RECENT POETRY AND EMOTIONALIZING OF EVOLUTION 9 



The dreaming generations from of old ! 

 Not thus, to luckless men, are tidings told 

 Of mistress lost, or riches taken wing; 

 And is eternity a slighter thing. 

 To have or lose, than kisses or than gold ? 



Nay, tenderly, if needs thou must, disprove 

 My loftiest fancy, dash my grand desire 

 To see this curtain Uft, these clouds retire. 

 And Truth, a boundless dayspring, blaze above 

 And round me; and to ask of my dead sire 

 His pardon for a word that wronged his love. 



It was in this mood, then, this mingling of prayer and pain, that our 

 author accepted the conclusion he has uttered for us in honest verse. 



In "The Hope of the World "^ he voices finally and unhesitatingly 

 the view that Life and her consort Law are unaccompanied in their 

 lofty realm by unconquerable Love. Heaven vouchsafes no sign that 

 through all the frame of Nature her aim is a boundless ascent benign, 

 that she led man in kindliness up the steeps. 

 In cave and bosky dene 



Of old there crept and ran 

 The gibbering form obscene 



That was and was not man. 

 The desert beasts went by 

 In fairer covering clad; 

 More speculative eye 

 The couchant lion had, 

 And goodlier speech the birds, than we when we began. 



Then this incipient self of ours cHmbed at last in a mere fortuitous 

 hour, the child of a thousand chances. That in our hearts Hope 

 still hngers unsubdued, he will admit: 



She tells me, whispering low: 



"Wherefore and whence thou wast, 



Thou shaft behold and know 



When the great bridge is crossed. 



For not in mockery He 



Thy gift of wondering gave, 



'Poems, Vol. I, pp. 122-30, 1905. 



