stilled his agitated lips. 
 That struggled to reveal how, smitten thus 
 With lingering death, he came to set her free 
 From vow to him, and found the gathered throng 
 Of bridal, and had sought unknown to gain 
 A glimpse once more of that long-worshipped face
 
 I lo Qiiorsuni ? 
 
 To soothe, as dream of love, his closing days. — 
 She would not listen to the tale she knew 
 His moving lips were uttering ; but his hand 
 She took, and led him altarwards, and bade 
 The astonished priest, and with a voice and mien 
 Imperious even beyond her father's wont. 
 Repeat the rite to that white form and her. 
 
 ' Wrath like a demon's staunchless vengeance filled 
 The baffled suitor, left without a word 
 To turn from vow and altar. Ready armed, 
 His band of few retainers grasped, with him, 
 Their swords ; but, kept in check by steady gaze 
 Of greater numbers whom the open door 
 Showed swayed with a resolve o'ertowering theirs. 
 They curbed their present wrath to loose the rein 
 Of future vengeance. And his muttered threats 
 The scorn of valour coldly took and smiled, 
 And bade liim show completion of his words 
 In deeds that were less empty than were threats. 
 
 'And when upon the castle and their homes 
 He led attack — assault waked up to joy 
 Their olden battle-fervour. Life and life 
 Went down before their weapons — but even so 
 The strife left battered walls and levelled homes 
 And waste of crops by flaming harvest reaped, 
 Before his death in blood made end to war.
 
 Leprosy and Love. 1 1 1 
 
 ' And she, regardless of the yielding walls 
 And missiles hailing round the castle's towers, 
 Filled hour and hour in binding up the wounds 
 Of men that bled with gladness, so her hand 
 But bound them. And to child and woman, thronged 
 For shelter in the castle's court, she spoke 
 The words that stirred endurance in the heart 
 And soothing hope. And every interval 
 Allowed by care of wounded men and sick 
 She gave to him on whom her wifely love 
 Poured all its pent devotion, sister-like. 
 In virgin nursing of his wasted form. 
 And while the life within that sepulchre 
 Dragged on its weakness, more devote, in scorn 
 Of superstition's fear she ministered 
 To all his need, and of her woe poured out 
 The wine of sympathy and help and joy 
 To sufferers who from out their pain to her 
 Looked up with awe and love. 
 
 And when at length 
 The leper passed away she laid her down 
 In dim exhaustion's weary somnolence 
 In that same room wherein the spectral voice 
 Had given its ghostly warning. Wasting there, 
 She died, but in the hour when death was nigh, 
 Beholding through the casement's aperture 
 The pallid rose of eve, which up the path 
 Of glacier-pinnacle spread its burnished glow,
 
 1 1 2 Quorsum f 
 
 Her eyes from languid somnolence woke up 
 
 Awhile to light, and something left her lips 
 
 That told of spirits rising glory-robed, 
 
 From woe, to mount the gleaming heights and tread 
 
 Their triumph-path unto the throne of God. 
 
 ' No hand had touched the castle's battered walls 
 To heal their wounds. But in the night which closed 
 Around the rite which laid her to her rest 
 Came storm in mountain fury, and its flash 
 And thunder-burst broke through the empty hall. 
 And rent the shivering walls. And winds of night 
 Moaned ever through the gaps, and seemed a voice 
 That wailed in agony of blighted love ; 
 And fancy feigned a spectre wandering sad 
 Through all the haunted rooms ; and slow decay 
 Consumed the broken battlement and tower.'
 
 X. 
 
 RUNIMONT'S VISION 
 
 DAY followed in the rear of day till came 
 The hour of further journeying. The Priest 
 And Runimont together took their way 
 In leisured travel, while the others clomb 
 The grandeur of the snowy slopes, and breathed 
 The mountain's upper air, and gazed, from crags 
 And summits fit for feet of gods, afar, 
 Over the low horizon of the world, 
 And ending crossed the crests, where far on high 
 The silent snow-seas slumber round the steeps 
 That o'er them, towering up in savage strength, 
 Stand black and scornful of the white assault 
 Of storm-driven snow, which in humility 
 Of drift they force to lie about their feet. 
 
 Weary the day that led to weary night, 
 And weary night that brought to weary day ; 
 Repeated and repeated, this his fate 
 Brought dread to Runimont, which dragged the length 
 
 I
 
 1 14 Quorsmn f 
 
 Of weary day and wearier night to more : 
 Dread of a useless future, when the years 
 Should bear him on upon the changeful waves 
 Of fluctuating feebleness, till death 
 Brought ending to a life that left no trace 
 Even on the feeble waters where it passed. 
 And in the hours when darkest on the heart 
 Was laid the shadow of this fear, a wish 
 Crept through the shadow, seeking for a grave 
 That soon might close the hopelessness of life, 
 And came at times in wail of uttered word. 
 
 * 'i'liy feet are slow, methinks Thy feet are slow. 
 The days drag on and weeks and trailing months, 
 And yet Thou com'st not with the word that bids 
 The struggler cease his struggling and lie down 
 In peace of rest. At times, O Lord, when night 
 Rallied its stillness into storm, and winds. 
 Fierce shriekers, wandered through the startled air. 
 And lightning clove the shuddering tree and gave 
 Its tliundcr roar of iriumi^h, has my heart 
 Thrilled with the thought " He comes perchance anon 
 By wind or lightning He will send His call." 
 
 ' But yet no call. Nor when I passed and paused 
 Beneath the mass which in the grip of cliffs 
 HuiiEj, and the cliffs each moment wearier seemed 
 And ready to let fall the ready rock.
 
 Runiuwnfs Vision. 115 
 
 And thought was brightened into hope, that death 
 Might with a sudden burial put end 
 To the long labour, — neither then had hope 
 Thy mandate that it be at once fulfilled.' 
 
 Such thoughts at times swept o'er his mind, but gained 
 No hold, for Reason came with steady front 
 And claimed her sway and kept in manacle 
 The thought — unreasoning progeny of woe 
 And sickness — 'Why endure and not make end? ' 
 
 And sometimes in his weakest hours, when sleep 
 Hovered uncertainly about his brain, 
 His will, impaired and weary with attempt 
 To keep its hold upon itself, sank loose : 
 And dreams, confusing past and present, mixed 
 The things that were not with the things that were, 
 And brought unto his sight the face he loved. 
 One, o'er its comrades vivid, back and back 
 Came in his waking hours — her arms were stretcTied 
 A moment as in pain, that longed to clasp 
 Yet dared not, then asudden locked his breast 
 And held him in embrace, and on his neck 
 Her head sank soft, and shy love silently 
 Melted from shyness into happy rest. 
 And oft the face was lingering, and the kiss 
 Which only dream could ever know kissed on 
 When dream was over, and regret, with locks
 
 1 1 6 Quorsum ? 
 
 Of aegis-bitterness, flung on the dream 
 
 A blighting stare which quelled its gaze of love. 
 
 And when awhile at times in slow attempt 
 Strength seemed to show return, his rousing will, 
 Like some old baron of the castled past, 
 Shook off the assailant dream and gave command 
 To close his memory's gates against the foe. 
 
 The Priest and Runimont the third eve reached 
 A wild ravine whose sides no stunted bush 
 Nor verdure held. Such awful wall arose 
 Above the roaring stream whose thunderous fall 
 Dashed, down the narrow depths, from heights just seen 
 Far up in snowy distance, waves whose force 
 Smote almost with the shock of solidness ; 
 And even the air which their mad rush displaced 
 Swept like a roaring wind above their face. 
 Beyond the hostel rocks arose, as heaped 
 In bitter struggle's end of death. ICvcn these, 
 Except for stain of moss and lichen, held 
 No evident sign of life. 
 
 The night's wild horde 
 Of fancies rushed before the fevered brain 
 Of Runimont, and in fantastic dream 
 Rolled her he loved, beseeching, on the whirl 
 Of dashing torrent, and the solid wind 
 Rising therefrom beat back his vain attempt
 
 Ruiiivwufs Vision. wj 
 
 To stretch his hand in wild desire to save — 
 
 And, gaping sudden to the storm of foam, 
 
 The path his rushing steps pursued in vain, 
 
 To follow and fling down himself to help, 
 
 Let down his steps to awful depth of fall 
 
 Wherein beyond his reach — nor more beyond 
 
 Than just to mock his touch — her hand was stretched, 
 
 And all the thunder of the awful deep 
 
 Spake ' Runimont ' and ' Runimont ' in voice 
 
 That was the utterance of her lips, and changed 
 
 To desolate toneless clamour, deafening ear 
 
 And brain, as in the boiling dark she sank, — 
 
 And he, dewed o'er with drops of anguish, woke. 
 
 Morn showed his face more pale, and trembling hands 
 More trembling, and his eyes red, listless, set . . . 
 Escape from scene so wild that gave no rest . . . 
 Escape, was all the wish he had within. 
 
 Up — upwards, fevered thought drove on his steps. 
 Up — upwards, for a glimpse of gentler scene 
 To calm with peace thought's horror. 
 
 On they pressed : 
 The Priest with anxious and astonished heart 
 Companioning the pace he could not check. 
 The summit crossed, at eve they neared a spot 
 Where, o'er the rudeness of its slopes, the gorge 
 Had wrapped a garmenting of firs, festooned
 
 ii8 QuorsiDH? 
 
 In trailing grey of lichen, and the moss 
 Grew green about their feet, and lower down. 
 With sycamore and oak and chestnut green, 
 The valley's floor was widened out in stretch 
 Of grass that lay in evening's light of peace. 
 
 There in exhaustion's fever day by day — 
 Four days was laid the sufferer's prostrate form, 
 And then delay enforced for some return 
 Of strength detained the Priest and Runimont, 
 And from the fore-appointed meeting-place 
 Their friends came up the pass at message sent 
 To join them in their dwelling of delay. 
 
 And meanwhile grew the bond of confidence, 
 And brought its bud affection into flower 
 In him who nursed and him who suffering lay. 
 
 And of his past and his more inward thought 
 Spake Runimont unto the listening Priest, 
 And freely spake. He told him how, while life 
 Was still the path of hope, and strength was still 
 His own, his voice was raised and heart to God 
 In prayer, whose sequel suffering followed close. 
 
 ' I asked for suffering to arouse my will 
 To learn endurance, and for chastisement 
 To lift and to refme, but asked the strength
 
 Rimitnont's Vision. 119 
 
 To toil withal, nor yield at scourge of pain, 
 But in that conquer. . . . After this my heart 
 Drew faltering back and shrank, and seemed to feel 
 That it had pressed too closely on its God. 
 
 'And then again the living ardour came, 
 And taunt of weakness smote me full, and stung, 
 And I once more crept close, and dared once more 
 To risk the prayer. And then 'twas scarce a moon 
 Had passed upon the uttering, and I knew 
 That He had girt me round with pain and made 
 Thought but the thrill of anguish.' 
 
 Thus he told 
 He lay in weakness like a swooning flower 
 For six months' space, and thought from anguish passed 
 To feeble cold that seemed a dreamy death. 
 And afterwards rose up to pallid life. 
 But gained no vigour and no noontide strength. 
 
 ' Then came a sort of vision,' thus he said 
 Unto the Priest, ' the sequel of my thought 
 And brooding, not a dream. 
 
 It was a cross 
 That rose between me and the morning heaven, 
 And held a Sufferer pale in quivering pain. 
 Yet holding back the writhing and the throes ; 
 And heaven seemed darkening, and the weary sun 
 Grew wan and faint as in bewilderment,
 
 1 20 Quorsmn ^ 
 
 That could not gaze upon the Sufferer's pain, 
 
 Nor dared to gild the thorns which gemmed His brow. 
 
 But fascination, even while heaven grew dark, 
 
 And horror, kept the Features and the P'orm, 
 
 And cross, clear-marked before my sight : so clear, 
 
 I seemed to read the expression on the Face, 
 
 And saw thereon a purpose shaped and kept 
 
 Through even the anguish of the taunt, that round 
 
 Seemed ringing mockery forth . . . and o'er me came 
 
 Thought like the utterance of a far-off voice. 
 
 Which told the meaning of the cross and dark . . . 
 
 I knew in caitiff's crown of thorns the King ; 
 
 And knew in guise of malefactor's death 
 
 The holiest thought and noblest wish of man. 
 
 ' And from the dark came forth a hand that held, 
 Stretched out unto my grasp, a wreath which seemed 
 Like His of thorns ; and near the hand a voice 
 Like still suggestion of unspoken thought 
 That said, " If thou wouldst follow, l)ind thy brows 
 With this. So His triumphal pain shall fill 
 With fire of noble impulse all thy heart." 
 
 ' I put my hand to grasp, and then drew back ; 
 For as I reached I saw the marble Face 
 With quiverings crowded. In suppression even 
 Of these the fierceness of the pain stood forth. 
 A shudder shivered through me, and " Divine
 
 Runimonfs Vision. 121 
 
 It is," the thought within me said ; " divine, 
 
 But yet the clasp of suffering unto death, 
 
 Too great for mortal strength and mortal brow." 
 
 'The hand and wreath from vision slow withdrawn 
 Passed into darkness ; then the cross and Face 
 And glimmer that had lit the Face. And dark 
 Sank on my heart that homeless in the dark 
 Was fluttering, as a child in straggling moans 
 Amid the wild at night its mother lost. 
 'Twas He, I thought, was meant to give release, 
 Not burden ; rest, not toil ; and joy, not thorns 
 For crown. And with my thought the darkness grew 
 A deeper dark. My thought sped on — it seemed — 
 The dark. And somewhere in the night a voice 
 Spake, and it said, " The thorns are joy, the toil 
 Is rest, the burden is release. But grant 
 That these they were not, wouldst thou dare to use 
 Divineness of such death for only self?" 
 
 ' And then I felt the Face to heaven was raised, 
 And as with lightning cleft the bitter dark. 
 With voice ineffably forlorn, " Eli, 
 Eli, lama sabachthani," echoed through. 
 
 ' And shame welled in me, boiling up to move 
 The encasing mud of self-regarding wish.
 
 122 Qiiorsumf 
 
 And then once more the hand with ofiered crown 
 Came forth, and voice, " Make offering of thyself 
 In love of men for service of that love. 
 And link thy deeds and fate thereby with His." 
 
 * My hand I stretched and took the circling pain 
 And therewith bound my brows. But shaking limb 
 And fainting thought were sequels of the deed. 
 Till strength somewhat returning seemed to bring 
 Thought equal to its task to do and bear. 
 
 * But then again came suffering, heavy, long, 
 And weakness. And the heaven was crowded o'er 
 W'ilh doubts which cloudlike kept its daylight back, 
 And oft return, and hide its peace from thought.' 
 
 The Priest, a quiet speaking in his tone. 
 Gave counsel. ' Be but patient, and with face 
 Turned towards the light, seek stedfast for the light ; 
 The Heaven grows clear to those who wait the hour 
 Whose destiny is dawn. The dark remains 
 To those who, leaving patient search, shut out 
 The light with curtained thought that night is round 
 And has an ending other than the dawn.'
 
 XI. 
 
 THE ENGINEER'S TALE 
 
 ANOTHER day, — their friends beside them sat ; 
 And they were listening to the tale of climb 
 Recounted with the marvels of its hours. 
 — The wondrous silence of the starry night 
 And snowy sea that blushed at smile of dawn ; 
 And cliff with ruin lying at its foot, 
 The heaped memorials of its greater past, 
 Which stayed to tell how destiny such as theirs 
 Was watching for the rock's most inward strength 
 With agelong patience, changeless, moveless, calm. 
 
 And in the balmy eve when eve grew dim, 
 And o'er the mountain-snow its death-hue stole, 
 And heaven was hung with pall of purple-dark, 
 The Engineer at wish of all — but voice 
 Of Belford spoke the wish — began his tale. 
 
 ' It was my lot to guide, awhile agone, 
 The joining of two shores which face to face
 
 124 QuorsioH ? 
 
 Stood fronting each the other o'er a sea 
 
 Which, here a narrow arm of three leagues' width, 
 
 Bore petulantly to its wider deep 
 
 All essay at approach by silting sand. 
 
 Two headlands stood, tlic guardians of the line 
 
 Of either strand, and where the racing tide 
 
 Beneath them rolled, it rolled across a ridge, 
 
 The lowly wreck of what was once a bond 
 
 Between the shores, by hunger of the waves 
 
 Devoured. But underneath the liquid roll 
 
 It stretched, with here and there a jutting head 
 
 That, fathoms deep, had longer patient borne 
 
 Its battle with its ocean-enemy ; 
 
 On these were placed the towered foundation-piers 
 
 O'er whose high tops the iron road should run : 
 
 Caissons, that to their destined goal were towed 
 
 Afloat, for firm enrooting on the ridge. 
 
 These, poised above their resting place and sunk. 
 
 Were freighted at their base with prisoned air 
 
 That, heavy with compression, met the wave 
 
 As equal, holding back its liquid mass, 
 
 And barred its entrance to the chambered keep 
 
 Wherein men fixed the caisson's foot, that thus 
 
 ^Vas formed to tower, root-fastened to the rock. 
 
