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Not there, not there!

Not in that nook, that ye deem so fair;—

Little reck I of the bright, blue sky,

And the stream that floweth so murmuringly,

And the bending boughs, and the breezy air—

Not there, good friends, not there!

In the city churchyard, where the grass

Groweth rank and black, and where never a ray

Of that self-same sun doth find its way

Through the heaped-up houses’ serried mass—

Where the only sounds are the voice of the throng,

And the clatter of wheels as they rush along—

Or the plash of the rain, or the wind’s hoarse cry,

Or the busy tramp of the passer-by,

Or the toll of the bell on the heavy air—

Good friends, let it be there!

I am old, my friends—I am very old—

Fourscore and five—and bitter cold

Were that air on the hill-side far away;

Eighty full years, content, I trow,

Have I lived in the home where ye see me now,

And trod those dark streets day by day,

Till my soul doth love them; I love them all,

Each battered pavement, and blackened wall,

Each court and corner. Good sooth! to me

They are all comely and fair to see—

They have old faces—each one doth tell

A tale of its own, that doth like me well,

Sad or merry, as it may be,

From the quaint old book of my history.

And, friends, when this weary pain is past,

Fain would I lay me to rest at last

In their very midst; full sure am I,

How dark soever be earth and sky,

I shall sleep softly—I shall know

That the things I loved so here below

Are about me still—so never care

That my last home looketh all bleak and bare—

Good friends, let it be there!

Thomas Westwood (1814-1888).

Every man hath his gift, one a cup of wine, another heart’s blood.

Hafiz.

Some poets sing of wine or sensuous enjoyment, but Hafiz pours out his heart’s blood in song. Presumably wine and blood are contrasted because of their similar appearance.

The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.

G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).

THE PULLEY

When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by,

“Let us,” said He, “pour on him all we can;

Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,

Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way,

Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure;

When almost all was out, God made a stay,

Perceiving that, alone of all His treasure,

Rest in the bottom lay.

“For if I should,” said He,

“Bestow this jewel also on My creature,

He would adore My gifts instead of Me,

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:

So both should losers be.

“Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessness;

Let him be rich and weary, that at least,

If goodness lead him not, yet weariness

May toss him to My breast.”

George Herbert (1593-1633).

“The Pulley” because by the desire for rest after toil and tribulation God draws man up to Himself.

(Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in November, 1859.) At the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860 Huxley had on Thursday, June 28, directly contradicted Professor Owen’s statement that a gorilla’s brain differed more from a man’s than it did from the brain of the lowest of the Quadrumana (apes, monkeys, and lemurs). He was thus marked out as the champion of evolution. On the Saturday, although the public were not admitted, the members crowded the room to suffocation, anxious to hear the brilliant controversialist, Bishop Wilberforce, take part in the debate. An unimportant paper was read bearing upon Darwinism, and a discussion followed. The Bishop, inspired by Owen, began his speech. He spoke in dulcet tones, persuasive manner, and with well-turned periods, but ridiculing Darwin badly and Huxley savagely. “In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution: rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to Huxley, with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.”

As he said this, Huxley turned to his neighbour and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands!” On rising to speak, he first gave a forcible and eloquent reply to the scientific part of the Bishop’s argument. Then “he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words—words, which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor: but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.” (Macmillan’s, 1898.) There is no verbatim report of this incident, but the varying accounts agree in outline.

(Extracted from Life of Huxley.)

One object of this book is to bring back the memories of the seventy-eighties—and of overwhelming interest at the time was the alleged conflict between religion and science. Through Darwin’s great discovery and Herbert Spencer’s world-wide extension of the evolution theory, so much was found covered by law that men were blinded to the fact that the essential question of causality, lying behind all law, was still untouched.

The important and thrilling incident referred to above took place in 1860, when I was two years old, but it was still an absorbing topic thirteen or fourteen years later, and is one of my most vivid recollections.

Wilberforce (1805-1873) was a great Churchman and, indeed, has been said to be the greatest prelate of his age, although his nickname “Soapy Sam” led to a popular depreciation of his merits. (This epithet originally meant that he was evasive on certain questions, but it took a further meaning from his persuasive eloquence.) In this instance he meddled with a subject of which he was ignorant. Owen, who instigated him to make this attack on Darwin and Huxley had at first welcomed the theory of evolution, but quailed before the orthodox indignation against the necessary extension of that theory to the origin of man. Huxley (1825-1895) was thirty-five years of age when he thus showed himself a strong debater and a power in the scientific world.

