316 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed, 

 The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light; 

 All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst, 

 Diffuse themselves and spend in love's delight 

 The beauty and the joy of their renewed might. 



The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender, 



Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath; 



Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour 



Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death, 



And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath. 



Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows 



Be as a sword consumed before the sheath 



By sightless lightning ? th' intense atom glows 



A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. 



Alas ! that all we loved of him should be. 



But for our grief, as if it had not been, 



And grief itself be mortal ! Woe is me ! 



Whence are we, and why are we ? of what scene 



The actors or spectators ? Great and mean 



Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. 



This is an elaboration of the idea briefly and simply expressed 

 in the finest lines of Moschus, 106-111, 



Ah me ! the mallows when they fade and perish in the garden, 

 and the green parsley and the fair flowering tendrils of the anise, they 

 awake to life again and grow, with the coming of another spring. 



But we, the human kind, the great, the mighty, and the wise, 

 when once we die, unheeding in the hollow earth we sleep — the long, 

 endless, never waking sleep. ^'^ 



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