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Ranolf and Amohia

Canto the Second

page 20

Canto the Second.

I.

But this "Ranoro"—Ranolf—who was he?—
Let us a brief while turn aside and see.

Sprung from a race of hardy mountaineers—
At the remote extreme of Britain's isle,
Where rugged capes confront the Arctic sky,
Now faint beneath the pale and tender smile
Of Summer's lingering light that sadly cheers;
Now through rent chasms of the storm-cloud's pile
Seen lurking lone in grim obscurity;
Where whirlpools boil, and eddying currents scar
The tides that sweeping from the Atlantic far
In finest season at their gentlest flow
Swarm up a thousand rocks, shoot high in air—
Columns of cloud a moment towering clear—
Then sink at once plumb-down and disappear,
While all the shining rocksides, black and bare,
Are streaked with skeiny streams of hurrying snow
Like stormers beaten back that headlong go;—
There was he born; did there his childhood puss
Mid wastes of purple moor and green morass.
page 21 His father, last of a long race decayed
Of pastoral chiefs, when all their land was gone
Had manlike set himself to humbler trade;
And something more than competence had made
From calcined kelp, and that free-splitting stone
Which in sea depths or silent cliffs, unknown
A thousand centuries, unquarried lay
Stored up and fashioning for the future beat
And ceaseless tramp of busy millions' feet
In that enormous World-Mart far away;
But most from fisheries, filling all the bays
With ruddy shifting sails in sun or haze,
When rippling loud, with myriad gleam and glance
And rustling shiver o'er its wide expanse.
The liquid mass of seething Ocean seemed
Quickened to silvery life that one way streamed.
Such sights and sounds inspired the growing Boy
With wondering exultation; and the joy
Of deeper thought and loftier feeling lent
To the mere gladness of temperament
But books and fancy and old fishers' tales
Of glorious climes beyond these mists and gales
Soon made the youngster restless—stirred his blood
With impulses resistless, such as drive
That insect-dragon scaly-winged to strive
And struggle through his chasmed channel's mud,
And reckless dash Into the splendour-flood,
The new wide pool of light he feels and sees;
Such longings, as, when Summer's searching heats
Find out the butterflies in their retreats.
They yearn with, till, unvexed by any breeze
The velvet-winged ones at her sweet command,
Sole, or in slow-revolving twos and threes
page 22 Float in a crimson flutter through the land.
Thus the Boy fevered till his sire's consent
He gained to gratify his natural bent
Towards sailor life, and follow o'er the main,
Although the favourite son, his brethren twain.
So from his schools, and tasks, and tutors free,
Away he went at twelve years old to Sea,

II.

But what preceptor like the mighty Ocean
To kindle thought and manifold emotion?
Majestic in its every form,
Stupendous calm or terror of the storm;
For ever to the dullest sense
A symbol of Omnipotence;
Yet like that Oriental notion.
That Deity of old devotion,
Omnipotence so lightly roused to ire,
And fickle as a flame of fire.

And with this fierce Sublimity, despite
The terrors of its treacherous might,
Its ruthless rage or sleek perfidious play,
As 't were with some tremendous beast of prey
Half-tamed, the Sailor lives from day to day,
Lives cautiously familiar, hour by watchful hour
For ever in its presence—in its power

But what a hardy pride his bosom warms
The while he runs the gauntlet through the storms
Playing with such a foe in wary strife
A match whereof the forfeit is his life,
page 23 The gain, more than his own, another's pelf;
With such apparent odds against himself,
The seeming desperation of the game
Hardens the coarser soul it cannot tame
Into a blind oblivion of the morrow,
A stoic mirth that laughs at vice and sorrow;
While he of nobler mind and loftier aim
Is nursed by consciousness of danger, still
Escaped by foresight or subdued by skill,
Into a calm unboastful strength of will,
A sober self-reliance, firm and grave;
And feels as o'er vast Ocean's baffled wave
Triumphantly he steers from clime to clime
Elate with something of its own sublime.