On tracing the line of life backwards, we see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition. We come at length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the protogenes of Haeckel, in which we have “a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.” Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking; but however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life?... Believing, as I do, in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By a necessity engendered and justified by science I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.

(Referring to the question of inquiring into the mystery of our origin). Here, however, I touch a theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.

John Tyndall.

The italics are mine.

As in the preceding quotation the subject is the alleged conflict between religion and science, which occupied so large a space in our life and thought in the seventies and eighties. The above are the two passages from Tyndall’s presidential address at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 1874, which caused an immense sensation. The Belfast Address, like Huxley’s smashing reply to Bishop Wilberforce, was useful in showing that all scientific questions must be considered with an open mind, free of theological bias, and also in adding testimony to the importance and value of Darwin’s investigation. Although fifteen years had passed since The Origin of Species was published, this was still necessary. (At that very time Professor McCoy, afterwards Sir Frederick McCoy, F.R.S., when lecturing at the Melbourne University to his students, of whom I was one, was still making inane jokes about evolution and our monkey cousins.)

But, while the world was in ferment over the question of man’s alleged kinship with the monkey, there came the further startling fact that the President of the British Association also proclaimed his belief in materialism and, inferentially, that there was no life after death. Englishmen had not before realized how widely materialism had spread through England and Europe. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that a majority at least of the leading thinkers had become materialists.

In travelling outside science into metaphysics, Tyndall betrayed a lamentable ignorance of the latter—a parallel case to that of Bishop Wilberforce when he attempted to meddle with science. Martineau, referring to the first quotation above, wrote: “There is no magic in the superlatively little to draw from the universe its last secret. Size is but relative, magnified or dwindled by a glass, variable with the organ of perception: to one being, the speck which only the microscope can show us may be a universe; to another, the solar system but a molecule; and in the passing from the latter to the former you reach no end of search or beginning of things. You merely substitute a miniature of nature for its life-size without at all showing whence the features arise.”

THE NEW GOSPEL

HAECKELIUS loquitur:

The ages have passed and come with the beat of a measureless tread

And piled up their palace-dome on the dust of the ageless dead,

Since the atom of life first glowed in the breast of eternal time,

And shaped for itself its abode in the womb of the shapeless slime;

And the years matured its form with slow, unwearying toil.

Moulded by sun and storm, and rich with the centuries’ spoil,

Till the face of the earth was fair, and life grew up into mind,

And breathed its earliest prayer to its god in the dawn or wind,

And called itself by the name of man, the master and lord,

Who conquers the strength of flame and tempers the spear and sword;

For the world grows wiser by war, and death is the law of life,

The lowermost rock in the scar is red with the stains of strife.

Burst thro’ the bounds of sight, and measure the least of things,

Plummet the infinite and make to thy fancy wings;

From crystal, and coral, and weed, up to man in his noblest race,

The weaker shall fail in his need, and the stronger shall hold his place!

RENANUS loquitur:

Ah! leave me yet a little while, to watch

The golden glory of the dying day,

Till all the purple mountains gleam and catch

The last faint light that slowly steals away.

Too soon the night is on us; aye, too soon

We know the cloud is born of blinding mist:

The throne, whereon the gods sate crowned at noon

With ruby rays and liquid amethyst,

Is but a vapour, dim and grey, a streak

Of hollow rain that freezes in its fall,

A dull, cold shape that settles on the peak,

Icy and stifling as a dead man’s pall.

The world’s old faith is fairest in its death,

For death is fairer oftentimes than life;

No vulgar passion quivers in the breath:

The dead forget their weariness and strife.

Say not that death is even as decay,

A hideous charnel choked with rotting dust;

The cold white lips are beautiful as spray

Cast on an iceberg by the northern gust.

The memories of the past are diadem’d

About the brow and folded on the eyes;

The weary lids beneath are bent and gemm’d

With charmèd dreams and mystic reveries.

Once more she sits in her imperial chair,

And kings and Cæsars kneel before her feet,

And clouds of incense fill the heavy air,

And shouts of homage echo thro’ the street.

Or yet, again, she stretches forth the hand,

And men are done to death at her desire;

The smoke of burning cities dims the land,

And limbs are torn or shrivelled in the fire.