 'Of these the midmost on its bed its mass 
 Had just reposed. And on its top I stood 
 And watched the sun with yellow flood illume
 
 TJie Engineer'' s Tale. 125 
 
 The veil of cloud wherewith it hid in heaven 
 Its parting hour ; and in the yellow burned 
 A darker tinge as amber mixed and red, 
 And all around the light-filled veil crept clouds, 
 Dull joyless clouds — nor even a languid smile 
 Lit up with rim of light their inky shade. 
 Then 'neath its canopy the night grew dark, 
 And all its hollow slowly filled with voice 
 Of rising wind, which drove the beating rain 
 In squalls before. The next day laboured up 
 Sullen, resentful, brooding, heavy, dark ; 
 And o'er the wondering waters crept no smile 
 But dull long roll of wave pursuing wave, 
 And in the later morn the rising wind 
 Howled itself into tempest, till the air 
 Became one roar, and sea one seethe of foam. 
 
 'And o'er the caisson broke the rush of storm, 
 And howled around with howl that swept away 
 The sound of voice, and beat the swinging crane. 
 And rocked it to and fro : 
 
 No chance to make secure 
 The shifting gear : when effort failed and risk 
 Was useless, underneath the topmost stage 
 We sheltered, bolting fast the heavy door. 
 
 ' The caisson shivered to its very base 
 Where labouring hard the workmen strove to fix
 
 1 26 Qnorsum f 
 
 Its foot. To them at intervals I went 
 Through door and air-lock down the newelled stair, 
 And with encouragement of cheering words 
 Sped on their toil. And ready hands and hearts 
 Toiled steadily and well the forenoon through. 
 
 ' But in the early afternoon the shock 
 Of storm outstorming all its past with crash 
 Came on. The shaking caisson's wind-side rose, 
 And on the lee the foot crushed down the rock 
 Whereon it pressed. The crumpled floor in heaps 
 Rose up unto the base's half-way line ; 
 And sliding down the yielding rock the tower 
 Bent forwards from the wind and surging wave, 
 And from beneath the tilted foot the air 
 Boiled upwards, bursting through the bounding foam; 
 And in the gap it left the waters rushed 
 And swept asudden, deluging the floor. 
 And in a moment all was dark and whirl, 
 And then eventless silence. 
 
 I my voice, 
 To quell the fierce suggestion of my fear 
 Uplifted, seeking answer from the dark. 
 And voice and voice amid the darkness came 
 In answer. Bidding one to seek the stair, 
 And from the upper stage return with light, 
 I called the names by one and one of those 
 At toil within the chamber : answer came
 
 TJie Engineer's Tale. 127 
 
 From all. A moment's cold of sweat came o'er 
 My brow, and shiver through me ran. Relief 
 Was almost swoon. The light descending showed 
 Each face thinned pale. I bade them one and one 
 Ascend the stair to gain by respite strength 
 For later toil. 
 
 No more there came that day 
 Such burst of fury, but the wild day sank 
 To sob of eve, and sob of eve to sleep 
 Of windless night. And only moan of wave 
 That could not cease its utterings of remorse 
 Around the caisson wailed. 
 
 The basement then 
 Air-filled again to drive without the wave — 
 I searched the cause of sliding and discerned 
 Where weaker bedding of the rock and joint, 
 Unequal to the pressure of its foot, 
 When wind and wave made heavier still its thrust 
 And somewhat changed direction of its strain. 
 Had crumpled 'neath the pressure and let slide 
 The heavy bulk. The morrow's sea more calm 
 Gave chance to mark the caisson's rightful seat, 
 And move it, tilting gently, to its home. 
 
 'And through the day and through the morrow's night 
 I stayed to speed the toil and make secure, 
 And change to frequent the relays of men 
 Whose hastened labour in the prisoned air
 
 128 Qiiorsiini ? 
 
 Brought quick exhaustion on. When all was safe 
 I sat upon the caisson's deck awhile 
 To rest rug-folded. And with sudden hand 
 Sleep seized me, and it led me unto dream. 
 
 ' Black space was round me, yet with studded isles 
 Marked o'er, some points, some orbs, and one there was 
 That grew and ever grew in widening blaze. 
 And seemed the sun in awful growth, but pale 
 Beyond its wont beheld through air of earth ; 
 So large it grew that o'er the vast expanse 
 It stretched as floor to half the sphere of space. 
 
 ' And from the crystal chamber where I watched, 
 I seemed to see that floor's expanse of fire 
 Come nearer still and nearer, and a fear 
 Within me stiffened all my flesh and hair. 
 Till something stayed the approach, and fear, begun, 
 Died into wonder at the awful scene. 
 
 ' Above me rose a whirling cloud of mist 
 That poured its downward rush of spangled hail 
 In columns like the spout of waters seen 
 At sea. And looking where the columns fell 
 I saw below me seething lightnings massed 
 And matted thick unto an ocean face. 
 Whose waves for crests had tongues of whitest flame 
 Which writhed and quivered, shot from side to side,
 
 The Engineer s Tale. 129 
 
 And all around an endless roar arose 
 From out that deep : a roar of many sounds 
 And many notes and many mingling tones, 
 That seemed, some new, in new vibration waked. 
 Some older, some from centuries afar. 
 So strong, so soft, so near, so far the sounds. 
 They waked a harmony whose majestic voice 
 O'er-thundering many thunders deafened not 
 Nor stunned, but roused the ecstasy of awe. 
 
 ' I gazed in fascination on that sea, 
 And as I gazed I saw a storm of flame 
 Tornado-like, except that by its side 
 Tornado were a crawl of pigmy breath, 
 Rise upwards, whirled unto the height afar, 
 And there aglow it hung awhile, then, dulled, 
 Became a mist that spangled in the light 
 Poured upwards on it from the ocean's face, 
 And glistening like a jewelled canopy 
 It spanned the height, then, whirled in eddies, grew 
 To cloud, whose massed array of glittering points 
 Heaped themselves unto larger, and rained down 
 In lustrous shower of gem and metal snow 
 And crystal, hued with hues of many tints. 
 And some in rapid rush of midmost fall 
 Glowed into drops that beat upon the sea. 
 And some still crystal smote its fiery waves, 
 And where they struck a steam of coloured flame 
 
 K
 
 1 30 Qiiorsiun ? 
 
 Arose and wandered upwards ; and all round 
 
 Mounted and ceased not from the heaving sea 
 
 Flames that if folded round this world could wrap 
 
 Its bulk to hiding. Ever and anon 
 
 From spot and spot rushed fierce tornado up 
 
 And fell as whirl of elemental rain, 
 
 And heaven, aurora-filled, sent flashes forth 
 
 To track their path amidst its crystal mist, 
 
 Where chasms, but few, in the rent canopy 
 
 Revealed the distance of that upmost mist. 
 
 And awfullest dark of empty space beyond. 
 
 ' And througli that mist a wandering portent came, 
 And tore an awful path amidst the cloud ; 
 A globe in fiercest madness of career 
 Rushing athwart the height. The cloud it tore 
 I-'lII to it hanging like a trailing robe, 
 And underneath its path awhile the storms 
 Stayed their incessant rush upon the sea. 
 And left abyss of an unwonted calm 
 Of fearfullest expectation in their stead. 
 
 ' Then on the sea rose up the leap of waves, 
 That with their mountainous tide pursued a path 
 Straight underneath the portent's frantic course. 
 Heaped up in awful longing for the prey 
 They followed till upon the horizon's bound 
 They curtained out its sinking with their flames.
 
 The Ejigineers Tale. 131 
 
 And following on the tide such huge abyss 
 Was opened in the lightning-sea, that earth 
 Hurled in with forty other mates, its peers. 
 Would sink therein, nor choke the mighty chasm ; 
 Into whose deep there streamed, in torrent stream, 
 Cascades of flame and crystal cloud and mist. 
 Borne in by whirl of wind whose mightier sweep 
 Sucked up the wild tornadoes round its verge, 
 And rolled, like foamflakes off the sea, in drift, 
 Huge continents, and hung them o'er the abyss, 
 And flung them to the chasm's further brink. 
 
 'Across the sea that moving chasm drove 
 And dragged its trail of dying sobs, each sob 
 Tornado of tornadoes. And not yet 
 Had died the fury nor had time to die. 
 When from the opposite horizon's bound 
 That orb again arose, but nearer now 
 And fiercelier dashing through the cloud that writhed 
 Its mass, convulsed, to an enwreathing robe 
 For that new fascination. And beneath 
 Still fiercelier clomb the mountainous sea and strove 
 To reach the orb and followed up its path, 
 And down behind, in distance like a heaven 
 For depth, abyss was opened. Spasm of storm 
 Racked all around and all abyss and height. 
 And tore the very heart of mountainous waves. 
 And whirled their writhing mass to foam of flame.
 
 132 Qiiorsuvi? 
 
 ' I saw the rushing world pass once again 
 The horizon-rim, and then once more come forth, — 
 Desire of flames up-stretched to meet its rise, 
 That lit the sky through which it rose witli hues 
 And glories and with spiral glow of shape 
 So vivid, so surpassing in their gleam, 
 The light behind the glories, else intense, 
 Was wrought by their appearance shadow-grey, 
 And glows and hues of sunrise seem, in thought 
 Of that, to fade to lightless, hueless, dim. 
 
 'But as I looked the globe burst fortli in flame 
 And made new thunderous music in the roar. 
 And hurried, slant in course, to meet the thirst 
 Which heaped the mountainous longings of that sea. 
 And, sequent, grew unutterable storm 
 That now was lightning-sea, now, whirl of foam 
 Fire-flaked, and now was torrent-flash, and now. 
 Cloud, and now, awfullest abyss : abyss 
 And sea and cloud and foam and torrent mixed 
 In one chaotic whirl of maddest roar. 
 
 ' Then midst the fierce confusion wildest-thronged 
 I saw that orb with its out-flaming trail 
 Dash like the dipping seagull into waves 
 That welcomed it with burst which seemed to break 
 And shatter all the mighty sea, and flared 
 Through all the lacerated roof of cloud
 
 The Engineer's Tale. 133 
 
 That, torn to shreds, was scattered, driven far ; 
 
 And shook the shuddering vast of measureless space. 
 
 ' And here I woke and saw the rain of fire 
 Shot by a falling meteor o'er the sea 
 That just before with thunder roar had burst.'
 
 XII. 
 
 'UNTO THE HILLS' 
 
 THE morn which followed held the hour that struck 
 The signal for their homeward way begun. 
 Calm, clear, a morning pure with summer's sun 
 At summer's ending, and in golden light 
 Steeped underneath the cloudless blue. Alone, 
 Awhile along the road that wound and climbed 
 Above the steep of torrent's bank and floor 
 Of valley, Runimont to gaze his last 
 On height and stream and valley wandered slow. 
 
 But feeble sign that wore improvement's front 
 Gave hope of health to come. The hope of rest 
 For brain and strength for wearied thought, in vain 
 Was nursed within him. Weakness taunted still, 
 And taunted unto uttering of farewell 
 That spoke unto those mountain-heights reproach 
 As unto things which gave no aid, no love.
 
 ' Unto the Hills! 135 
 
 ' I turned to you for voice whose potent spell 
 Could stir the numbness of my brain. Ye gave 
 No answer, ye were silent. Unto thought 
 Raising her languid head and grasping hand 
 Of hope, who with persistent tone averred 
 In you was restoration, and in you — 
 The long desire of childhood's years and youth's — 
 Was rest, ye gave but silence as response 
 To her that sought as though from human heart 
 Response. And icy in your cold of day 
 Gleamed peak and snow with statue's moveless heart 
 And answered nought. Adorned at dawn and eve 
 In cruel beauty, for yourselves alone 
 Ye donned the weaved bedizenments of joy 
 And answered naught, but let your silence bind 
 Pale thought the more to widowhood of grief 
 At her own blankness. And in calm of night, 
 Whose unimpassioned stars gazed down on snows 
 And ice and lakes that stared their coldness back, 
 Ye answered naught ! 
 
 The hour is come to go — 
 I go away, and ye are but a dream 
 Hung tapestry-like round memory's walls to show, 
 Not life, nor love, but only empty form. 
 I go without a smile from you of light 
 To wake in thought's wan eyes an answering smile, 
 I go away — and ye are but a dream.'
 
 XIIL 
 
 GRANTA 
 
 ' O ING it again ... it may be as you say — 
 
 »^ A morbid strain — a harmony of sighs — 
 It is to me a solace and a rest. 
 Shadows hang dull about my clouded brain. 
 Will ever sunlight clear return to thought? 
 Or is the darkness near when she must lie 
 Enchained upon the midnight soil, and speak 
 Only to utter sound, of meaning lost, 
 Unto the phantoms she creates and deems 
 Beings of life ? and love pour fancied woes 
 And fancied joys to wake an echoing voice, 
 Where sound returns no echo ? and the shade 
 Of reason, jabbering phantom, to and fro 
 Wander at scourge of feelings that have lost 
 Their power to find the object which they seek ? ' 
 
 There was no singer, and no song was sung, 
 But Runimont, awaking from a dream,
 
 Granta. i37 
 
 With which his fevered sleep had ended, felt 
 Vibrating still the chords he heard in dream. 
 
 Eight months had passed succeeding their return. 
 Flaxton and Wake still stayed and Runimont, 
 In Granta's home of learning. Belford, Spring 
 Had seen remove to new abode of toil, 
 To give to medicine all his active power. 
 
 But Runimont by illness that cut down 
 With ease the strength so long impaired was chained 
 To long endurance of his prisoned months, 
 And now just raised as if on infant step, 
 And insecure and tottering like a child. 
 He shuddered in the torture of dismay. 
 Lest Thought should fade to shadowy feebleness. 
 And Reason, like a skeleton, only hold 
 The form disjointed of its links and power. 
 
 Yet slowly back both Thought and Reason rose. 
 Though not unto their former height of place. 
 Nor gave a promise yet of such return. 
 So seemed to him that life was path of pain 
 For him who had not strength to toil, nor hope 
 Except to suffer weakness to the end. 
 And dead hopes stared their dead stare in his face. 
 And anguish raised its bitter cry to God.
 
 138 Qiwrsinn ? 
 
 ' Give what 'I'hou hast for me, and I Thy gift 
 Will take though it should sear my heart, and pain 
 Be all the guerdon. But I cannot see 
 Thy face to read if what 'i'hou giv'st is love 
 Or anger. NN'hich, O Lord, ui)lifts Thy hand? 
 What holdest Thou in the shadow in Thy grasp ? 
 The band that binds the martyr to his pain, 
 But not to pain of death, but pain of life ? 
 To life's long cell of night, but not to joy 
 Of flaming car that takes him to Thyself? 
 Is that Thy gift ? Then let Thine hand impart 
 The martyr's thrill of grapple with his pain, 
 And let the light of victory in Thine eyes 
 Pour on my heart the rapture of a will 
 That in its rapture overstatures hope. 
 Lest anguish force my loosened grasp to fail, 
 And that be loosed which Thou didst give to hold.' 
 
 Through all had Wake's affection silently 
 Supplied the sufferer's need, whose lower purse 
 Had else been drained. And many hours did he 
 In loving watch beside his prostrate friend. 
 And many hours did IHaxton sil. And oft 
 When other duty gave the interval 
 They spent their time within his room to cheer 
 His days of slow recovery, till his strength 
 Sufficed unto departure's hour of pain.
 
 Granta. 1 39 
 
 Two days, and then departure from those scenes 
 Wherein affection roots too deep its roots ; 
 So near the end was come. What years those years, 
 What past that past had been ! what brought ! what 
 
 wrought ! 
 And yet is absence exile of the heart ! 
 Two days were yet ere Runimont's farewell ; 
 The Priest, in hope by solace to assuage 
 Somewhat the sorrow of the parting hours, 
 Had come. With Runimont he wandered round 
 Amongst those courts whose age-robe like a garb 
 Of lichen hangs its beauty on their walls ; 
 They trode the ample court where Newton dwelt, 
 And passed the chapel-side whose inner space 
 Is thronged with memoried names of those who knelt 
 In worship there. They passed the screens and strolled 
 Through Neville's cloistered court, and reached the lawns. 
 Then went beneath the trees whose tall arcade 
 Arched the long vista, till the tree-girt road, 
 Dyke-bordered, lay beneath their feet. And there 
 They downwards gazed to see the pictured heaven, 
 And pictured light, which dark-hued waters hold. 
 Where topmost trees in early evening's light, 
 And downmost branches, dark in shade, respond 
 Inverted, to the lowmost branch above, 
 And topmost gilding of the sunlit tree ; 
 And sweetness and the calm of heaven below 
 Give answer to the light-calm heaven above,
 
 140 Qitorsmn? 
 
 () earth, can even thy dyke-slow waters, stained 
 
 With tincture of decay so picture Hght ? 
 
 So glow with peace? so show the far-off heaven? 
 
 They looked across to leafy walls which stand 
 Above the Cam, and foliage trailing down 
 To reach the stream and kiss its dusky face. 
 And over all, o'er foliagcd wall and tree 
 And lawn-sloped banks, the buildings of the past 
 Rose in their varied outlines softly clear, 
 And bells that sang for evening chapel gave 
 A voice expressive of some distant peace, 
 Some distant hope, some joy afar but sure, 
 Some far-off victory, some far-off rest. 
 
