XII.

Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;

While we are speaking the word, it is already the Past.

XIII.

In the twilight of age all things seem strange and phantasmal,

As between daylight and dark ghost-like the landscape appears.

XIV.

Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;

Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.

THE CITY AND THE SEA.

Written May 12, 1881.

THE panting City cried to the Sea,

"I am faint with heat,

Oh breathe on me!"

And the Sea said, "Lo, I breathe! but my breath

To some will be life, to others death!"

As to Prometheus, bringing ease

In pain, come the Oceanides,

So to the City, hot with the flame
Of the pitiless sun, the east wind came.

It came from the heaving breast of the deep,
Silent as dreams are, and sudden as sleep.

Life-giving, death-giving, which will it be ;
O breath of the merciful, merciless Sea?

MEMORIES.

Written September 18, 1881.

OFT I remember those whom I have known
In other days, to whom my heart was led
As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,

As graves with grasses are, and at their head The stone with moss and lichens so o'erspread,

Nothing is legible but the name alone. And is it so with them? After long years, Do they remember me in the same way, And is the memory pleasant as to me? I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears? Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay, And yet the root perennial may be.

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.

[Written October 5, 1881.] As Seleucus narrates, Hermes describes the principles that rank as wholes in two myriads of books; or, as we are informed by Manetho, he perfectly unfolded these principles in three myriads six thousand five hundred and twenty-five volumes.

Our ancestors dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of

STILL through Egypt's desert places
Flows the lordly Nile,

From its banks the great stone faces
Gaze with patient smile.

Still the pyramids imperious

Pierce the cloudless skies,

And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,
Solemn, stony eyes.

But where are the old Egyptian
Demi-gods and kings?

Nothing left but an inscription

Graven on stones and rings.
Where are Helios and Hephæstus,
Gods of eldest eld?

Where is Hermes Trismegistus,
Who their secrets held?

Where are now the many hundred
Thousand books he wrote?

By the Thaumaturgists plundered,
Lost in lands remote ;

In oblivion sunk forever,

As when o'er the land

Blows a storm-wind, in the river
Sinks the scattered sand.

Something unsubstantial, ghostly,
Seems this Theurgist,

In deep meditation mostly
Wrapped, as in a mist.

Vague, phantasmal, and unreal
To our thought he seems,
Walking in a world ideal,
In a land of dreams.

Was he one, or many, merging
Name and fame in one,

Like a stream, to which, converging,
Many streamlets run?

Till, with gathered power proceeding, Ampler sweep it takes, Downward the sweet waters leading From unnumbered lakes.

By the Nile I see him wandering,
Pausing now and then,
On the mystic union pondering
Between gods and men;

Half believing, wholly feeling,
With supreme delight,
How the gods, themselves concealing,
Lift men to their height.

Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,
In the thoroughfare
Breathing, as if consecrated,

A diviner air ;

And amid discordant noises,

In the jostling throng,

Hearing far, celestial voices

Of Olympian song.

Who shall call his dreams fallacious?
Who has searched or sought

All the unexplored and spacious
Universe of thought?

Who, in his own skill confiding,
Shall with rule and line
Mark the border-land dividing
Human and divine?

Trismegistus! three times greatest!
How thy name sublime

Has descended to this latest
Progeny of time!

Happy they whose written pages
Perish with their lives,

If amid the crumbling ages
Still their name survives!

Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately
Found I in the vast,
Weed-encumbered, sombre, stately,
Grave-yard of the Past;

And a presence moved before me
On that gloomy shore,
As a waft of wind, that o'er me
Breathed, and was no more.

TO THE AVON.

FLOW on, sweet river! like his verse Who lies beneath this sculptured hearse; Nor wait beside the churchyard wall

For him who cannot hear thy call.