Once more the scene is shifted, and the gleam

Of eastern suns about her brow is curled;

Once more she roams a maiden by the stream,

Despised of men, the Magdalen of the world.

So scene on scene floats lightly, as a haze

That comes and goes with sudden gust and lull:

Limned with the sunset hues of other days,

They are but dreams; yet dreams are beautiful.

Archibald Henry Sayce (Academy, Dec. 5, 1885).

As in the two preceding quotations, the subject is the supposed conflict of religion and science. Haeckel (born 1834, recently dead) was the most ruthless of all the biologists in accounting for evolution and all progress by a struggle for existence. Renan (1823-1892), the French writer, whose love of Christianity survived his belief in it, speaks of the passing away of the old faith as “the golden glory of the dying day,” and says that in its death it will be more beautiful than in its life, when it led to passion, persecution and war. The penultimate verse refers to the time when temporal power was removed from the church, and she reverted to the humility, and also the beauty, of primitive Christianity when it came in its morning glory from the East.

The fact that these fine verses are by the great philologist and archæologist, Professor Sayce, who has not publicly appeared in the rôle of a poet, adds greatly to their interest. The few verses he has published have mostly appeared over the initials “A.H.S.” in the old Academy (the present periodical is a different concern), and he was not known to the public as the author.

Anything about Professor Sayce must be interesting to the reader, and I, therefore, need not apologize for mentioning the following incidents, which, I imagine, are known only among his friends. In 1870, during the Franco-German War, Mr. Sayce was ordered to be shot at Nantes as a German spy, and only escaped “by the skin of his teeth.” It was just before Gambetta had flown in his balloon out of Paris, and there was no recognized Government in the country. Nantes was full of fugitives, and bands of Uhlans were in the neighbourhood. Mr. Sayce was arrested when walking round the old citadel examining its walls—not realizing that it was occupied by French troops. Fortunately, some ladies of the garrison came in during his examination to see the interesting young prisoner and, after Mr. Sayce had been placed against the wall and a soldier told off to shoot him, they prevailed upon the Commandant to give him a second examination, which ended in his acquittal.

Mr. Sayce was also among the Carlists in the Carlist war of 1873, and was present at some of the so-called battles which, he says, were dangerous only to the onlookers. He also once had a pitched battle with Bedouins in Syria.

Professor Sayce (he became Professor in 1876) has also the proud distinction of being the only person known to have survived the bite of the Egyptian cerastes asp, which is supposed to have killed Cleopatra. He accidentally trod on the reptile in the desert some three or four miles north of Assouan and was bitten in the leg. Luckily, he happened to be just outside the dahabieh in which he was travelling with three Oxford friends, one of them the late Master of Balliol. The cook had a small pair of red-hot tongs, with which he had been preparing lunch, and Professor Sayce was able to burn the bitten leg down to the bone within two minutes after the accident; thus saving his life at the expense of a few weeks’ lameness.

But hark! a sound is stealing on my ear—

A soft and silvery sound—I know it well.

Its tinkling tells me that a time is near

Precious to me—it is the Dinner Bell.

O blessed Bell! Thou bringest beef and beer,

Thou bringest good things more than tongue may tell:

Seared is, of course, my heart—but unsubdued

Is, and shall be, my appetite for food.

I go. Untaught and feeble is my pen;

But on one statement I may safely venture:

That few of our most highly gifted men

Have more appreciation of the trencher.

I go. One pound of British beef, and then

What Mr. Swiveller called a “modest quencher”;

That, “home-returning,” I may “soothly say,”

“Fate cannot touch me: I have dined to-day.”

C. S. Calverley (Beer).

These are the two last verses of a parody on Byron. In each of the last three lines there is a literary reference. The first, of course, is to the happy-go-lucky Dick Swiveller of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop.

The next reference is to the amusing story about Sir Walter Scott that became known about the time Calverley was writing (1862). Scott, in his description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight (“Lay of the Last Minstrel”) says:

If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

For the gay beams of lightsome day

Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey....

Yet there can be no doubt that he himself had never seen the Abbey by moonlight! He further tells his readers that they can

Home returning, soothly swear

Was never scene so sad and fair.

They, having seen it, can “soothly” (i.e., truthfully) swear to its beauty, which was more than he himself could!

Calverley’s last line is from Sydney Smith’s “Recipe for a Salad”:

Oh, herbaceous treat!