 And as they strolled along, ' These were my haunts,' 
 Said Runimont ; ' these, since the shadows closed 
 Around the hour whose hope was living glow. 
 First here to me she dawned ; her form of light 
 Long labouring through the massive bank of cloud 
 That wrapped her round. Hut gathering strength awhile. 
 She tore the swathing dullness, and looked forth 
 From her celestial home 'mid flame-red locks. 
 And seemed as bent to conquer, and lit u[) 
 The scene to life's horizon with her glow 
 Of bright-hued promise, then hemmed in again 
 Fell back into the dreary grey of day. 
 And left the landscape hueless, veiled, and dull.
 
 Graf it a. 141 
 
 The voices of that past are quivering still 
 
 And press upon the present. Old thoughts speak 
 
 And old ideals voice themselves with word, 
 
 Old longings cry — but all as with the tone 
 
 Of a dead voice in phonograph stored up 
 
 And speaking of the past as in the past, 
 
 And memory seems as if in act to tear 
 
 The coverings from her coffined slumberers — 
 
 The past is past — why should it wake again ? ' 
 
 ' Is life to you, my friend,' the Priest replied, 
 * Only the tomb of what no more can be ? 
 Only a fugue repeating o'er and o'er 
 With changes sorrow-noted its own past ? 
 And has the present only hope to spend 
 Its efforts in a wail o'er what is gone ? 
 Let not your will in helplessness lie crushed 
 Beneath the swooning form of wounded hope — 
 Bid it be patient and arise, O friend. 
 Wait but awhile for strength, and bid it rise 
 That it receive aright what meaning lies 
 In all that bars the onward path, and tread 
 To victory. Bid it arise and use, 
 Not fail beneath the trial. Could the rock 
 That towers to catch the glow of morning sun, 
 And throw the gleam upon the dawn-dull pass, 
 Be dowered with strength to spurn the tingling cold 
 Of clutching ice, and macerating drip
 
 142 Quorsmn ? 
 
 Of dribbling stream, and the expanding heat 
 
 Of summer's forceful sun, without its past — 
 
 When titan forces pressed it in its bed 
 
 Of hope-lorn proneness mercilessly down, 
 
 And in the sweat of anguish held it crushed, 
 
 Until its inmost atoms, tortured, writhed 
 
 Into new combinations ? Thus, made strong 
 
 Beyond its compeers, adamantine-willed 
 
 It rose upheaved to face the myriad years 
 
 And scorn its frost foes and the dalliance 
 
 Uf heat ; while in its fellows casual stream 
 
 And shower found scarce-resisting easy prey, 
 
 And bore them into final waste. This teach 
 
 Unto your heart, and bid its patience live, 
 
 And unto your hereafter let your past 
 
 Be not a dream inconsequent of deed, 
 
 But school of greater things. Low lies the heart 
 
 Which lends itself unto the foot of cares 
 
 As pathway. Feebly speaks the string of thought 
 
 Upon whose slackness strikes a nerveless hand.' 
 
 ' I know,' said Runimont, ' T know the truth 
 Too well of all. No words from other lips 
 But speak less clear than does the bitter speech 
 Of lips of slow experience whose face 
 Melts to no human feeling, and I know 
 That if the guerdon of but one success 
 Were the glad destiny of will and thought
 
 Granta. 143 
 
 Resolve would seek again her olden strength, 
 And thoughts now wrapped in powerless infancy, 
 To vex the mind their mother with their limbs 
 Of shrunken waste, would rise as brood of health. 
 But like the spell which on the limbs in dream 
 Drags back the hastener from his aim, a spell 
 Lies cumbering will and mind and thought.' 
 
 ' Then wait,' 
 Replied the Priest, ' and, waiting, hope, till work 
 Becomes a thing which does not mirage-like 
 Go on before and keep itself unreached.' 
 
 ' That have I done,' said Runimont, ' and do : 
 But wait like one who holds beleagured fort, 
 Not hoping for release, and knowing well 
 The end must be to sink o'ermatched in death ; 
 But holds to help his country's cause. Like him 
 I bid my will endure and toil till death. 
 But think not of success beyond this meed : 
 Endurance to the end.' 
 
 ' Then thus endure.' 
 Quiet and low, yet full of all that fills 
 Counsel with strength, the Priest's voice said, ' Endure 
 To conquest. That which tongues pronounce success 
 Is but a showy garment which at times 
 Result, for more display, throws round her form. 
 But greater than the glitter of its robes 
 The living form they wrap ; and spurning these
 
 144 Quorsion ? 
 
 She oft seeks souls with whom along a path 
 
 Lowlier but nobler, dearer to her heart, 
 
 In garb severely simple she may walk 
 
 And unbedizened. See you hold not deed 
 
 At valuing of repute that follows deed, 
 
 The blame or flattery which the changeful crowd 
 
 Bids or forbids ; but judge it by the laws 
 
 That are eternal laws of right and truth. 
 
 So do ; so patience keep ; so wait the end.'
 
 XIV. 
 THE DYING SCULPTOR 
 
 AUTUMN let fall at touch of winter's cold 
 The wand she held, and bade the woods be clad 
 In garb of changeful hues. And spring arose 
 In glad young strength and smiled, till winter's cold 
 Gave way beneath the beaming of her smile, 
 And she with laughing voice of windy stir, 
 That shook the leaves, pursued by summer passed, 
 And hid herself to wait another year. 
 
 A few brief days — they seemed to friendship brief — 
 The friends together spent. The Engineer, 
 The Priest, and Runimont, and ^Vake, and next 
 The man of Science, Flaxton then, and last 
 For briefest, Belford, not alone he came. 
 And w-elcome much was given the bride he brought. 
 A hostel on the gentler slopes that front 
 The snowy heights at which they gaze from far 
 Was where they met. Around, the leafy trees 
 
 L
 
 146 Q II or sum? 
 
 Let through wide gaps the distant dream, and rich 
 In foHage wrapping all the hostel's walls, 
 The creeper waved its trailing arms and spake 
 In love-low whisper as the breeze went by. 
 At eve in gathered group they sat to talk, 
 And as they sat the Priest rehearsed the tale 
 Of one whose tale not long before had wrought 
 Itself its sad accomplishment. His voice 
 Beginning, other voices all grew still. 
 
 'Low in the hope-lorn twilight of that room — 
 Twilight it was within though day without — 
 Lay he I came to see, and lay alone ; 
 And I drew near and saw the dreary dream 
 Of eyes that in large gaze from out their caves, 
 Sunk in the whiteness of a face shrunk back 
 Upon its bony frame, took what they saw, 
 But, listless, for no information sought 
 Of what they took, but only, as I moved. 
 Followed my movements, as an infant's gaze 
 Half-sleeping, follows moving light. I reached 
 And took the hand stretched helpless at his side, 
 And added to excuse for entrance words 
 Whereby intrusion sought in service given 
 The answer of acceptance. Unto this 
 His weak lips gave their murmured thanks, but more, 
 His eyes ; though there I saw a sorrow rest 
 Whose shade the gleam of thanks could scarce illume ;
 
 The Dying Sculptor. 147 
 
 And few his words in answer to my words, 
 
 And to my questions little his replies 
 
 Gave answer, and itself the room told more ; 
 
 Traces too clear it showed of conflict waged 
 
 Against its fate of poverty and death 
 
 By genius which in victory wounded fell. 
 
 The clay stood there which finger-pressed was left 
 
 To stiffen into death of rigid shape, 
 
 When from the work his hand could grasp no more 
 
 He crept to lie where he had since lain low. 
 
 Of all but barest needs the room was bare, 
 
 And scarce of even these it held the signs, 
 
 And help or comfort for the sick was none ; 
 
 But, from their stand, unto the hollow face 
 
 Of him who made them, turned his visible thoughts 
 
 In moulded clay and looked their changeless look, 
 
 And held their moveless limbs, and spoke their love, 
 
 And told their sorrow, and their calm of ire, 
 
 In moveless dignity. And in his face 
 
 Sickness I read, but more than sickness read ; 
 
 Famine was there, awaiting, as I saw. 
 
 The moment's near approach when she could light 
 
 Her fire of fever. Drug nor nurse at hand 
 
 To help, and on his lips, in low response 
 
 To all my questions, words whose meaning mocked 
 
 The weakness of his voice, " no need of help 
 
 For ailment light and soon to pass away."
 
 148 Quorsum ? 
 
 ' I stayed but little time. With feigned excuse 
 As of appointment made whose hour had come, 
 Entreating leave thereafter to return 
 I left the room, and with the granted leave 
 Gained chance to l?ring the help which soon must come 
 For even short respite — else would come too late. 
 
 ' Of fitting food and help secure, again 
 I sought the room, and through persuasion slow 
 Attained success, by little to impart 
 And little, drops of food. And on my steps 
 One I had sought — physician he and friend — 
 Followed, who came, he said, to seek me here 
 On matters bent whose bidding could not wait 
 Uncertain interval of my return, 
 But in the sequel of excuses turned 
 As with new thought to know what illness here 
 Had asked my help, with other questioning. 
 Which sympathy new awakened seemed to prompt. 
 
 * I turned unto the sculptor's face, as there 
 Seeking the answer he, not I, should give, 
 And then my friciul, with question more direct 
 And tone of interest growing in his voice, 
 Drew slowly from the silence and the words 
 Of him who stiffly held in silence all — 
 Save what his feelings felt uncouth to keep — 
 The knowledge tliat he sought, and gained at last
 
 TJie Dying Sculptor. 149 
 
 Reluctant leave to listen to the voice 
 Wherewith his beating heart its message sent 
 Through breast and limb ; and note the whispered sign 
 "WTiich travelled through the corridors of breath, 
 And test the burning of the flame of life. 
 
 ' Thus, careful of the wound of noble pride, 
 We carried all the bastions of his will, 
 And brought unto his weakness aid of drug 
 And tendance ; and more face of comfort gave 
 To the bare room, and curtained out its dearth. 
 But more than this we had no power to give — 
 The life to every effort wrought gave back 
 An answer of delay, too short delay, 
 And hope not even evasive gave reply, 
 ' A moon, a moon or so, and then the end.' 
 
 ' And somewhat oft I sought the room with him, 
 Who pressed the pleasure of his tendered skill 
 Upon the patient's still unwilling heart. 
 Which persevering tendance made to glow 
 At last with welcome. Somewhat oft alone 
 I went and sat beside the dying man. 
 To give the respite of an interval 
 To the assiduous nurse, and cheer with words 
 Of solace, if a solace were, the heart 
 Of him from whom all comfort seemed so far.
 
 I 50 Qnorsuvi ? 
 
 'And thus some days went by, and then his tongue, 
 Released a little from its famine-chain 
 And moving to the thrill of friendship, grown 
 Now strong, revealed the story of his life. 
 
 * An only child, whose parents long before, 
 By sickness hurried through exhaustion's gate 
 To death, had gazed their parting gaze of grief 
 On him they left an orphan, friendless, lone : 
 His way along the thorns of life had lain 
 Away from kin, and nearer seemed than kin 
 The friends and even the strangers that he knew : 
 For only distant kin at distance his, 
 His father and his mother sole remains 
 To those who bore them of their birthling group ; 
 The rest had closed in death their infant sleep — 
 
 ' He told me how when first the sense of form 
 Like revelation of a glory came, 
 It filled his heart with eagerness that spoke 
 As if the voice were destiny's, and awaked 
 New longings that impelled him on and on. 
 He told me how when music on his ears 
 Was poured, it woke arrays of forms that filled 
 The chambers of his thoughts and seemed divine ; 
 And how from toil to toil his spurred resolve, 
 And goal to goal, in ceaseless quest advanced. 
 And power had seemed to come with stroke of tool ;
 
 Tlie Dying Sculptor. 151 
 
 But more reward than barest sustenance 
 Came not to aid his labour-driven thought. 
 
 ' But yet at times, for very joy of toil 
 He laboured on, whene'er the shaper Thought 
 Unveiled her quick creations to his hands ; 
 And even, at times, despair of giving shape 
 To that which floated all divinely clear 
 Before his thought, impelled his will the more 
 To break the barriered fence which daunted hope. 
 
 ' His way- — the long, long length by penury dogged — ■ 
 He toiled to Italy Rome-wards. There at Rome 
 What seemed awhile the auguries of success 
 Floated about him, voiced with thronging hopes, 
 But changed their wheeling course and spake despair. 
 
 * And here upon his lips not words that moved, 
 But quivering came, and 1 in silence sat 
 Until his trembling voice resumed its tale. 
 
 ' "A friend," he said, " came one day in and led — 
 Asking to see the shapes my studio held — 
 A group to me unknown, but friends of his. 
 And of the group was one whose form of grace 
 On the sweet verge of ripening womanhood. 
 And voice and stately gesture, drove my thoughts 
 Upon themselves confused. A strange delight
 
 '5- Qnorsitiii ^ 
 
 And stranger fear encaged them, and my words 
 AVith tlicm, that laal in lidplessness like wings 
 By fluttering birds hciu frayetl through prisoning bars 
 For exit; stammering thought gave stammering word. 
 
 ' " To me, before that hour, had form appeared, 
 When form was beauty, like a thing divine 
 Whereon I gazed with awe that kept my thoughts 
 As kneeling worshippers, but there came then 
 A newer thrill, a newer awe, a joy 
 That stretched its seraph hand to thrill with pain. 
 From kneeling unto prostrate sank my thoughts. 
 And yearnings, whispered in my heart before. 
 Broke into cries. And perfect form that stood 
 Afar before to take the worship given. 
 Sublime and cold, made new approach in her, 
 And looked direct upon the thrills it woke. 
 And, looking, roused the thrills to ravishment ; 
 A sacred joy in feeling of unworth 
 To share the honour so bestowed welled up, 
 And while it humbled seemed exalting more. 
 
 "'She came once more, and yet once more again, 
 And I, as in the .spell of some sweet dream, 
 Forgetful of all other thought or form, 
 Found her in all imagination worked. 
 Found her in every hint emotion gave. 
 New shapelings flitted frequent into view,
 
 TJie Dying Sculptor. 153 
 
 That were each one some sweet suggested joy, 
 
 Fashioned upon the Uving clay of thought 
 
 By gestures and by movements which were hers. 
 
 ' " 'Twas hke the end of weary pilgrimage 
 In a sweet land of sunny blissful peace, 
 Whose clouds sailed love-winged through a love-clear 
 
 heaven, 
 And boundary hills afar through lucent air 
 Showed their calm dream of cities height-enthroned 
 Above the lowly sleep of sweet champaign, 
 And one long rim afar of distant hope 
 Spake low the sweet suggestion of the sea 
 Love-lit, love-billowed, there, unseen but sure. 
 Lengthening the unseen distance with far joy. 
 A land whose birds poured melody through the day, 
 Like that which from their nests they chirp at eve. 
 Love's sleep song. Evening's splendour sank to rest 
 At serenading of the still sweet night, 
 That filled its sleep with dreamy thoughts of peace, 
 And melted into blissful morn that lit 
 The verdure with the jewelled lace of dew. 
 And filled the heaven with treasured light, and rose 
 With distant song which echoed forth the strains 
 Sung sweet in dream. And sunny day brought lull 
 In all its sleeping light and restful shade ; 
 A lull was on my thoughts that lost themselves 
 Adream, and lost, except as shades which moved
 
 154 Quorsum? 
 
 And voices that without a meaning spake, 
 All knowledge of the world around of men. 
 
 ' " But, like the distant mumble of the snow, 
 Broken and speeding to its fateful fall. 
 The news fell on my heart that she was gone. 
 And then the increasing thunder and its crash 
 Beat on my brain, and dashed my buried thoughts 
 Down depth and depth in wild enveloi)ed fall, 
 And in the sequent silence all was dark. 
 
 * " Gone ! all my power and all my life was gone, 
 A self that seemed a sepulchre and held 
 Some dead self's corse was what was left behind ; 
 The very air of day clung close and choked 
 With pain of breath — room, room I sought and breath, 
 And beat with gasp the walls that stifled space. 
 
 ' " Gone ! And my heart that in its moveless dream 
 Of joyous awe had been to such a thought 
 As any end oblivious, and no word 
 Had dared, nor even a sign that spake of love, 
 Was filled with stings that turned upon themselves 
 And stung and stung in madness of regret. 
 
 ' " But worse than even the stinging of regret, 
 A lash of bitterer thought enforced a calm. 
 Cold reasoning calm, a calm like that which comes
 
 TJie Dying Sculptor. 1 5 5 
 
 When down the ice-browed precipice of alp 
 The cragsman, slipping, sums with lightning speed 
 Event and chance before him, and his glance 
 Surveys in those few moments all of hope 
 Or all the death that is his rushing fate. 
 
 ' " Speak unto her of love ? How should I speak — 
 The starling to the eagle speak of love ? 
 To what reception would the high-born maid 
 Admit the words ? A cold surprise of stare 
 From her were like the stroke of bitter death, 
 Nay, aught which unto chill of distance changed 
 The stately kindness of her present seemed 
 That it would fill with torture all the hours 
 And all the future years. An easier fate 
 It were, upon my prostrate neck to feel 
 The pressure of her foot that trode my gaze 
 And lips into the dust that foot had graced. 
 If this could mean compassion, than to speak 
 And bring the death of all that could be hope. 
 
