They know the grief of man, without its wisdom; They sink in man's despair, without its calm; And slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm: Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly The harvest of its memories cannot reap, Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly. Let them weep! let them weep! They look up with their pale and sunken faces, And their look is dread to see, 150 For they mind you of their angels in high places, With eyes turned on Deity. "How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation, Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart, Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart? Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper, A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT What was he doing, the great god Pan,1 He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, Ere he brought it out of the river. High on the shore sat the great god Pan, 6 I 2 1 the goat-footed god, traditional inventor of the shepherd's flute These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best? Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height This perfection, succeed with life's dayspring, death's minute of night? (With that stoop of the soul which in bending Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul upraises it too) The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete, As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet. Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own. There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, I am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think) Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst E'en the Giver in one gift. love if I durst! Behold, I could 130 But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake. - What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appall? In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what Began? Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 140 And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power, To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul, Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole? And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) the mistake, Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, and bid him awake 150 From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set Clear and safe in new light and new life, a new harmony yet To be run, and continued, .and ended or endure ! who knows? The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make sure; By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss, And the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles in this. From thy will stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread Sabaoth:1 I will? the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loth To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my despair? This; 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do! See the King I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through. Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would - knowing which, I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! |