’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;

Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,

And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl;

Serenely full the epicure would say,

“Fate cannot harm me—I have dined to-day.”

This again is an adaptation of Dryden’s “Imitation of Horace” (Book III, Ode 29):

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call to-day his own;

He who, secure within, can say,

To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d to-day.

We may live without poetry, music and art;

We may live without conscience, and live without heart:

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized man can not live without cooks.

He may live without books—what is knowledge but grieving?

He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?

He may live without love—what is passion but pining?

But where is the man that can live without dining?

Earl of Lytton, “Owen Meredith” (1831-1891) (Lucile).

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,

“Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

Are very good indeed—

Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed.”

Lewis Carroll (The Walrus and the Carpenter).

That all-softening, overpowering knell,

The tocsin of the soul—the dinner bell.

Byron (Don Juan).

First of the first,

Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as now

Perfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child..

My rose, I gather for the breast of God..

And surely not so very much apart,

Need I place thee, my warrior-priest..

In thought, word and deed,

How throughout all thy warfare thou wast pure,

I find it easy to believe: and if

At any fateful moment of the strange

Adventure, the strong passion of that strait,

Fear and surprise may have revealed too much,—

As when a thundrous midnight, with black air

That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,

Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed

Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides

Immensity of sweetness,—so, perchance,

Might the surprise and fear release too much

The perfect beauty of the body and soul

Thou savedst in thy passion for God’s sake,

He who is Pity. Was the trial sore?

Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!

Why comes temptation but for man to meet

And master and make crouch beneath his feet,

And so be pedestaled in triumph?

R. Browning (The Ring and the Book, X).

A young handsome priest, who had led a gay life, was moved by pure motives to rescue a beautiful young wife from a dreadful husband, and he travelled with her for three days to Rome. The husband was following with an armed band, the priest was risking disgrace, and the girl was risking death. The mutual danger would in itself tend to draw the fugitives too closely together; but also the girl had shown herself doubly lovable, for the strain and stress had revealed in her a very beautiful nature—just as a midnight thunder-storm opens and draws rich scent from

Some sheathed

Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides

Immensity of sweetness.

Coleridge has a similar illustration, “Quarrels of anger ending in tears are favourable to love in its spring tide, as plants are found to grow very rapidly after a thunderstorm with rain”—(Allsop’s Letters, etc., of Coleridge). Coleridge died in 1834, and “The Ring and the Book” was published in 1868-9: it is curious that both poets should have been impressed with a fact that appears to have been only recently recognized. In the seventies Lemström proved that plants thrive under electricity; but I think it is only a few years ago that in some agricultural experiments in Germany it was found that electricity was of no benefit to the crops without rain or other moisture.

The quotation is from the fine judgment which the Pope delivers.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

Swift (Gulliver’s Travels).

A child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.

(Love’s Labour Lost, I, 1.)

The whole World was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman: Man is the whole World, and the Breath of God; Woman the rib and crooked piece of man.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).

Give me but what this ribband bound,

Take all the rest the sun goes round!

Edmund Waller (1606-1687) (On a Girdle).

A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with.

J. P. F. Richter (Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces).

If she be made of white and red

Her faults will ne’er be known.

(Love’s Labour Lost, I, 2).

God made the world in six days, and then he rested. He then made man and rested again. He then made woman and, since then, neither man, woman, nor anything else has rested.

Author not traced.

Thou art my life, my love, my heart,

The very eyes of me.

Robert Herrick (To Anthea).

As perchance carvers do not faces make,

But that away, which hid them there, do take:

Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee,

And be his Image, or not his, but He.

John Donne (The Cross).

As sculptors chisel away the marble that hides the statue within, so let “crosses” or afflictions remove the impurities which hide the Christ in us, so that we shall become His image, or not His image, but Himself.

What is experience? A little cottage made with the débris of those palaces of gold and marble which we call our illusions.

Author not traced.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.

He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;

Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

Shelley (Adonaïs, an Elegy on Keats, XL).

This verse is engraved on Shelley’s own monument in the Priory Church at Christchurch, Hampshire.

A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).

This was about 1819. It is pathetic, this meeting of two great poets, Keats who was to die two years afterwards at the early age of twenty-six, and Coleridge, whose few brilliant years of poetic life had long previously ended in slavery to the opium-habit.

THE BALLAD OF JUDAS ISCARIOT

’Twas the body of Judas Iscariot

Lay in the Field of Blood;

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot

Beside the body stood.