 ' " Yet rose at times regret in fevered rush 
 And held a maddened struggle with despair ; 
 Was there so much in blood and high descent 
 That scorn were certain end of ventured love ? 
 Was high-born heart so distant from access. 
 So far aloof from what could give it joy ? 
 Her eyes had hung upon my work and filled
 
 1 56 Qnorsuvi / 
 
 With rapture as they gazed, and smile had Ht 
 Her Hps, as turning to my face she showed 
 Reception of the thought upon the clay 
 Impressed, or sculptured on the chiselled stone. 
 And when she gazed upon them I, thrilled through, 
 Had seen the look of light which grew like that 
 Of one in hope and happy love adrcam 
 Upon her mate when he is far away. 
 
 ' "And could she love the shapcling thought and turn 
 Cold scorn upon its shaper? Speaking thus, 
 Doubt brought up anguish gasping in my throat, 
 And misery unto weakening palsied thought. 
 And hateful were the weary days and nights 
 And l)lank. And hateful was the voice of men 
 And harsh and grating, who, not shadows now, 
 But loud, intrusive, hustling, seemed to press 
 And trample on the wound that laid me low. 
 
 ' " Then sickness smote me that my feeble thought 
 Wrought as in stupor, dreaming that the shapes 
 Of its dim fancy equalled those its toil 
 Of earlier years created — dull, dead dolls. 
 Shapeless, not even grotesque she saw them, waked 
 Once more at end of months, but waked to see, 
 Too feeble to create — and horror came 
 And dread. Had power for ever left my brain ? 
 Had destiny for my end a nameless grave,
 
 The Dying Sculptor. 157 
 
 Unto which goal through wilderness she led 
 My useless steps? 'Twere better far at once 
 To lay me in the desert than drag on. 
 
 ' " But strength crept back, and when it came I rose 
 To meet rfly fate. It \vere not just to her 
 To venture even to bind her life to bear 
 The loss of all that she must lose for me, 
 Though such Elysium as her love would bring 
 Should be the sequel of my love confessed. 
 Be silent then, let silent love pour out 
 Its unavowed expression and its strength 
 In work the better done for love of her, 
 And dream, for satisfying of that love, 
 That she would let her eyes upon my work 
 Rest with that loving light mine eyes had seen 
 When she — and I was near — on it had gazed. 
 And with some kindly thought would dwell on him 
 Who worked the shapes which gave her soul delight. 
 
 ' " What memory held still clear of that fair face 
 I wrought in stone as stay to soothe my heart. 
 And often round the neck have held mine arms 
 And spoken to those cold lips, and pressed thereon 
 The reverent kiss which was not meant for stone 
 But dared not hope on more than stone to rest : 
 At times unto my yearning fancy seemed 
 The face as melting to return of love."
 
 158 Quorsuvi? 
 
 ' He pointed to the bust. The face, I saw, 
 Was placed to meet his gaze as there he lay ; 
 It was a face whose noble lineaments. 
 Imperious in their beauty else, revealed 
 The writing of a tenderness which spoke 
 As almost with a living voice, and thought 
 Imprinted there seemed more of heart than mind, 
 Though imprint clear of mind was also there. 
 
 ' " But it was all in vain," he said, " in vain. 
 It has been all in vain, and hopeless love 
 And bitter anguish of regret have broken 
 My days, and almost has my madness reached 
 At times such strength that I was fain to drag 
 My anguish in confession to her feet 
 And ask for what I felt could be but death. 
 
 ' " I loved, and never had that which I loved — 
 Had I possessed and lost, my grief, meseems, 
 Were easier borne — if even a single hour 
 Of that which I must pine for till I die. 
 Her love, had smiled upon me, then were fate 
 Less dark, less crushing ; but to love and feel 
 A stony silence all of love's return 
 Is fire that in its lightless flame torments — 
 The fire of something worse than a despair." 
 
 * He said not more. Exhaustion's weary drops
 
 IJie Dying Sculptor. 159 
 
 Stood thick upon his pallid face and brow, 
 
 And on the skin-loose framework of his hands. 
 
 I wiped away the drops and gave him food, 
 
 And held the trembling hand which clung to mine. 
 
 No word at first I spake — what word had I 
 
 F"or solace unto such a fateful grief? 
 
 ' But when with food and rest the trembhng ceased, 
 I ventured question who she was, and where, 
 If he yet knew. And in the answer learnt 
 'T was one of whom I knew but knew her not. 
 But once in days when she was child had seen, 
 
 'And as I left the room that day a thought 
 Came to me like a floating leaf which clings 
 Wind-pressed upon a garment's woollen front — 
 It clung and held and would not loose its hold. 
 
 ' I doubted if my steps might go the way 
 O'er which that thought held out its pointing hand. 
 But ever when the doubt came forth to hide 
 The signal, upwards rose the thought and held 
 Its finger sternly forwards in command 
 To that within which answers duty's call. 
 
 ' It bade me seek the maid on whom such thoughts 
 Of love were poured. I started on the quest 
 And gained the meeting sought. Such face and form
 
 1 6o Quorsiim ? 
 
 I wondered not should wake the love, yet wake 
 The awe which kept love silent in its spell. 
 
 ' In answer to my earnest wish she gave 
 An audience to the tale of want and woe, 
 Which first I told without its secret note 
 Of love, and gained expression of distress 
 At want and sickness crowning genius thus 
 \\'ith poison-wreath of death. Then point by point 
 I made my way, and led her memory back 
 To know the sufferings as of one to her 
 Not utter stranger ; then at last unrolled, 
 But cautiously, the story of the love 
 And worship rooted in the dying heart. 
 
 * Astonishment and silence, at the first 
 Were answer. I with eyes upon the ground 
 Sat in suspense. When I al kiigth looked up 
 I saw the imperial beauty of that face 
 O'erhued with paleness, and unnoticed tears 
 Stole down their silent way, and unrevealed 
 By word, emotions stirred wiiliin their shrine 
 Of maiden heart — I sought not what, nor felt 
 A right to seek — so one I sought came forth — - 
 Pity — which came and grandly rose and filled 
 Her heart and with its impulse checked the voice 
 Of pride, and in true human garb looked forth 
 And sought out comfort for the heart which soon 
 The voice of comfort would address in vain.
 
 The Dying Sculptor. i6l 
 
 ' She bade me as from her supply in full 
 Whatever comfort lacked, whatever need 
 Required, and made appointment of an hour 
 Wherein to meet me at the sculptor's side. 
 And somewhat shyly, yet with voice whose tone 
 Showed greatness reigning queen, she gave to me 
 To take what more than all, she felt, would help — 
 Pledge of her coming soon — her pictured face, 
 A\Tierein his dying thoughts a present joy 
 Would find. 
 
 And this her gift I took, and took 
 The promise, and with cautious words and slow 
 Unto his listening told my deed and tale. 
 
 "Twas like the waking of the dead to life 
 That heard not at the first the voice which called ; 
 But after faintly heard — then more distinct. 
 And hearing woke. So grew his face to smile 
 Of joy from its wan shadow of despair. 
 His feelings, keen with reverent love, took in 
 The meaning of the visit and the gift. 
 As if by intuition, finely true — 
 Not even in fondest dream his hope had held 
 Such prize of joy, nor did his grateful thought 
 Seek more return to glad his dying heart 
 Than such sweet sympathy from her he loved. 
 
 ' The hour was come — and living face and look, 
 
 M
 
 1 62 QuorsiDii ? 
 
 Not marble's fixed response of eye, returned 
 His gaze — the marble at his wish was gift 
 To her, accepted as from liim when death 
 Should end his need for marble's memoried form. 
 
 ' His eyes looked up to hers, and spoke in light ; 
 And all the thin white face with grateful joy 
 And reverence shone. It seemed as if I saw 
 An angel smiling from beyond the bourne 
 Of life with love that made approach from far. 
 And she her face bent down to his to gaze 
 In such sweet passionless love as like reply 
 From answering angel beamed. When I, as oft, 
 See o'er again that scene 't is like a glimpse 
 Of some new world, where love is glorified. 
 Shadowy in form, but of transcendant might. 
 
 ' What glory gilt those afternoons with joy. 
 Wherein her visits came, and lit the morns 
 With zodiac-light of sweet expectancy. 
 And gave his nights their silent requiem — peace. 
 
 ' The moon was scarcely past. His pallid sleep 
 Was plainly floating him to brink of death. 
 We sat in silence as she stayed to see 
 His open eyes if, opened once again, 
 They made return of gaze. I saw her stoop 
 And lightly with her lips his forehead press.
 
 TJie Dying Sculptor, 163 
 
 The kiss, before her face was raised, awoke 
 
 The sleeper, and he knew what just had passed — 
 
 He smiled as one whose eyes surprised beheld 
 
 The earliest glimpse of heaven. Death caught the smile 
 
 Before it passed, and shaped the grateful glow 
 
 And silent calm of that pale wearied face 
 
 Into the semblance of an angel's sleep.'
 
 XV. 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 THE eve before the group broke up they turned 
 To him of Science, to beguile the hour 
 Of dusk with somewhat from his learning's store, 
 And thus in turn he led their listening thoughts. 
 
 ' I wandered through the world of living things, 
 Seeking to understand what is, what was ; 
 And wishful in the varying multitude 
 To trace the laws which rule the growth of form. 
 Long time it seemed I trode with useless steps. 
 But at the end I heard a voice which said, 
 " Not outward semblance but homologous part 
 Must be your field of search : For structure, like. 
 Shows kin, and, unlike, hints remoter kind ; 
 And function is interpretation's guide 
 To show what is homology of parts." 
 
 ' I looked, and lo the world of life was grouped 
 By that new thought unto its kinds and kin :
 
 Evolution. 165 
 
 ^^^lat else had seemed a random scattering, 
 
 Unmeaning, planless, then arrayed itself 
 
 To groups and kindreds each with settled post. 
 
 'Again a voice, which said like quiet thought, 
 " Likeness in growth's successive stages shows 
 The same descent." The thought lit up the path. 
 Obscure before. The youngest shapes of Time 
 And skeletons of the past, the embedded dead 
 Of ancient rocks, took up their several posts. 
 The deep gave forth its forms to join the array 
 From out the mystery of its thwarted light, 
 Even to the lowliest shape of living slime: 
 Forms limited, not shaped, that gave not yet 
 A prophecy of symmetric shape — nor more 
 Than segmentation leading slowly on 
 To more complexity of larger whole ; 
 And all stood forth in rightful rank and place. 
 
 ' But then came lower, and so low, I heard 
 But part and not the whole of what it spake — 
 A distant voice. " Life and unlife are linked, 
 And to interpretation of the whole, 
 Unlife and life in one, these four lead forth — 
 Inertia, function, kin, environment ; 
 And dower of fittest tendency o'ercomes." 
 
 ' But dim and dimmer grew my thoughts, I seemed
 
 1 66 Quorsum ? 
 
 Steered outwards in a shadowy bark afar 
 
 To unknown coasts, whose filmy headlands rose 
 
 From out a hazy ocean ; then still on, 
 
 To pointless movement on a fog-bound sea, 
 
 O'er which at last a thought rose up and loomed. 
 
 But rose not o'er the fog in steady pause, 
 
 It gave through gaps a glimpse and then was lost. 
 
 And I was borne to vaguer, dimmer dream. 
 
 'A solitude around, and utter blank. 
 An infinite of nothingness, nor near 
 Nor far a goal, nor near nor far a point, 
 By which to trace direction or approach 
 Or growing stretch of distance ; nor was Place, 
 To give suggestion of *' beyond." For " near " 
 Was not nor " far," nor aught by which itself 
 Movement could know as movement, nor the lapse 
 Of "then " to "now" reveal itself, and nought 
 To show the embryo "now " as passing phase 
 In the evolving of " to be " . . . a pause, 
 A sleep or death of movement, force, and place, 
 Expanse, dimension — nay, of matter's self, 
 And even of tliat whose interaction builds 
 The mystic building " matter." Not one thrill 
 Feeblest of feeble passed the awful void, 
 Not one last trace of gurgle, as a sun 
 Disintegrate and dark, was lost, dissolved 
 Into the undimcnsioned nothingness,
 
 Evolution. l6y 
 
 No whisper of a dying system's breath 
 Rippled its last, its faintest, through the vast. 
 The pause was like the pause in blank of swoon 
 Between two conscious moments, dreamless, deep, 
 A silence which mysterious faintness told. 
 And that alone, as other than a death. 
 
 ' A blank, unsphered to space by studding stars, 
 Blank dark, unthrilled by vibratings to feel 
 Duration, and unintervalled to time 
 By aught of oscillation, or of phase 
 Of what might seem to go or to return. 
 
 ' Then something, how I knew not, seemed to steep 
 The blank, nor whether slow it came or quick 
 I knew, but what was blank became therewith 
 Chaos of influences that teemed, obscure, 
 But gave to thought the vague, the infant hint 
 Of blank whose awful stillness intervalled 
 Cosmos and Cosmos. And as infant stare 
 Looks on the moving things around, nor knows 
 Distance at first from sequence, so knew thought 
 Not then, if that most stirless silence lay 
 Between a Cosmos that had had a past. 
 And one whose whole existence was to come. 
 Or two existing and isochronal. 
 Or two in part coeval ; and the blank. 
 Ocean of nothingness between their shores.
 
 1 68 Quorsmn f 
 
 'And then there came to thought the feeble dawn 
 Of power which aided her to grope her way 
 Towards the concepts Time and Space, and these 
 Gave the arena over which dim forms — 
 New concepts — passed like titan shadows thrown : 
 A death of something past whereof no sign 
 Disturbed the dark and blank ; a birth to be 
 That gave as yet no sign of coming throe; 
 Concepts whose shadows firm and firmer grew 
 Until they reached to definiteness of form. 
 
 'For those awakening influences that stirred, 
 Seemed in mysterious movement, as results 
 Awaking from a sepulchre of sleep, 
 Renewed to newer phase of infant life ; 
 Infant, not inchoate — renewed, not new ; 
 But yet they stirred them, as delirium's thoughts 
 Half shaped, that crowd each other and rush on 
 In jumble of unsettled path. There seemed 
 No hitherwards of moving sway that woke. 
 Nor thitherwards. Confused unmeaning force. 
 Scattered and mixed and jostling, with no bent, 
 Nor even prophetic tendency, to point 
 To settled course or rhythm or gathering shape. 
 
 ' Then came, as when from vague delirium's dream 
 Thoughts trace their way to reason, that which gave
 
 Evolution. 1 69 
 
 Impress of aim which slowly shaped itself 
 
 To certain path. And in the vast afar 
 
 Grew glimmering haze, that in slow change became 
 
 A cloudy light ; and as the light grew more, 
 
 The chaos filled about with thrills that moved 
 
 In complex movement, rhythmic as in thrall 
 
 Of subjugating law with destined aim ; 
 
 And slowly changed the light to shape defined 
 
 Of spiral glow, that later knit its streams 
 
 Into spheroidal fire oblate in whirl. 
 
 ' And ever in the blank afar some streak. 
 Some haze, some cloudy film of light appeared. 
 New, one succeeding other, till there glowed 
 Ten thousand shapes diverse of nebulous cloud : — 
 The blank became the studded sphere of space. 
 
 ' But measureless in age, for awful length, 
 Seemed the slow moulding of the dawning haze 
 To spheroid fire, unmeasured as the dark 
 From which that haze had crept. But now I knew 
 The wreck of a past cosmos in what filled 
 The dark of blankness. In the blank I knew 
 The death of what had filled a measureless past, 
 A death which to a newer universe 
 Was birth, and gave it in that silent throe, 
 As heritage from its mother's dying pulse. 
 The embryo bent of destiny which shaped
 
 1 70 Quorsum ? 
 
 Its progress through unmeasured length of age 
 Unto its death in the eternal-far. 
 
 'And, as I watched, the spheroid fire, grown large, 
 Brought forth its mighty progeny, evolved 
 Through ring and swarm and globe to planet suns — 
 The embryo brood of millioned years — that rolled 
 Their titan forms around their parent globe 
 \Vhich shrank and shrank in giving birth, but blazed 
 The brighter for the pang of lessening self. 
 
 ' One of that brood I watched, to see its growth : 
 Begun as hazy ring of floating light, 
 Which, when its infancy of ring was past, 
 And youth of spiral gyrating, that closed 
 In spheroid orb of slow maturity, 
 Wrapped round itself even such a film of ring 
 As it itself in infancy had been ; 
 And gave the 'minished story of its birth 
 In that new child which grew to sphere and rushed 
 In wilful course around, and lost the glow — 
 Its dower at birth — and colder grew and shrank. 
 And, shrinking, rolled in wider path, and changed. 
 Till, parted far, a cold and blistered ball 
 Spinning with slowing gait, with wandering worn, 
 Unable to return, it turned its face. 
 In changeless lassitude and late regret. 
 Always unto the parent it had left
 
 Evolution. lyi 
 
 In wayward wandering ; like a child whose eyes 
 
 In dying turn towards its mother's face, 
 
 And so remained in the still calm of death. 
 
 And while the child thus changed from wreath of flame 
 
 To rigid cold, the parent world, sphered more, 
 
 And gathered more about its lessening self, 
 
 Flung out flame-stretchings of embraces huge 
 
 Towards its retreating child, the awful thrills 
 
 Of wild emotions in continual tide 
 
 Rending her breast with mighty billowing sighs. 
 
