406 APPENDIX 



Of fate that clings around these limbs so fair. 

 Kiss the rod rather ; learn to face the doom 

 Which we with all things that have beauty share. 



The world we breathe in is a chrysolite, 



No chance, no dreadful drift of dateless days 



May tarnish. Those long ages infinite 



Which wafted us over unfooted ways, 



When from dim whirling vapour sun and earth, 



And all the spheres that in their cycles blaze, 



Grew into being with a gradual birth, 



These shall endure, though all men 'neath the sod 



Turn a deaf ear alike to grief and mirth. 



We know not elsewhere any other God 

 Than that which permeates the living whole, 

 Alike in sentient clay and senseless clod. 



Call it Power, Motion, Life, Creator, Soul. 

 There is no name for force that over nerve 

 And granite sweeps with absolute control, 



Compelling germs invisible and curve 

 Of comet to the one resistless law, 

 Wherefrom the noblest creature cannot swerve, 



Nay, nor the meanest. Overmastering awe 

 Sublimes the sort of man that thinks and feels, 

 When toward the source of life he never saw, 



With genuflection meek he trembling steals, 

 Divining in the void a Yea and Nay, 

 Godhood akin to Manhood, which reveals 



Beyond the night of death a dawn of day. 

 Nor blame we man, if mid the weltering sea 

 That rings him round with impotent dismay, 



He crowd those chasms of immensity 



With phantoms of his own trail thought, and cry 



To what seems loftiest in things low as he. 



It may be that we shall not surely die : 



It may be that the powers to whom we pray, 



Are waiting in the calm crystalline sky 



To breathe by death these clouds of life away, 

 Yet were it wasteful, think you, in the span 

 Of endless things, if what was once mute clay, 