Black was the earth by night,

And black was the sky;

Black, black were the broken clouds,

Tho’ the red Moon went by....

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,

So grim, and gaunt, and gray,

Raised the body of Judas Iscariot,

And carried it away.

...

For days and nights he wandered on

Upon an open plain,

And the days went by like blinding mist,

And the nights like rushing rain.

He wandered east, he wandered west,

And heard no human sound;

For months and years, in grief and tears,

He wandered round and round....

...

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,

Strange, and sad, and tall,

Stood all alone at dead of night

Before a lighted hall.

And the wold was white with snow,

And his foot-marks black and damp,

And the ghost of the silvern Moon arose,

Holding her yellow lamp.

And the icicles were on the eaves,

And the walls were deep with white,

And the shadows of the guests within

Pass’d on the window light.

The shadows of the wedding guests

Did strangely come and go,

And the body of Judas Iscariot

Lay stretch’d along the snow.

The body of Judas Iscariot

Lay stretched along the snow;

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot

Ran swiftly to and fro.

To and fro, and up and down,

He ran so swiftly there,

As round and round the frozen Pole

Glideth the lean white bear.

’Twas the Bridegroom sat at the table-head,

And the lights burnt bright and clear—

“Oh, who is that,” the Bridegroom said,

“Whose weary feet I hear?”

’Twas one look’d from the lighted hall,

And answered soft and slow,

“It is a wolf runs up and down

With a black track in the snow.”

The Bridegroom in his robe of white

Sat at the table-head—

“Oh, who is that who moans without?”

The blessed Bridegroom said.

’Twas one looked from the lighted hall,

And answered fierce and low

“’Tis the soul of Judas Iscariot

Gliding to and fro.”

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot

Did hush itself and stand.

And saw the Bridegroom at the door

With a light in his hand.

The Bridegroom stood in the open door,

And he was clad in white,

And far within the Lord’s Supper

Was spread so broad and bright.

The Bridegroom shaded his eyes and look’d,

And his face was bright to see—

“What dost thou here at the Lord’s Supper

With thy body’s sins?” said he.

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot

Stood black, and sad, and bare—

“I have wandered many nights and days;

There is no light elsewhere.”

’Twas the wedding guests cried out within,

And their eyes were fierce and bright—

“Scourge the soul of Judas Iscariot

Away into the night!”

The Bridegroom stood in the open door,

And he waved hands still and slow,

And the third time that he waved his hands

The air was thick with snow.

And of every flake of falling snow,

Before it touched the ground,

There came a dove, and a thousand doves

Made sweet sound.

’Twas the body of Judas Iscariot

Floated away full fleet,

And the wings of the doves that bare it off

Were like its winding-sheet.

’Twas the Bridegroom stood at the open door,

And beckon’d, smiling sweet;

’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot

Stole in, and fell at his feet.

“The Holy Supper is spread within,

And the many candles shine,

And I have waited long for thee

Before I poured the wine!”

The supper wine is poured at last,

The lights burn bright and fair,

Iscariot washes the Bridegroom’s feet,

And dries them with his hair.

Robert Buchanan.

See reference to Buchanan in the Preface.

Now, as of old,

Man by himself is priced:

For thirty pieces Judas sold

Himself, not Christ.

Hester Cholmondeley.

I learn from the New Statesman reviewer of the first English Edition that these lines were by Hester, a gifted sister of Mary Cholmondeley. She died at 22.

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

Alexander Smith (On the Writing of Essays).

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.

Sydney Smith.

In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstances of their universal admission. Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

S. T. Coleridge (Aids to Reflection).

I have given no man of my fruit to eat,

I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.

Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,

This wild new growth of the corn and vine,

This wine and bread without lees or leaven,

We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,

Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,

One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.

In the change of years, in the coil of things,

In the clamour and rumour of life to be,

We, drinking love at the furthest springs,

Covered with love as a covering tree,

We had grown as gods, as the gods above,

Filled from the heart to the lips with love,

Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings,

O love, my love, had you loved but me!

We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved

As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen

Grief collapse as a thing disproved,

Death consume as a thing unclean,

Twain halves of a perfect heart, made fast

Soul to soul while the years fell past;

Had you loved me once, as you have not loved;

Had the chance been with us that has not been.

Swinburne (The Triumph of Time).