 In vain attempt to press her parting kiss 
 
 Upon the child whose wilful slow retreat 
 
 Fulfilled itself in far remorse and death. 
 
 ' But when the child out-distanced all the reach 
 And gurgling of her woe, and grew more cold 
 And let emotion show no visible sign 
 Of living thrill, but only held before 
 The moveless mask of dead emotions past ; 
 Earth's parent breast grew less disturbed and less, 
 Slow-yielding to her long despair. And age 
 From her withdrew her glowing light of youth 
 Until the ash-scarred remnants of her fire 
 Of fierce primeval passion lit no more 
 The space around her, save when here and there 
 A fiery sob of wailing passionateness 
 Broke through the sullen stillness of her breast 
 With earthquake throb.
 
 1 7^ Qtiorsiiin? 
 
 But age by age there came, 
 Even from the burstings of those fiery throbs, 
 New drops of anguish which at first she drove 
 In steamcloud from her scornful breast that brooked 
 No taint of weakness, and flung off afar 
 The signs of tears and oozing sweat of i)ain 
 With titan hiss ; but after, when the strength 
 Of fiery eagerness grew, aging, less 
 They fell upon her bosom — even thus 
 To meet with fierce rejection. But at last 
 Grown weary she permitted their approach 
 In wreath of moving mist, and then in wave. 
 
 ' But when, as oft, she felt her weakness sting. 
 Or when her parent sun unwonted thrills 
 Sent, that were fierce reminders of her past 
 Of fiery power, she raised the lash of winds 
 And drove them whirling forth that would not leave 
 But ever clung. 
 
 So aeons crept away. 
 The passion of remembrance of old strength, 
 And passionate longing for her wandering child, 
 Grew calm, and earth with less reluctant breast 
 Submitted to the mellowing influences 
 Of the vast sea of waters, which remained 
 After the wild emotions of her past, 
 As signs and oozings of her agony ; 
 Whose soothing slow caress, and soft embrace.
 
 Evolntio7i. 173 
 
 Endured at length, brought thrills unknown before, 
 To haste the aging stupor of her grief. 
 That so her scars felt their hard surface veiled 
 With film of lowliest plant, which o'er them spread 
 As if with healing hand of peace. Her seas 
 Filled all their longing depths with lowly hope. — 
 Earth woke to feel the primal touch of life. 
 
 ' New rapture, destiny new ; whose eager rush 
 As of revulsion in the heart, broke forth 
 With an impassioned fulness, to produce 
 Its multitudinous new variety 
 Of mode and form and structure, till at last 
 The rock-thronged mountainous throbbings of her storms 
 Of passion, grown in act of throb to stone, 
 Began unto the stimulus to yield, 
 And spreading plains and nestling vales and slopes 
 Were robed in lofty plant and diapered stem 
 And feathery foliage thick with quivering hopes 
 Responsive to the wooing wind. 
 
 Thus passed 
 Through long-continued change the pictured world, 
 As through a series of dissolving dreams 
 That led still onwards unto newer change : 
 Free-moving life, and moving things to haunt 
 The forest green, and things of wing to flit 
 From plant to plant that carpeted the ground ; 
 And shape and tinge and tender pencilling
 
 1 74 Quorsiiui ? 
 
 And hue in sweet gradated shade began 
 
 On their tipped verdure — means of that strange link 
 
 Which binds the plant unto its birthling plant. 
 
 ' And things of moving life began to feel 
 The stir of new sensations which came forth 
 As feeling, vision, hearing, after growth 
 Crawling through generations. Then arose 
 In later forms of life the mystic sense 
 Which thrills to passion. And the green recess 
 Of forest and the stretching plain were thronged 
 With other sound than sweeping wind — with voice 
 That had a meaning in its changing tones. 
 And slowly memory rose, and — acolyte 
 To memory — reason, and the complex mind ; 
 Till, in the monarch of the throng of life, 
 Passion and feeling grew to nobler selves 
 And blossomed into love, and mind assumed 
 Intelligence and consciousness. And birthed 
 From these came moral sense and sense of shame 
 That unto their possessors contact new 
 Gave with the universe of things, and gave 
 Resource which wrought them power of search and power 
 Of use ; conception that subdues and guides. 
 
 'Thus earth unrolled her scroll of destiny. 
 And, all the ages long, her parted child. 
 The moving moon, beyond her parent aged.
 
 Evolution. 175 
 
 In calm and stiffened cold, but lovelier 
 In her death-cold, poured down her calm of smile 
 Upon her parent earth — a borrowed smile. 
 Which when the storms of life to moveless peace 
 Of death have sunk, shines on, not from, the face. 
 And still the sundered earth in yearning gropes. 
 But gently, for her unforgotten child ; 
 For with such lower tide emotions roll 
 Across her breast, as seem but stir in sleep. 
 
 ' Here let me end — at least this evening end — 
 The story of the universe is long, 
 And all too complex is its tale of life.'
 
 XVI. 
 MAN MORE THAN REASON 
 
 THE chorussed thanks of all were heard, and then 
 The Priest began : 
 
 ' ^Vith nunh delight my thoughts 
 Have at your leading tracked the mighty strides 
 Of one development, amid the throngs 
 Of many millioned orbs that ceaseless roll 
 As denizens of the measureless vast of space : 
 One — type perchance of destiny of all. 
 But type, perchance, as life in lowly forms 
 Is type of life of man. A destiny seems, 
 Like viewless tide that yet is stern in flow, 
 To swceii thr bark of all creation on. 
 Whence comes— the thought within puts question forth — 
 That unreturning tide's determined flow ? 
 Whence came, I ask myself, the destined bent 
 Which gave the embryo-cosmos law of growth ? 
 And whence, as much, the bent that guides to-day 
 The future of the embryo flower or germ 
 Of animal life ? I ask myself who know
 
 Man More than Reason. lyy 
 
 That such poor contact as the mind can have 
 With all that is, gives but one surface-touch, 
 Nor more than one interpretation's voice 
 To that which may have meaning manifold, 
 Or range of meaning wider than the ken 
 Of mind, as wider than the ken of sight 
 Reaches the spectrum-range of solar ray. 
 
 ' In that life-tale repeated ever new — 
 The germ's reiteration of the past 
 Of its far-reaching ancestry, concise 
 And brief and outlined, which its being writes 
 As prologue to the drama of its life — 
 I seem to see one instance of that sway 
 Which reigns through all the universe of things : — 
 Permanence in direction and advance ; 
 Result, the sequel of continuous steps, 
 And not a sudden entity, upsprung 
 Without a link to bind it to the past — 
 The path by which the end attained is reached. 
 No easier has annulling, than long ranks 
 Of centuries on the roll of Time — 
 
 Through all 
 Is permanence in direction and advance. 
 And deviation from the right-lined course 
 Of repetition ever of a self, — 
 The deviation complex influences 
 Force, that themselves vicissitude of path 
 
 N
 
 1 78 Quorsiim? 
 
 Have felt in thrall of some directrix-rein, 
 Or some new influence to themselves akin ; 
 Whose ending, through acceleration slow 
 Of ages, is a course, remote in pace 
 And conformation, from its primal start. 
 
 'Advance, continuance, permanence, result — 
 Not linkless spasms nor self-engendered throbs, 
 As if of matter that were self-upsprung. 
 Matter, the limited, that could not rise 
 Into spontaneous assonance, self-create : 
 These surely speak of impulse by some Power 
 Distinct from Nature unto Nature given : 
 These surely speak Creation, and themselves 
 Are parts of that Creation which they speak. 
 
 ' i\nd though such thought bewilder, it, I deem, 
 Leads not to such inconsequence complete 
 Of supposition as awaits the thought 
 Which feigns a Nature of itself the cause 
 And of its law of being. Though I know 
 'Twere reasonless to deem for Nature need 
 Unto her being and her destiny 
 That they be comprehensible to man : 
 What cannot be, man only in one sort 
 Can judge, nor is lie measure of the whole. 
 No finite cruse exhausts Infinitude.
 
 Man Mo7'e thmi Reason. 179 
 
 ' These impulses of Nature signs I deem, 
 And impress of a Power which shapes the mode 
 Of every birthhng Universe His Thought 
 And Will engender; Him, I deem, from these 
 His thoughts, in personal separateness distinct. 
 These His and He not them. 
 
 And " He," I say, 
 And "personal separateness," and, saying, feel 
 As if a lisping child would strive in words 
 To utter some inceptive thought that comes 
 And flutters near and floats away, too huge 
 For grasp, in cloudy maze. For saying " He" 
 Of that Eternal Will, I use the word 
 And know too well, that Personality 
 Of Infinite Presence and Eternal Power 
 Is limned in feeblest outline by such terms ■ 
 As paint with easy stroke all powers of man. 
 
 ' But would express, by terms like these, belief 
 That He whose roll of thought is Universe 
 Succeeding Universe, is such that these 
 His thoughts, in Him have part like man's in man, 
 Nor span the might of His Infinitude 
 More than do man's successive ponderings span 
 The power and life of him whose passing states 
 Of brain they mark ; but that they bear to length 
 Of His eternity such length as bear
 
 I So QuorsujH? 
 
 Man's separate thoughts unto man's sum of Hfe, 
 Who lives beyond their evanescent term. 
 
 'And I by saying " He" would say that power 
 Belongs that Infinite Being, which controls 
 The long array of Universes birthed 
 One from the other, with such sway as man 
 By will exerts to fashion or destroy 
 Over the shapelings of his brain— save this : 
 Man does no more than group— that Power creates. 
 
 ' This palimpsest, this cosmos bears, I hold. 
 Throughout the impress of the Hand that writes. 
 
 'And also saying " Personal '' and •' He," 
 Thus argue : to that Infinite Power belongs 
 Existence which from all that is besides 
 Sunders that Power, as consciousness and life 
 Do man from things that have not life as dower.' 
 
 ' I have no yea to say, and yet no nay,' 
 Replied the man of Science, ' to your thought. 
 If there be cause — then, what that cause may be. 
 Or whether cause is part of matter's self 
 I say not, cannot say; for natural things 
 Have naught that can of more revealment show 
 Than of themselves, and of themselves they give 
 Part only; there the knowable has end.
 
 Man More than Reason. iSi 
 
 'You spoke of thought, you seem to speak of Hfe 
 As, in some fashion, property of Him 
 AVho is, in your regard, the Cause of all ; 
 But thought is comrade of a form of life, 
 And all we know of life is as it were 
 The flame of act of combination, lit 
 By ceaseless change and kept by change aglow ; 
 Between such ceaseless, necessary change 
 And changelessness like that you give to Him 
 Yet call it life : between such passing state 
 Of brain in living things as thoughts and that 
 Which you conceive in Him — yet call it thought, 
 Is nought and can be nought of parallel.' 
 
 ' Is nought of parallel full well, I know,' 
 The Priest replied, ' but neither is there aught 
 In all the shapelings of the tongue of man 
 To serve for that delineation's truth 
 Which these, though in the dimmest way, suggest. 
 They are analogy only, faint and dull : 
 But if the words give such poor aid alone 
 As shows a partial truth, and are as far 
 From truth, as from coincidence is far 
 The circle, small of orb, that meets the rim 
 Of one whose ampler sweep leaves separate soon 
 The smaller ; still the words, defective, weak, 
 Are what we have, the likest and the best, 
 And with what words we have as fittest tools
 
 i82 QuorsuDi ? 
 
 It is our lot to shape the thought of Cause 
 Who plans and rules the destiny of all.' 
 
 * If that you need attempt to shape such thought,' — 
 Returned the man of Science, 'but so wide 
 A chasm is placed, without a bridge to cross, 
 Between the shore which mind of man can know 
 And that far shore of mystery profound 
 Whereto such thoughts attempt to take their flight ; 
 Thai what you reach must be a guess too dim. 
 Too shadowy, to give shape to any dream 
 Or adumbration of that cause unknown.' 
 
 ' " If thai you need ! " but there are hearts that need.' 
 The Priest with lighted glance of feeling spoke. 
 * They throng the generations of the past, 
 They throng the present, and what sign appears 
 To show their future fixed diminishing? 
 Lives unto which the need is hope, a hope 
 Without whose spring their thoughts and acts sink down 
 In joyless, dull despair. That need, meseems, 
 Is in no less degree interpreter 
 To tell llic first essential and the cause 
 Of all that is, than Reason is of law 
 In natural things. A need that cries aloud 
 For love and truth and goodness in its God, 
 And sickens unto death before the thought 
 Of one who like a Phantom, all unknown
 
 Man More than Reason. 183 
 
 In attributes and power, commands its way 
 
 Of comfortless silence to a mystery 
 
 Of unknown bourne. Instinctive is the need : 
 
 As much instinctive and as much a need 
 
 As is the mother's love, which never lack 
 
 Makes less a normal thing, though there perchance 
 
 Be lack in any mother of that love — 
 
 Which is no work of Reason, though, with gaze 
 
 Thereon directed, Reason may tell the cause 
 
 Why it exists, nor does she more produce 
 
 What feelings else within the heart of man 
 
 Instinctive work ; they came and entered first 
 
 The portal, she with after-step came in. 
 
 And he who thought to give, as if complete, 
 
 Description of the life of man, and trace 
 
 The source of act, yet thrust out these from view 
 
 That, more than Reason, prompt the deeds of men, 
 
 Would fail, and show no more than part alone. 
 
 And in their narrow field, these, part of man 
 
 And part, as much as Reason herself is part, 
 
 Afford a hand to gain some grasp of truth, 
 
 If truth be that which is ; so there but be 
 
 Interpretation of their meaning given 
 
 In its right harmony with Reason's voice, 
 
 Or such as clashes not with Reason's note. 
 
 Man is not Reason only — man is more.'
 
 XVII. 
 A FAREWELL 
 
 UPON the morrow's morn, on Belford's knee, 
 Just as the voices ceased that spake adieu, 
 At starting of the post-chaise, Runimont 
 A packet placed and what it held was this : 
 
 'Farewell ! 'Tis we to whom the parting pang 
 Brings dark and cold — thou hast what lifts the light 
 Above the waves of sorrow, nay, will hang 
 Stars hope-lit o'er its gurgling sea of night. 
 
 ' The voice and eyes that give thee sweetest rest 
 Thou with thee hast ; be long thy lot to hear 
 That voice to thee of music tunefullest 
 Speak to thy listening heart its love thrill clear. 
 
 ' Thy lot be long to have those eyes to thine 
 Their sweetness of devout affection bear, 
 To have that love its buds of peace to twine 
 In every flowerless wreath of thorny care.'
 
 XVIIL 
 THE LEGEND OF THE VANISHED STAR 
 
 THEIR halting place was close beside a lake, 
 Whose waters in the morning light shone pale 
 And glimmered like the waking of a smile ; 
 And there the long day's sultry length they stayed, 
 For the green waters stream-fed from the ice 
 Of glacier gave the thirst of heated air 
 Sips of their cold. And in the afternoon 
 Came low the thunder-wraith, and crept the lake 
 With trailing cloud, and poured its floods profuse, 
 Swamping the meadow verdure by the shore, 
 And streaming on the lake's pure green a flood 
 Of turbid wave that, mocking the disdain 
 Wherewith the clear-hued deep received it, stained 
 Its face far out. So on to end of day 
 The cloudy torrent whirled itself to swell 
 The turbid throngers of the lake. Awhile 
 At sunset ceasing its impetuous grief, 
 The storm grew still and held its flowing skirts, 
 As gazing on the gold-thrilled rose of eve,
 
 1 86 Quorsuvi ? 
 
 And listening to new chord or thought of hope, 
 Which tinged the duhiess of its gloom with joy ; 
 I'.ul when llic liorizoii-hiddcn sun no more 
 Could lift the glory of its parting smile 
 Face unto face, but only threw o'er heaven 
 Remembrance like the smile that lights the dead ; 
 Then waking from its rapturous reverie 
 It poured anew into the echoing dark 
 Its streaming torrent of repining thoughts. 
 
 And thus the hours grew long, forbidding aught 
 Except delay. Round Runimont the group 
 AVas turned to listen, as he with quiet voice 
 Gave the fulfilment of desires that long 
 His friends had shown by utterance of lip 
 And iteration of the uttered wish ; 
 His lay the legend of the vanished star. 
 
 * I sate within an abbey's ruined wall, 
 Its chapel wall, whose ivy-robe of leaf 
 Clothed it for fresco : moss and grass and fern 
 And bramble decked its floor and upward crept 
 About the bases of the columns, hid 
 By lichens in their tender lowly garb, 
 To cloak the ravage of their moulded lines. 
 Wounds, windows once, gaped silent in the walls, 
 Their tale of grace and beauty lost for aye ; 
 Except that one where eastward once it crossed
 
 TJie Legend of the Vanished Star. 1 87 
 
 The light with branching beauty still retained 
 A fragment of its tracery unto which 
 The climbing ivy reached and sought to give 
 Its clasp of sympathy — a welcome clasp. 
 The wearied fragment seemed to feel the love 
 Which brought the leaf in kindliness so close. 
 Above its responds, still the chancel arch 
 Kept its high watch and showed arcaded walls 
 Facing, on either hand, the trailing grace 
 Of rose and honeysuckle that, like wings 
 Which held the ark in shadow, filled the spot 
 Where the high altar stood. I sought to dream 
 The abbey's past, to see the rites which erst 
 Were celebrated, and to hear the chant 
 Of voices sounding to the timbered roof: 
 To see the hooded throng in slow array 
 Pass up the echoing nave — but sought in vain. 
 My wilful thoughts strayed off from rite to cell, 
 From cell to toil of labouring scribe, from this 
 Unto the pages of an olden book 
 Hand-written on its vellum leaves with ink 
 Of black, and here and there with red adorned. 
 The toil of one who in such home had lived, 
 Whose faded ink and olden-lettered words 
 Deciphered told me tales of olden years ; 
 And one therein there was whose broken thread 
 Was full with fascination to the thoughts 
 Of those who wandered down its faded lines :
 
 1 88 Quorsum ? 
 
