No More Learning

Except that sound, the place is full
Of silences, which when you cull
By any word, it thrills you so
That presently you let them grow
To meditation's fullest length
Across your soul with a soul's strength:
And as they touch your soul, they borrow
Both of its grandeur and its sorrow,
That deathly odour which the clay
Leaves on its deathlessness alway.

X.

Alway! alway? must this be?
Rapid Soul from city gone,
Dost thou carry inwardly
What doth make the city's moan?
Must this deep sigh of thine own
Haunt thee with humanity?
Green visioned banks that are too steep
To be o'erbrowzed by the sheep,
May all sad thoughts adown you creep
Without a shepherd? Mighty sea,
Can we dwarf thy magnitude
And fit it to our straitest mood?
O fair, fair Nature, are we thus
Impotent and querulous
Among thy workings glorious,
Wealth and sanctities, that still
Leave us vacant and defiled
And wailing like a soft-kissed child,
Kissed soft against his will?

XI.

God, God!
With a child's voice I cry,
Weak, sad, confidingly--
God, God!
Thou knowest, eyelids, raised not always up
Unto Thy love, (as none of ours are) droop
As ours, o'er many a tear;
Thou knowest, though Thy universe is broad,
Two little tears suffice to cover all:
Thou knowest, Thou who art so prodigal
Of beauty, we are oft but stricken deer
Expiring in the woods, that care for none
Of those delightsome flowers they die upon.

XII.
O blissful Mouth which breathed the mournful breath
We name our souls, self-spoilt! --by that strong passion
Which paled Thee once with sighs, by that strong death
Which made Thee once unbreathing--from the wrack
Themselves have called around them, call them back,
Back to Thee in continuous aspiration!
For here, O Lord,
For here they travel vainly, vainly pass
From city-pavement to untrodden sward
Where the lark finds her deep nest in the grass
Cold with the earth's last dew. Yea, very vain
The greatest speed of all these souls of men
Unless they travel upward to the throne
Where sittest THOU the satisfying ONE,
With help for sins and holy perfectings
For all requirements: while the archangel, raising
Unto Thy face his full ecstatic gazing,
Forgets the rush and rapture of his wings.




_TO BETTINE,_

THE CHILD-FRIEND OF GOETHE.

"I have the second sight, Goethe! "--_Letters of a Child. _


I.

Bettine, friend of Goethe,
_Hadst_ thou the second sight--
Upturning worship and delight
With such a loving duty
To his grand face, as women will,
The childhood 'neath thine eyelids still?

II.

--Before his shrine to doom thee,
Using the same child's smile
That heaven and earth, beheld erewhile
For the first time, won from thee
Ere star and flower grew dim and dead
Save at his feet and o'er his head?

III.

--Digging thine heart and throwing
Away its childhood's gold,
That so its woman-depth might hold
His spirit's overflowing?
(For surging souls, no worlds can bound,
Their channel in the heart have found. )

IV.

O child, to change appointed,
Thou hadst not second sight!