 For here and there a line in clearness left 
 Stood like a fragment of a picture, else 
 All veiled to sight, and stirred solicitude 
 To see the whole, but tantalized nor gave 
 The chance, nor could all effort reach to more 
 Than this decipherment of what it held ; 
 It was a legend of a vanished star. 
 But pondering on the fragmentary tale 
 I lost myself in dreaming — this my dream. 
 
 ' Fairest and best it gemmed the crown of dawn. 
 Hung there to thrill her hallowed dream of light 
 ^Vhen first the dawn from out the pristine dark, 
 Rose like a bashful maiden closely veiled 
 To light with joy the earth and new-made sea 
 And heaven, and crept in shyness up as one 
 ^\■ho feared the gaze of that to which she gave 
 The light to see. And best and fairest gemmed 
 The crown of dawn that star. But when the dawn 
 In later years rose pale above the sin 
 And violence of earth, and earth was filled 
 With curse of wrong, the star had lost its light 
 And gemmed no more the dawn till He was come. 
 Whose childhood was the world's new dawn of life. 
 Then new in that new dawn its herald light 
 It gave ; and through His childhood shone and lit 
 With lustrous joy the heavens, while still His voice. 
 Ringing with love and longing like a prayer.
 
 TJie Legend of the Vanished Star. 189 
 
 And teaching clear the faith He held in pain, 
 
 Was heard of men. And earth seemed roused once more 
 
 To sweet remembrance of her Eden prime ; 
 
 And all the yearnings of the age-long past, 
 
 Long crushed in blood and lust and rapine rose, 
 
 And all the weary prayers and all the pain 
 
 Which all those centuries through for love and peace 
 
 And purity had cried, but trodden down 
 
 Had sunk to ashen coldness, seemed anew 
 
 Awaking into fire in human hearts — 
 
 Seemed waking — but they seemed to wake in vain. 
 
 'And earth lay in her shadow of despair, 
 But with the moon to give the silent light 
 Of hopeless smile to light her wrinkled face. 
 The stars shone pale behind her pallid fire, 
 And heaven wheeled round their glittering multitude 
 Like steady tide of uncomplaining grief. 
 
 ' Night, . . . with the moon to give the silent sign 
 Of hopeless smile . . . that night the traitor's lips 
 Had pressed the sop which sacred fingers gave, 
 And shameless from the room of Paschal Feast 
 Had gone to work his treacherous thought to deed. 
 
 ' No thought in those the traitor left within 
 Unto what purpose gone he took his way 
 Thereout into the moonlight's shuddering gleam ;
 
 1 90 Quorsinn ? 
 
 Save that beneath the guise of friendly smile 
 The Master knew the traitor's heart, and knew 
 The horror and the insult and the pain 
 That for Himself the Iscariot-steps would bring, 
 But turned His face towards that pain of death 
 As to a mighty joy, and unto those 
 Who near Him saw His features glory-lit, 
 As with llif triumph of a coming throne, 
 He spake what left His lips like seraph strain 
 Of ecstasy. Then leading forwards trode 
 With feet of conquest on the opened way 
 That led direct unto His agony. 
 
 ' How wan, how weary is His face, how pale 
 The scattered glimmer of His anguished eyes, 
 His languid form, held rigid unto toil 
 Of prayer in pain, is quivering through with throes — 
 And yet He sinks it not to earth to rest. 
 
 'I see upon the pallor of His brow 
 An oozing stain. ... It drips from off" Thy face 
 O Christ, but Thy clasped hands held close in prayer 
 Regard it not, nor cease their clutching clasp . . . 
 He bows His head. It meets the dew-cold ground. . . . 
 
 ' Long thus He knelt, prayer-bowed with face to earth 
 And from the westward heaven where evening light 
 Had died there came a star, that nearer drew 
 In constant flight and bright and brighter seemed,
 
 The Legend of the VanisJied Star. 191 
 
 Held in the grasp of one whose robe streamed out 
 Like a clear web of floating light of moon, 
 And form was angel's and the star, him close. 
 Was in his grasp a chalice glowing clear. 
 And bending low on reverent knees, with face 
 Awe-veiled by love, that angel-form the cup, 
 Flashing like lighted crystal purest white. 
 Offered unto the kneeUng Son of man. 
 
 'And of the cup He drank, but as He ceased 
 Some drops of that red flow which left His brow 
 Fell in the cup, whose light that sacred touch 
 Of anguish sudden changed from crystal white 
 To crimson tender-pale, whose glorious hue 
 Glowed sweeter than the sweetest light of gem. 
 
 ' Straight to that scene the traitor's footsteps came ; 
 But as he came the angel-form arose 
 In heavenward flight, and holding in his hands 
 The glowing chalice. Crimson from the heaven 
 Its parting light was flashed, and as the kiss 
 Of treachery touched the lips of sacred woe 
 The light was lost, eclipsed in sudden dark. 
 And thenceforth from the heaven was gone the star 
 Whose morning joy flashed o'er that sacred birth. 
 
 'And men looked longing oft to heaven to see 
 Once more its rays, and looked in vain, and left
 
 192 Quorsii7n ^ 
 
 The hope of its appearing once again 
 
 Unto the generations unfulfilled. 
 
 Thus the long hope was handed down the years. 
 
 ' But at the end of centuries lived a monk 
 Ere mid-life worn to age by toil that sought 
 No boon for self, l)ut in tlie use of self 
 To work relief for woe and aid distress, 
 And in effacing of all wish but this 
 Sought the fulfilment of impassioned aim ; 
 The fevered felt the soothing of his touch, 
 The leper knew his care, the tongue of age 
 In famine and in suffering uttered words 
 Of blessing, and the dark of dungeon foul 
 Had hid his form, but let into the light 
 The broken wretch whose place he took therein. 
 
 ' His worn heart, beating with that one desire, 
 Reached in its long endurance of the strain 
 Unto more fevered passion, as his frame 
 More weakly grew, and self-devotion, stung 
 By its own spurs, began like frightened steed 
 To champ upon the bit of self-restraint. 
 
 ' It was a morn of early summer's glow; 
 Upon a hill, and just beneath its brow, 
 He sat. The toil of tendance in the night 
 And rush of thoughts, which, like a stormy wind
 
 The Legend of the ]^anished Star. 193 
 
 Fluttered the quiet dignity of will, 
 
 Had left him chafing unto wild unrest. 
 
 O'erhead the fir trees' groined embranchments hung, 
 
 And their dead needles strewed the summer soil. 
 
 And where the steep forbiddal of a rock 
 
 Barriered the trees, the light of morning crept 
 
 And lit with smile the moss-draped stems. The rock 
 
 Was near his seat, and its high outline stood 
 
 Tinted in hue of dawn. And soon the sun 
 
 Behind a fronting ridge, fire-pinnacled 
 
 With pines that robed them in the jewelled light, 
 
 Arose, dissolved the pines awhile in glow. 
 
 And underneath their foliage, midst the stems 
 
 Where long the stems had ceased to hold their arms 
 
 In hopeless withered stretch, shot forth a beam 
 
 That reached beside the sitter, lighting up 
 
 The rock, and tinging all the creeping moss, 
 
 Whose dewy coronal seemed to bud with fire. 
 
 ' He, half in dream, as drowsiness of morn 
 Began to steal upon his restless thoughts. 
 When on his sight the sense of coming glow 
 Smote gently, saw, it seemed to him, a Shape 
 That o'er the morn's horizon purple-rimmed 
 Stood flaming, and the chalice crimson-pale 
 Was in his hand, and lit the sky and trees 
 And pinnacles and moss and silent rock. 
 And in the waking murmur of the trees 
 
 o
 
 1 94 Qiiorsum ? 
 
 He heard a voice that came as from afar, 
 A voice like music whispered lowly-clear. 
 
 ' " In vain, in vain, in vain, the earth once more 
 Is searched to find a willing heart to build 
 A temple and an altar where to place 
 The holy chalice. All in vain once more 
 Are night and wandering through the sleep and dreams 
 Of men. For morn and waking-will hold back 
 Intents that slumber till the night again 
 And dream renew the vision and the wish. 
 In vain, in vain, the earth is searched in vain !" 
 
 ' "But wherefore? " ' seemed a voice from far away, 
 From even the furthest heaven, to speak and ask. 
 
 ' " He who shall build will build as unto doom. 
 And building he will build himself his grave." 
 Thus spake the answer, and the voice was still. 
 And then the second voice that spoke afar, 
 " But earth has yet its hearts that dare to greet 
 Anguish and death for Him who welcomed these 
 As meed of the deliverance of man — 
 Shall not the earth be searched yet once again?" 
 
 •'And as the words fell on the ear of him 
 Who sat adream, half waking from his dream 
 He spake unto the words he heard in dream,
 
 The Legend of the Vanished Star. 195 
 
 "Behold the willing heart which greets the task," 
 And knelt, and as he knelt he thought a voice 
 Replied, that said, " The task is thine." And sound 
 Of far-off chants seemed sung amid the glow, 
 Where died the cloud in glory of the morn 
 Dissolved. He with the covering of his hands 
 Concealed his face, and his sealed eyes beheld 
 His thoughts and only these, and reverie left 
 When round him was the sunlight and the day 
 Sending its full morn's glitter through the trees. 
 
 ' Was it then his, that task of worthy doom 
 Which pointed to the toil as certain grave. 
 But presaged not what suffering formed that grave ? 
 His weary hopes leapt forth with joy to meet 
 The mystery and reward of such a fate, 
 'T was chariot-fire that seemed with glory's meed 
 Consuming whom it carried up to God. 
 
 ' Three hours he knelt, and three hours thence arose ; 
 The building pictured stood before his thoughts, 
 A new impetuous wish strode high and held 
 His heart, and flung all other wishes back 
 Unto that trodden soil, the pathwayed past. 
 
 ' The market throng filled, in the midmost morn. 
 The city's square, and thitherwards his way 
 He took, ^^'ell known to all the throng the man,
 
 196 Quorsuni ? 
 
 Well known his voice, but not the tone that rang 
 As he before their upturned faces told 
 The vision, and the voices, and the task ; 
 And, ending, thus he poured his torrent words. 
 
 ' "The task is mine. It is not mine alone, 
 Nor could my hands, though they were worthy, raise 
 Alone a worthy temple, and my life 
 Were lengthened out to fill a hundred years 
 With ceaseless toil. A boon I ask of you, 
 The boon of aid. The honour and the share 
 In building is for all ; for one alone 
 The death. If consequence to all were death 
 I would not ask, would simply tell the call 
 For those whose will to such a victory led 
 To enter on the labour. Life is meant 
 For willing hearts to mount to noble death, 
 But only to the willing is reserved 
 The seraph-thrill that fires to upward tread 
 Of will on that triumphal path. The feet 
 Of others tread the road to idle death : 
 But think you idle death is worthy more 
 Than idle life ? that creeping feebly down 
 Unwilling to the dark is worthy end 
 To aught except unworthy path of life? 
 ' The mighty, not the mean, should lay thee low. 
 Do battle with the gods'— did not this stir 
 The war joy in our fathers' heathen hearts ?
 
 The Legend of the Vanished Star. 197 
 
 Shall we be less than they when Christ has lit 
 With supreme glory such a crown of death ? 
 Is His voice weaker, bidding us to fall 
 Or conquer, than the call of heathen heart 
 That bade him fall before some stronger foe ? 
 To meet and conquer, or to meet and die — 
 Some mighty duty ; this, not ease, is life. 
 
 ' " But well I know that God in His high love 
 Gives suffering as that duty unto some ; 
 And well I know that not to all is given 
 Such altar-burning of prophetic fire 
 ^^'ithin the heart as strengthens for the task. 
 
 'a'- 
 
 ' " I ask for aid, and aid that all can give. 
 And say not that you wish not to speed on 
 The hour of death for me. I see that look 
 Upon your faces, and the lips of some 
 Are fixed and close, as ready to deny ; 
 And some I see who, with their open lips. 
 Are ready with that answer to my words. 
 I am not that I was, ye know it well. 
 Ye that have known me stand beside your sick, 
 Ye know that patience answers not to will. 
 And will has lost its olden spur to push 
 The lagging gait of strength, and anger roused 
 Breaks in me oft the tables of the law, 
 "\Mien I behold the earth's idolatry
 
 1 9^ Qnorsinii ? 
 
 Making you sing your own destruction song, 
 And dance the dance to tunc of ruin's pipe. 
 I am not that I was . . . and less the years 
 Show patient usefulness my future lot. 
 Better to work at something worthy death, 
 And die, than live among you with regret 
 Gnawing my heart that cannot help you more. 
 A boon it is I ask you. If perchance 
 Succour in any wise from me has come 
 To any, let him do me this return 
 To help me to this mission of my death. 
 
 ' " If there be he to whom in hours of pain 
 These hands have offered com''ort, and his strength 
 Came back ; if there be he whose anguish-load 
 Of heart grew less at word of mine ; if he 
 For whom a festered limb or lame was wrapped 
 In bandage which sufificed to soothe or ease 
 What baffled healing, and his use of limb 
 Suffices for his need ; if there be he 
 To whom in famine's hour of low despair 
 Through me was given the cheer which roused to life ; 
 If there be those on whom in pangs of cold 
 My hands have wrapped a shelter, let them help ! 
 The strength which knows itself a match for toil 
 Let it give offering of toil ; who lacks 
 Strength but hath will, let it suffice to give 
 His offered gift, and who hath treasured stone
 
 TJie Legend of the Vanished Star. 199 
 
 Or wherewithal adornment may be wrought, 
 Let him bestow. 
 
 And think not that I ask 
 As only for the boon for which just now 
 I pleaded. Unto me it is enough 
 To build and die the death of him who builds, 
 But unto you the worthy task is this — 
 That to the sacred memory of pain 
 Bleeding its tears of sweat in eager love 
 To give relief to pain and misery, 
 The hands of those to whom that pain of love 
 Has given release or peace should shape their thanks." 
 
 ' He ceased. The upturned faces rapture-pale 
 In dense peripheral Unes their fervent gaze 
 Turned to his central vehemence. At first 
 A silence like the waters of a sea 
 In moveless sleep lay o'er them, then arose 
 A murmur as the stir of gentle wind 
 Ruffling the silence ; then spoke voice and voice, 
 Lifting themselves above the murmurous sounds, 
 And toil and gifts in ready promise given 
 Their echo of united shout that came 
 Sent through the square and up the lofty walls 
 And tracery of the high cathedral spire ; 
 Which seemed therein to start anew and rise 
 In mellow music to the hstening heaven.
 
 200 Qi tor sum ? 
 
 ' Zeal winged their readiness. The autumn sun 
 Lit the foundations laid with busy toil, 
 Where voice and vision took the sitter's thoughts. 
 The early summer morn on risen plinth 
 And moulded base for shaft-enthroned arcade 
 Poured its sweet light through mullioned apertures. 
 And autumn once again its sunset light 
 Streamed through the embranchments of the window- 
 heads, 
 Upon the shafts and capitals that bore 
 The voussoirs, centring-shouldered, moulded-deep. 
 Then spring, retreating at the summer's step, 
 Beheld the arch which leapt to roofless wall 
 From coronetted buttress-pinnacle. 
 And moon of harvest poured its dream of light 
 And slumber-depth of shadow on its floor, 
 Through rafters ranked and fixed in firm array. 
 And autumn glowed in sunset thoughts when late 
 She yielded to the winter's cold command 
 On roofed fulfilment of the pile that closed 
 Around the unfulfilled high hope, whereon 
 The years to be should throne the lofty wish 
 Of mighty tower and spire. One summer more — 
 On capital and corbel hung the shapes 
 And shadows of the beauty-chiselled leaves, 
 O'er which the softened lines and hollowed dark 
 And foliage band rose graceful that enhanced 
 The upward longings of the pointed arch.
 
 TJic Legend of the Vanished Star. 201 
 
 'And he from out whose thoughts that vision sprang, 
 And rose from dream to hand-accompHshed deed, 
 \\'ith tool which sped as driven by rush of thoughts 
 Pouring their torrent of created forms 
 So rapid that the execution lagged. 
 Wreathed round the choir its coronal and hung 
 From moulded groins their clustered leaves, and screened 
 The altar apse with lace of stone. 
 
 Lame men 
 And maimed and weak, whose limbs no other help 
 Could render, worked with emulous will to give 
 Edge to his tools, or cleared away the dust 
 And heaps of stony fragments chisel-chipped. 
 Or brought him food and drink, or sat to gaze. 
 
 'And when from leafy shadow unto face 
 And lineaments of human form and mien 
 His labour passed, the rapt devotion there 
 Tool-wrought seemed almost to their listening ears 
 To utter prayer ; and to their wondering eyes 
 It was as if a present miracle. 
 
 'At last the altar's white of marble stood 
 Arcaded, and for shadow of arcade 
 Inlaid wnth alabaster yellow-woven 
 In undulating lines, and serpentine 
 Blood-red and lazuli and malachite ; 
 And studded round its rim with amethyst
 
 202 QuorsHin ? 
 
 And opal brought by pilgrims from afar. 
 Incessant had become his eager toil, 
 Day giving thought its shape, and night to thought 
 Giving her sleepless fever. Even dream, 
 Filling the scattered hours of sleep, kept full 
 The torrent course of vision and design. 
 And paler grew his face, and seemed his flesh 
 To melt away around its bony frame ; 
 Impetuous fever driving on the toil. 
 
 ' Thus came the day when chant of olden psalm 
 Sang out the consecration of the pile ; 
 When voice of prayer and chorus rolling up 
 Came mellowed back from soaring arch and roof, 
 As if on high repeated, softer sung 
 By voices more melodious than the crowd 
 That pealed their jubilant hymnody below, 
 
 ' The rite was o'er, the last amen rang out 
 And died in melody to silent peace. 
 And through the echoing nave the parting steps 
 Of worshippers had passed. The autumn sun 
 Flamed in the cloud-clear sky, and poured its rays 
 Through the rose windows of the west, and lit 
 With dreams of light the scr^jen-defended choir, 
 And dreamy shadows floated through its space 
 From arch and corbel, canopy and i)ier. 
 But all the choir with tone and radiance filled
 
 The Legend of the Vanished Star. 203 
 
 As if with thoughts of beings unbeheld 
 That were by new receptacle to eyes 
 Of men made visible. 
 
 Knee-bowed in prayer, 
 And all alone, was he whose toil around 
 Arose. Exhaustion following on the track 
 Of effort's fever-fire. 
 
 " Dimittis nunc 
 In pace servum tuum Domine," 
 His lips had said, but in his heart the wail, 
 "Usque quo?" rose. 
 
 At once the western door 
 Burst open, and a shrieking herd rushed in, — 
 Women with eyes that from their sockets sprang. 
 And children in the middle years of youth. 
 And unarmed men. And following on the shrieks 
 The lifted swords that merciless cut down 
 The flying forms and strewed them on the nave, 
 And stained the level floor with flowing blood ; 
 Mauraders from the marches, unto whom 
 That festal day was new advantage, seized 
 Their chance, and sacked the city, and hewed down 
 The home-returning worshippers, and few 
 Pursued had reached that sanctuary's gate. 
 
 ' Startled from prayer he saw the murderous rush, 
 And hasted forth with high forbiddal's voice 
 And stern appeal. He was too late ; the work
 
 204 Qnorsiim ? 
 
 Of blood was done, and the marauding chief 
 
 Received his words with coldness, and to one 
 
 Whose sword was high to strike, — with blade outstretched 
 
 A\'arding the blow, he gave command to hold 
 
 "A weakling and a monk — let him go free," 
 
 And, turning on his heel, he led the gang 
 
 Out from the open portal. 
 
 Stunned, the monk 
 Stood in the light that therethrough spread around 
 And lit his stiffened form — that sacred floor 
 Strewn with dead faces whose pale silence spake 
 To him, their friend, of hours of solaced care ! 
 Remembrances of help administered 
 Unto their living weakness — he debarred 
 From sharing in their fate, and kept to doom 
 Of ignominious life ! The grief smote full 
 His desolate soul. Choirwards he turned his steps 
 That tottered underneath his load of woe, 
 And on the altar step a bitter wail 
 Rose from the lips that lay humiliate, 
 And to its coldness spake the agony 
 Of one who seemed forsaken 1)\ his Clod. 
 
 'A crystal chalice on the altar stood ; 
 And through a westward window of one aisle 
 The sunlight came and smote the oaken screen. 
 And one clear ray glowing through ruby pane 
 And through the screen's arcaded tracery fell
 
 TJie Legend of the Vanished Star. 20 = 
 
 Full on the chalice, tinting it with gleam 
 That sparkled like a star of pallid rose, 
 And shadow tracery-cast dimmed all around. 
 
 ' Just then the broken-hearted monk, his eyes 
 Lifting in agonized appeal to heaven. 
 Caught the red glow. A feeble gasp of joy 
 Broke on the sudden silence of his wail ; 
 The limpid weakness of his weary eye 
 Lit up with smile, and spread its light of bliss 
 O'er all his pallid face, which with that smile 
 Stiffened in sweet placidity of death.'
 
 XIX. 
 SOBS OF PRIDE 
 
 THE sweet September sun of one more year 
 Lit their new journeyings through the mountain 
 scenes. 
 And gilt the hoary summits, standing wrapt 
 In age-long stillness high above the pass, 
 Receiving ever new the messaged beams 
 Sent ceaseless by the unwearied sun, and these 
 Interpreting to their own poesy 
 Of silent evening glow, or morning fire. 
 Or glory of the noon, but dark in sense 
 At times when cloudy doubtful meaning spread 
 Its passing shadow o'er their brows, and dim 
 At times when more mysterious message came. 
 
 Along the pass to meet the Priest who last 
 Arrived the three strolled slow, and with the three 
 The n\an of Science. Wake, with face that bore 
 'I'Ik- look which comes when suffering gnaws the heart, 
 iJut borne in silence as within a grave
 
 Sobs of Pride. 207 
 
 Is kept ; and never word of grief he spake. 
 And Flaxton with the rightful pencillings 
 Of one year aged. In Runimont the fire 
 Of Hfe in marshlight flame once more rose up 
 With promises unmeant. And somewhat thin 
 The locks of him of Science, but his step 
 Was firm, and eye was ready as of old. 
 
 From the high-seated hostel at the hour 
 When expectation sought the Priest's approach 
 They strolled to meet and greet their friend again ; 
 Nor long before the hoof-resounding road 
 Gave sign of nearing chaise in dust upraised, 
 Nor long before his welcome countenance 
 Gladdened their faces unto welcoming smile 
 And waked the joyful greetings of their lips. 
 Nor long before the grasp of loving hand 
 Laid hold on hand, and from the chaise the Priest 
 Descending wandered slowly with them back. 
 
 They left the road a little while to sit 
 Rock-seated looking o'er the pass below ; 
 Bushes around on which the Alpine rose 
 Mingled its stern simplicity of leaf 
 With just one lingering blossom here and there 
 Left from the sweet-hued throngs with which it clad 
 In earlier summer all the clustering rocks. 
 The dream of distance, Autumn's tender gift
 
 2o8 Qiiorsjan ? 
 
 Of young love's zeal, upon the landscape lay 
 
 In first and gentlest beauty, sign that speaks 
 
 Of near decay ; hut in its primal touch 
 
 Not yet suspected as decay, it tones 
 
 The harsh asperity of rock which stands 
 
 In indignation black to speak its wrath 
 
 Unto the soft and patchy snow that gave 
 
 Its virgin white to stain of summer storm, 
 
 And grovels as disfigured streaks beneath. 
 
 The air, fir-fragrant, from below sent up 
 
 Its evening incense balmy-fresh, and seemed 
 
 To win the Priest from his worn looks to thoughts 
 
 Of rest, but not secure and stirless rest. 
 
 As when the cindered crust that covers o'er 
 
 The lava-flow stirs sudden and reveals 
 
 The glowing anguish crawling on beneath, 
 
 And rustles shivering as it stirs — so showed 
 
 His face at intervals through outer calm 
 
 The signs of agitation and a fire 
 
 Within that glowed. They noted, but not yet 
 
 Had asked revealment. 
 
 But unasked it came 
 In slow, sad words. ' Delay's excuse,' he said, 
 * I sent, but told you not what caused delay. 
 Indeed there was not time to speak the cause : 
 Brief summons when was yet an hour or so 
 Till I should start and join you, bidding haste 
 Unto a sick bed side ; and interval
 
 Sods of Pride. 209 
 
 Of hours of journey lay between my home 
 
 And reaching that sick bed. Unto your hearts 
 
 It is a grief I bring — but yet a grief 
 
 A\Tiose cloud is rimmed with melting touch of hght ; 
 
 'Twas Belford's call, and Belford calls no more.' 
 
 A quiver ran along the old man's lips 
 As he then ceased. The opened eyes of all 
 Looked on his face with stare of wonderment, 
 And Flaxton's indrawn breath prepared to meet 
 The enemy grief, as if there w'ere assault 
 To come in detail of the history ; 
 Wake's face showed sudden pallor, and the name 
 Like rapid spasm, ' Belford ? ' left his lips ; 
 And Runimont with eyes in sudden mist 
 Of tears and choking throat, at utterance 
 Stumbled ; and sound came forth that was not word. 
 ' How so ? ' the calmer voice of age's grief 
 In him of Science asked to know the tale. 
 
 'There was,' replied the Priest, 'where Belford dwelt. 
 One who in jealousy of Belford's skill 
 And rivalry unfair by stealth essayed — 
 An undeserving rare in medicine's realm — 
 To check the rise of his prosperity, 
 And prejudice was thereby led, for weight 
 Had been to this man's words aforetime given. 
 
 ' But when in somewhat sudden sickness seized 
 
 p
 
 210 Quorsuvi? 
 
 He died, and left his debt-encumbered all 
 And children lo liis widow's feeble health, — 
 Improvident disi)lay had swallowed up 
 A\'hat else had l)een securing to his wife 
 Of barrier unto poverty's distress — 
 And sympathy, magnanimous of soul, 
 And pity wrought in Belford's heart and hers, 
 AVhose wish was 0!ie with his, his wife's, desire 
 To offer for one child a home, and share 
 In such degree the widow's load, and make 
 New parentage unto their slanderer's child. 
 
 ' But in few weeks tlie child grew sick, for death 
 Weaved the fell web whose leathery spume chokes up 
 The gasping throat, nor even Belford's skill 
 Availed. His late arrival from the task 
 Of working almost to exhaustion's term 
 To root a sufferer's tumour from its hold, 
 Oave all too litde chance to work success 
 In tliat w]ii( li, when he left his home, had shown 
 No sign of being, nor was yet his wife 
 Released from out her room ; her birthling's days 
 Had scarcely mounted unto three weeks' space. 
 
 ' \\'hat sadness and wlial grief can rend these hearts. 
 Honour and duty cliaiiied him lo his toil 
 To save the child, when on his weariness 
 Unequal to the task the task was laid ;
 
 Sobs of Pride. 2 1 1 
 
 And prudence and the safety of his own 
 
 Forbade the risk of even a loving kiss, 
 
 Or heart-exalting clasp from her, at once 
 
 So near, so far. But soon the hand of death 
 
 In merciless severity laid grip 
 
 On Belford's self, and weaved that rapid spume 
 
 In haste so fierce no help availed to save. 
 
 'A gasp of love that strove to be a word 
 His last, and one last look of peace that held 
 Its light above his anguish he bestowed 
 On her whose love, when voices told his death 
 As certain, flung command of absence down. 
 And staggered to his room, and saw him die. 
 
 ' I led her back before relapse could lay 
 Its faintness or its swoon upon her limbs, 
 And the third day which followed saw the end 
 Of what my present service could effect 
 For her and him. Over the noble dead 
 That for his enemy's child gave up his life 
 I read the words of sorrow, peace, and hope, 
 The hope whose music-shiver curdling stirs 
 Emotions which can pale his lips who reads, 
 " I am the resurrection and the life."' 
 
 A silence minute-lived pursued the sob 
 With which the Priest had ended. Tearful eyes
 
 212 Qnorsiiin? 
 
 Bent down but looked not at the Alpine rose ; 
 
 When sudden Runimont upleaping pale, 
 
 Paler than even a moment back, when sobs 
 
 Came thick ; and waving round his head his hat 
 
 * Well done,' sobbed out, ' well done, brave heart,' and 
 
 cried, 
 In voice as of triumphant pain, ' Hurrah ! ' 
 
 And when the moment's stern astonishment 
 Gave place to understanding of his thought. 
 Upstarted all the group, and joined the cry 
 And voices as the tears rolled down their cheeks, 
 Strove through their sobs to lift their proud ' Hurrah ! ' 
 
 Stillness . . . and sobs . . . and stillness . . . and from far 
 Across the pass, from out the thickening cloud 
 Which, unbeheld while they were listening wrapped 
 In grief, had closed upon the mountain tops, 
 Came pealing back a chorussed loud response, — 
 The thunder shout of triumph raised by storm 
 Above its raining tears of grief to God.
 
 XX. 
 
 'RING OUT O BELLS' 
 
 ' T OVED of the great, that with uncertain love 
 
 J — ^ Gave answer to their longings, and too oft 
 Didst turn with jealous fury on thy best, 
 Who even in indignation could not lose 
 The love which lashed their anger unto more. 
 Loved of the great and mother ; in thy shrines 
 What ashes lie, what memories crowd thy walls ; 
 Firenze, O Firenze, beautiful 
 Even as a dream of painter's joy, but swept 
 Through thine uncertain heart by cold like that 
 Which from thine Appennines, when spring's warm sun 
 Makes hot thy sheltered nooks, sweeps merciless 
 Through all thy open and defenceless shade ; 
 Such as thy clime, enchanting yet unkind 
 Wast thou unto thy sons, whose hearts were bound 
 In fascination of thy love, which now 
 Cheered them to victory of skill or thought. 
 And now cut down the effort fever-struck 
 By bitter cold. Firenze, storied still, 
 Though with the wrecks of thy past majesty,
 
 214 Qiiorsiiin? 
 
 Around the stranger as around thine own 
 Thy fascination throws its bond of chains.' 
 
 So Flaxton, brooding as he trode the side 
 Of Arno, that divides in twain the home 
 Of pictured thought and treading all alone, 
 And dreaming o'er the strangeness of the past, 
 And looking down Lung Arno's stately street. 
 
 And there in front approaching was what came. 
 As if a dream from out a past wherein 
 He seemed a part. Two forms to something lost 
 Linked, and two faces seeming to recal 
 A shadow from days gone. 
 
 Some tide long time 
 Unstirred, some tide of thouglit and feeling mixed 
 Stirred inly, knowing not what way to move, 
 Yet agitated, as in act to take 
 Fixed bent of movement momently when given. 
 
 And then by memory's confusion roused, 
 Thought strove to find the impulse lost ; to turn 
 Its agitation to a flowing tide 
 Which knew its bent. Motion at last and light 
 That made more clear the gravitating tide ! 
 
 A grave among the mountains, and a grief 
 Pictured by memory gazing on the grave.
 
 'Ring Out O Bells: 215 
 
 Thus came revealed from out the mist and dark 
 Of years their meeting in the pictured past, 
 And mutual recognition. Greeting strove 
 To hold its stiffness, but perforce unbent 
 By memory, when from dreaminess aroused 
 She lit the past with sudden blaze of light, 
 And waked the olden grief to strength and life. 
 The stiffness changed to friendly thought, subdued, 
 But greater for its quiet of restraint. 
 
 And in the days that followed, unto more 
 That friendship grew. On search together bent 
 Of Art's triumphal hoards of skill in church 
 And gallery and palace, they the days 
 Together passed, together went to view 
 The home wherein the infant Dante smiled. 
 And home of him whose thought had strength to shape 
 The early concept of a central sun, 
 And planet thrall to sun, and whose keen eyes 
 Through mean of glass and crowded thrill of light 
 Beheld the first far spectacle of worlds 
 In vortex-roll around their sovereign orb. 
 
 And Flaxton found a face that, when the hours 
 Brought end to such companionship, and day 
 Was melting into night, was ever close 
 And ever glimmered in the view of thought ; 
 The night with vision of that face was lit,
 
 2i6 Qnorsiim? 
 
 The day was lit to view that face alone, 
 
 And all too far the hour of meeting held 
 
 Its distance from the parting, and too short 
 
 The hour which parted marked the space that lay 
 
 Between the hour of meeting and itself. 
 
 And Painting, when that face was near him, gave 
 In whisper from the soul of her to whom 
 That face belonged what it before kept sealed, 
 The meaning of the oracle it speaks. 
 And sculptured forms their majesty revealed, 
 And light poured in, and life beat full where stood. 
 Before, the dulness of enigma's gloom. 
 Or moveless thought in stiff immortal death — 
 Shadow unmeaning and unliving stone 
 Took meaning and a life at touch of love. 
 
 'to 
 
 So passed the day.s, and Flaxton seemed afar 
 Even from the few weeks' gap which intervalled 
 The last sad meeting with the Priest that told 
 Of Belford's death. Their plans upon the sea 
 Of destiny adrift this year were driven, 
 P'or duly diverse in command had called 
 His friends, who listening to the voice went forth. 
 And Flaxton, left to wander, strayed alone 
 To find what wrought a newer loneliness. 
 
 So passed the days, and all but one had gone ; 
 The last, the sweetest, swifter than the rest
 
 'Ring Out O Bells: 21; 
 
 In flight was come, — too swift and, like the Hght, 
 
 A crowd of agitations speeding fast ; 
 
 And hope and fear chequered the morning hours ; 
 
 And with the lingering of perplexity 
 
 Cold grew the hidden sun of clouded joy. 
 
 Not, as throughout the days that just were gone, 
 The joy of her expected presence changed 
 To fairer all the landscape of his thoughts. 
 But o'er it passed the shiver of a wind 
 Which swept his heart at times with bitter cold. 
 
 He looked, and then he looked not at her face : 
 Turned full his eyes, then in confusion bent 
 Upon the ground that spoke with no response. 
 But listening to the voice which swept with thrill 
 His feelings now of joy and now of pain. 
 He heard, and yet he heard as in a dream. 
 And sometimes meaning seemed to wander far 
 As if resentful of his brooding thought. 
 
 At last they came from out a church alone, 
 Together — and alone. Her sister's steps 
 Had hngered where she stood to sate her gaze 
 Upon a fair Madonna's pictured face 
 That just before had chained both them and her. 
 
 ' What sweetness was in that Madonna's face,' 
 The maid to Flaxton spoke when through the door
 
 2 1 S Quorsuvi ? 
 
 The twain had passed and stood to wait the third, 
 ' The form alone would tempt the eye to keep 
 Long gaze thereon, but something more than form 
 Arrests and speaks. Love, which upon the lips 
 Just dawns in smile, seems in the eyes to speak 
 \\\\\\ pensive joy, hut furrows on the brow 
 That hint at sadness seem in act to rise. 
 And how that kneeling girl her wordless prayer 
 Unto the face poured out in fervent gaze ; 
 I wonder not that dwelling on a face 
 So pure, so sweet, so sad, so eloquent 
 Of love and pity, she should thus adore.' 
 
 ' You wonder not ? ' said Flaxton. Rising up 
 Resolve within his heart gave spur to thought. 
 
 * I deemed the faith you hold had placed a bar 
 Before that wonder, and had named the act 
 Idolatry and sin.' 
 
 And she at once, 
 
 * I hold not with the act. I do but say 
 
 I wonder not that one from childhood taught 
 The worshiji of the mother of her God 
 Should see in such a face what there she seeks, 
 Should find response to instincts scarcely shaped 
 As yet to thoughts.' 
 
 And Flaxton, with a smile 
 That glowed as if behind the cloudy veil 
 Of mood which lay upon his countenance.
 
 'Ring Out O Bells: 219 
 
 ' Then would you say the maiden found therein 
 Help to reach higher than herself when bowed 
 She pours before that face her heart in prayer ? ' 
 
 * I think she would,' she said, ' and wherefore not ? 
 Is every longing for a nobler will 
 Or purer heart or every cry for love 
 Sent up to heaven, to turn responseless back 
 When poured from hearts that know not how to pour 
 That prayer in fashion which is rightfullest ? ' 
 
 ' But what in that Madonna's face affords,' 
 Said Flaxton, ' to her votary that return ? 
 Is it the face alone, the shape, that speaks 
 In answer to the yearnings stretched thereto ? 
 Or is it face together with the name : 
 And that she therefore sees therein pourtrayed 
 What in the mother of her Lord her church 
 Has taught her is that mother's grace and love ? 
 Do face and lineament alone suggest 
 And wake the thrill which lifts the heart to give 
 Obeisance thus ? ' 
 
 The maiden then, "Tis more, 
 The face has more than form, a veil of thought 
 And light of smile and sweetness on the lip.' 
 
 ' But these,' he said, 'are form and what but form? 
 Expression is but form ; and thought and love
 
 220 QuorsiDn ? 
 
 Traced on the face are phases of its form. 
 
 And form commands, I grant, the mind to kneel 
 
 In reverence of its perfectness, but fails 
 
 To woo the adoration of a love 
 
 Which mates the reverence, save it meets therein 
 
 Suggestion that is something more than form : 
 
 Hearts seek for something more, which finding there 
 
 They own the longings of desire fulfilled 
 
 By offering up the worship which is love.' 
 
 ' It is the rule you give,' replied the maid, 
 ' And as the rule I grant it truth, but rule 
 May hold within its field what offers not 
 At first itself as held within the rule ; 
 As rocks stand up to break the level flat 
 Of grassy mead, and seem not of the mead, 
 Yet are of that which underlies its sward.' 
 
 ' I know,' said he, and with a husk which caused 
 The maiden's eyes to look upon his face— 
 And at the look the husk increased — 
 
 ' The rule 
 It was I gave, but will you kt the rule 
 Suffice for me if it suffice to wake 
 ^\'orship within that bends its knees to you?' 
 
 A moment — and the glitter of her eyes 
 Showed that her thought was sallying forth to meet
 
 RiiiiT Out Bells: 221 
 
 '<i> 
 
 With lance of playful keenness such attack ; 
 But in the husk and in the eye which fell 
 Before his voice had struggled to the end, 
 And in the paleness spreading o'er his face, 
 She read the earnest meaning of his heart ; 
 Her heart held back the thought, and gave reply, 
 ' Suffice for me what will suffice for you.' 
 
 Firenze, O Firenze beautiful ! 
 A dream of wonder in a land of dreams 
 Of beauty. Light was more than light that lit 
 The parting view of Arno's palaces. 
 And hue was more than hue and shape than shape 
 Bathed in the glorifying dream of love. 
 
 Ring out, O bells, ring out, ring out, and clear 
 Utter in clang that stirs the marriage morn 
 With winged vibrations flung from off your tongues 
 The strain that swings its thrilling hope afar. 
 Ring hope, long hope, and love as long as hope, 
 And life-long love. Ring hope and life and love ! 
 
 Ring out and clear — ring out, O clanging bells, 
 In mingling accents of melodious tongues 
 Swung speaking with the lingering din that clings 
 Within its hollow haunt of ivied tower ; 
 Ring life, long life, and love as long as life, 
 And love-long joy. Ring life and love and joy !
 
 XXI. 
 
 'THE LIGHT AND HIM' 
 
 COULD it be thus? And could the cause be this?' 
 The Priest it was who spoke ; in Flaxton's home 
 Talking with Flaxton's wife about the past 
 And their first meeting and the band of friends 
 The living and the lost. It was the spring, 
 Cold with late eastern winds, whose stinging scorn 
 Breathed their secureness of triumphal cold 
 Through all the genial ardour of the beams 
 Of May's unclouded sun. The past gone o'er. 
 Then their talk turned to Belford's noble death 
 And to his widow and his infant child. 
 And to the help the living on the dead 
 In her that lived as his bestowed ; and love 
 Living beyond the limit fixed by death. 
 And word escaped the lips of Flaxton's wife 
 Of offering unaccepted, made by Wake 
 Unto her sister's heart, whereat the Priest 
 Spake to her of the love whose secret spring 
 In Runimont he only late had learnt
 
 ' 2 he Light and Him! 223 
 
 From his pale lips and lowly uttered words, 
 That came with ending of a lustrous smile 
 Which lit the face and gemmed the tear-dim eye. 
 
 But Flaxton's wife let fall upon her knee 
 Her busied hands and knitted web she wrought, 
 And turned her eyes of wonder on the Priest, 
 That filled a moment later with the hue 
 Of earnest grief, ' My sister's heart,' she said, 
 ' Gave not to Wake because it could not give 
 The love it felt for Runimont alone.' 
 
 The hand of man, by pressure on a stud. 
 
 Can start the complex series diverse-tongued 
 
 And diverse-limbed and diverse in event 
 
 Of manifold machine. Is there a hand 
 
 Behind the fateful rule of things that moves 
 
 The complex inter-working of the hearts 
 
 Of men ? And is there One who moves the hand 
 
 And views with smile the dire complexity 
 
 Of love and grief that comes resultant forth? 
 
 Or is the fateful rule of things the work 
 Of One who loves and stirs in those He loves 
 That which alone love's lo-torture spurs — 
 Torture that goads to sweetness seen afar, 
 But kept like mirage-stream beyond approach —
 
 2 24 QllOtSUJH ! 
 
 The high creations of the heart and mind. 
 So that in hearts enthralled by ceaseless pain, 
 The love that loves as other love loves not 
 Builds, homeless, for ihr thoughts of men a home; 
 Sings, sad, the strains which give men's sadness cheer ; 
 And from the dark pours dreams that thrill with light. 
 
 'T is Love that works the fateful course of things — 
 Thus Faith, which comes when Reason faints, would say- 
 And bids the weary struggler struggle on 
 And bring to high effect the toil begun, 
 Whose lowmost stones were else the whole result — 
 Despair's — a crumbling base of pile mislaid. 
 
 ' But only here and there that lo-iiain, 
 And all the grief that wrings tlicse human heart.s, 
 Have power to bring their effort to effect ; 
 If it be Love which works behind the whole. 
 And scatters grief upon the souls of men, 
 That Love then works a wreck whose thought appals 
 If this alone be its resultant fruit — 
 One useful grief in many millioned waste. 
 
 'One useful grief in many millioned waste.' 
 Thou sayest this whose vision hath no power 
 To pierce beyond the outmost face and reach 
 The workings of Creation's inner soul ! 
 What thing amid the whole of Nature gives
 
 ' The Light and Him! 225 
 
 Into thine hands the secrets of its all ? 
 Is J) lace the thing it seems, and thou art sure 
 It hath no meaning other than that one 
 Thou graspest ? And is fi/iie for thee alone, 
 Formed only for thy mental picturing, 
 And nought to any thing but only thee ? 
 Does light unto the vision of thine eyes 
 And outer sense reveal its inner self, 
 So that thou seest it thus the thing it is ? 
 And doth the song which through the air afar 
 Rolls its increasing spheres of wavy length. 
 Do nought but speak its music to thine ears ? 
 Thou knowest of a mission but to thee. 
 Is that a warrant that it hath no more ? 
 
 But what the canvas of thy mind can hold — 
 Thine own conception's painting — thou dost deem 
 Their nature and their essence and their whole ! 
 
 And thou, because thou seest one grief alone 
 Give hue of sweetness in the endless throng 
 Of griefs, wouldst class the countless throng as waste ! 
 
 Be still till more is thine to know, or take 
 That lamp to light the dark, which unto Him 
 Whose fate was hardest of the race of men 
 Sufficed to work His daring scheme of love, 
 Wherewith to bring back hope and joy to man : 
 
 Q
 
 226 Qiiorsmn ? 
 
 A faith in love when love had seemed crushed down, 
 A faith in power that is but endless love, 
 When that divine conception lay, it seemed, 
 A helpless wreck beneath the feet of men. 
 Faith lit the Heart which broke upon the Cross, 
 What faith sufificed for Him, suffice for thee. 
 
 Once more there came the duty-call that spake 
 This time with voice of omen to the Priest, 
 \\'ho with foreboding heart felt his thoughts driven 
 From the clear sunshine of their peace to dark, 
 And grief wailed on monotonous through the dark. 
 
 Wake's was the hand that penned the message 'Come,' 
 And Wake was where the message winged for flight 
 Set forth — the room wherein the gasping form 
 So dear to liiiii and to the Priest was laid. 
 So near to utterance of the words which are, 
 But do not say ' farewell.' 
 
 Two days agone, 
 To suffering woman helpless, help bestowed. 
 And long necessity of patient stand 
 While the wind shivered through his weakly frame 
 Brought fierce assault upon the hold of breath, 
 And fevered fury carried all with rush. 
 
 And night, in hours of chattering dream, revealed
 
 ' TJie Light and Hi/nJ 227 
 
 The secrets of the silence and the past : 
 
 A name in piteous accents or in tone 
 
 Of cooing love repeated o'er and o'er — 
 
 A name that made the face of ^Vake, who watched, 
 
 Turn pale — but paler when the Priest told all. 
 
 And well it was to tell. The grief that rose 
 From great to greatness of a hundredfold, 
 But had thereby the chance to speak its thanks, 
 And sate by words from living lips to ears 
 Which heard, its longing thanks : that grief were else 
 The life-enduring cry of vain regret, 
 Uttering from bitter morn to bitter night 
 Unchanged its useless echo, answered not 
 But by itself. ' Would I had had the chance 
 To tell him of my grief, my love, my thanks, 
 And feel he knew them ; it were anodyne 
 To quell the passion of this moveless pain ! ' 
 
 The morn came slowly creeping on the dark 
 As if continuing the night and dream ; 
 A day that not in clouded sky nor sun. 
 But in the hearts and thoughts, seemed lengthening out 
 The night, and paling with the weltering cloud 
 Of grief the thoughts of those who watched the sick. 
 
 Short snatches came of sleep, and then he woke
 
 228 Qiiorsinn ? 
 
 Delirium-free. 
 
 'O Runimont, O friend, 
 Dear always — clearer now I know the grief 
 That bound your heart in love the more to me. 
 How willing would I change my lot for yours 
 If, dying, I to you the years could give, 
 You have foregone for happy love and me, 
 If, dying, I could give the hope of life 
 And years of love to compensate the past.' 
 
 But Runimont, with feeble hand outstretched 
 And laid in Wake's, and look of pain replied, 
 ' Nay, have my lips revealed with traitorous words 
 The secret that I thought I kept barred in 
 PVom stealing forth to you ? ' 
 
 * Delirious words,' 
 The Priest replied, * made needful all the tale, 
 Nor let your heart be grieved that it is told. 
 Nor let it take amiss the news I bring — 
 News that but yesterday 't was mine to know 
 She whom you love denied her heart to Wake 
 Because her heart, you knowing not, was yours.' 
 
 Awhile his eyes grew wide with open stare. 
 Then trembled on his lips some soundless word, 
 And then his eyes half closed and open lip 
 Kept silence. Then his brain had passed the swoon
 
 ' TJic Light and Him! 229 
 
 Of pain. He looked to Wake. Appeal and love 
 Were in the look. 
 
 ' Oh, Wake ... if she were here. . . . 
 Wake, is it what I have no right to wish?' 
 
 Wake's eyes were dim and throat too full for voice, 
 But to the Priest with look that was request 
 Turning, he had no need for word to speak. 
 
 And going forth, the Priest to Flaxton's wife 
 Revealed the wish and the event that brought 
 The wish. 
 
 And then one night, a night that buoyed 
 The sinking life of Runimont with hope, 
 "WTiich else that night had sunk in deep of death ; 
 And with the morn she came so long adored, 
 So loved. The worship of his dying eyes 
 Turned to her face, and o'er his features spread 
 A hallowed light of reverent joy. As one 
 Who sees the hope that years of toil had reached, 
 But sudden reached, when never sign had told 
 The nearness of the joy expectancy 
 ^Vith cold procrastination had denied. 
 And kept denial o'er and o'er in front — 
 So rapt in sudden bliss he took her hand 
 That trembled in the trembling wherewith death 
 Shook his, and placed it to his lips, then spake 
 With feeble sound that had but scanty strength
 
 2 30 Quorsu))i ? 
 
 To reach the ears of him whose ears it claimed, 
 And, taking by the hand his friend and her. 
 Between his hands placed theirs, and looking love 
 He murmured in low accents what was prayer 
 That ceased in weakness. Then his hand, that fell 
 In act of reaching, to the Priest he stretched, 
 Who took the hand which made its new attempt 
 To reach its aim ; and felt its trembling guide. 
 Until upon the hands of Wake and her 
 It lay. Attempted movement of his lips 
 Ceased in the sequent weakness, and awhile. 
 His eyes half closed, he lay and did not move. 
 
 But in a little time his eyes stood wide 
 
 With glow as of serene surprise that broke 
 
 Into a triumph-smile of joyous love. 
 
 'The light — and Him,' he said, and then the fire 
 
 Left the pale eyes, and on the sunken face 
 
 Came the cold silence of eternal peace. 
 
 Hand-written, and the last that on the leaves, 
 Corrected by the careful hand that wrote, 
 Stood shaped to last expression this, the Priest 
 Found in the book by Runimont bequeathed, 
 As token to him of his love in death. 
 
 ' Beneath the sunset's crimson stain tlie wind
 
 ' The Light and Him! 231 
 
 ^^'ith moan of longing, moan of long regret 
 Utters the wail which shakes the shuddering pines ; 
 And on the streaming air torn clouds their forms 
 Diffuse and helpless pour and cross the glow 
 And kindle into rapture, and awhile 
 Thrill with the light which will be theirs no more. 
 And eastward gloom in shapeless shroud enrobes 
 The might of mountains, and the rising night 
 Lays inky shadow on the gloom. Thereto 
 My upward way with stern persistence turns ; 
 The unknown path unto the home unknown. 
 
 ' And darker grows despairing eve that now 
 Hath lost her splendour of triumphant fire. 
 Too soon. The glimmering fragments of the heaven 
 Are blotted out by dark of storm that blacks 
 The dark of night. And now the wailing wind 
 Turns wail to hissing, and the dark is filled 
 With swirling sleet that stings with bitter stroke, 
 And stuns the torrent's roar beside the path. 
 
 'And now again the stream outroars the storm 
 And dim white quiverings, eddies of its foam. 
 Seen through the dark as dimmest haze rush by, 
 And ceaseless beats the torment of the rain 
 ^^^lich swells its flow. How far away is light ? 
 And rest and shelter ? Upward still and up 
 I push my ever-slowing way. For me
 
 232 Quorsuni ? 
 
 Night will not end in lucent joy of morn, 
 But in a dreamless dark, whereunto dream — 
 The feeble shadow of what once was thought — 
 Will guide and hold its torchlight dying low. 
 But may that dream reveal His form whose voice 
 Commanded all the unknown path, and led — 
 Himself unseen — the way through all before.'
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
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