And many a vacant hour, on many a theme,
Our thoughtful Sea-boy found to muse or dream;
Those vigils which the sailor needs must keep
In the sky-girt seclusion of the Deep;
Oft when the playful billows, lightly curled,
Run past the ship, and quiet seems, as sleep,
The lone retreat that roams about the world—
That white-winged monastery moving still
Of rugged celibates against their will;
Or when in darkness, towards her goal unseen,
On moonless midnights mournfully serene,
She seems, as by some instinct, self-inspired,
Still pressing on her eager quest untired;
While, the obscurely-branching clouds between,
Crossed stays and braces—silent rocking spars
Seem mingling dimly with the dancing stars;
Or when, if steady-breathing trade-winds blow,
No shift of sails for days required, the crew
page 24 About the deck their quiet tasks pursue;
The dragging sail with rudely-skilful hands
They patch, or splice the rope's stiff-plaited strands,
Or twirl with balanced backward steps and slow
The whizzing yarn, still pondering as they go
The long-drawn tale it types of blended joy and woe:
Or when, her topsails squared, with plunging ease,
The ship goes reeling right before the breeze;
And he who has the watch, relaxing now,
May lean and mark, with thoughts far elsewhere, how
The bowsprit weaves great circles on the sky—
Down sinks the deck with all its life—up fly
The wide horizon and dark Ocean's plain;
And then the buoyant deck ascends again:
While speeding after, ever and anon,
A huge blue watery hill comes roaring on,
Tiger-like, open-mouthed, in furious chase;
But near the flying stern with slackened pace,
Ami lowered crest, seems first disposed to see
What the strange winged Leviathan may be
That dares amid these boisterous brawlers stray;
And, fearful the encounter to essay,
Falls back in a broad burst of foam, and hissing slinks away.
No lack of change each feeling to employ!
How his eyes widened with a solemn joy
When on some witching night
The jutting corner of the gibbous Moon—
A golden buoy
That weltered in a sable sea of cloud
(One level mass extending wide,
The firmament all bare beside)—
Shed an obscure and ominous light,
page 25 And fitful gusts scarce dared to moan aloud:
How was the heart-leap of his exultation
Sustained—sublimed by thrilled imagination
When, if a storm came veiling all the noon,
Old Ocean, rising in gigantic play,
Marshalled his multitudinous array
Of waves tumultuous into ridges gray,
And sent them whirling on their headlong way,
Host after host of crested cavalry
Charging in lines illimitable, urged
By trumpet winds whose deafening bray
Drowned the sharp hiss of myriad-lancing spray,
Into the horrible white gloom profound
That gathered, thickened all around!
And when the dimness of the squall was gone,
Haply, to some far region bound,
The great whale went majestically by—
Plunging along his mighty course alone,
Into the watery waste unknown;
Cleaving with calm, deliberate speed,
The battling waves he would not heed;
While at long intervals up thrown
Successive jets of spouted brine,
Decreasing with the distance, in a line,
Told how he ne'er diverged
An instant from his haughty path
Into die black heart of the tempest's wrath,
That like dense smoke before him scowled,
For all the clamorous coil of winds that howled
And waves that leapt around him as he past
And flung his foamy banner to the blast

page 26

III

But with these Ocean-scenes the Sea-hoy fed
On others fruitful both for heart and head;
Had glimpses of strange lands and men as strange:
Saw with each clime their minds and manners change:
Learnt how on God by various names they call,
While God's great smile shines equally on all;—
Allah, unimaged, One; Brahma, Vishnu,
And Siiva—monster-imaged One in Three;
Ormusd—' Ahuramasda '—name profound—
'Living I Am'—that splendour! One of Two
At war—dark Ahriman his throne invading,
Piercing with evil first the shell so sound,
His cosmic Egg-of-Order's perfect round;—
Manitou, mistlike with his pipewhiff fading;—
Buddha—prince, mystic, moralist—at last
Made God for teaching that no God can be:—
Arab—Hindu—Red Indian—Jew—Parsee;
Chinese Joss-beater, little reverent, too—
That cracker-loving creature of the past—
Blithe spirit—soul a lifeless leaden cast;
Who with high-sublimated Gods, a store,
His Buddha, Fo—Confutzee's Tien—Taou
That pure God-Intellect of Lao-tse,
Breathes blinding fog—Convention-fixed of yore—
Of grossest superstition With the rest,
The necromancing negro of the West,
The terrorist of Obeah. These he scanned;
And many a charm on each delightful land
Lavished by Art's or liberal Nature's hand:
Inhaled the breath that through dense mist distils
From green spruce woods and all the sea-air fills
page 27 With sweet sour odours from Canadian hills:
Dwelt with enraptured gaze on Hindostan's
Umbrageous bowers of spice and spreading fans,
And glistening ribbon-leaves and arching plumes;
Her Starr)- palms and sacred peepuls set
On many-fingered roots, a snaky net;
Or propping their highroofed magnificence
On pendent pillars; clustering gorgeous glooms
Whence pointed domes of marble mosques and tombs
Emerge—from that deepbosoming defence
Black green—into the burning atmosphere;
Or gilt pagodas rise above the shade
Like spires of thick cardoon-leaves closely laid,
All in blue tanks reflected, still and clear.
Or else that tropic Isle of Springs entranced
The lad—who revelled in its noonday glare
And silence deep, so tremulously hot—
So gently interrupted when it chanced
A sudden and soft fluttering in the air,
Like silverpaper rumpled, startlingly
Whispered some flying rainbow-fragment nigh,
Darting in downy purple golden-shot;
Or, as suspended by his long bill's tip
On viewless wings a-quiver poised, to sip
A crimson cactus-bloom—the honied dew
Which from that silky breast, so fit in hue
And texture fine, the airy suckling drew.
Safely that land of merry slaves he saw
Late ruined by a half-completed law j
When thoughtless theorists had flung aside
The evil bonds by ancient Custom tied,
Nor better bonds they wore themselves, supplied;
Had left to tyrannies of grovelling sense
page 28 The victims of their vain benevolence;
Left them still basely free from forethought, care,
And loftier loads the self-dependent bear;
Left them untaught to welcome Labour's pains,
More nobly slaves to all a freeman's chains;
To feel, the highest freedom all cm reach
Is but the highest self-restraint of each;
True freedom is a grave and sober thing,
With loyalty to Right crowned inward king;
While laws of Duty made despotic, make
The only freedom mobs nor kings can break.

IV.

So four years passed: to him a happy time.
Meanwhile his brothers both in youthful prime
Had perished; one, the pest of that fair clime,
The demon lurking in its loveliness,
The yellow fever's swiftly-withering flame
Had caught up and consumed: and that distress
Scarce over, from the Storm-Cape tidings came
Doubtful, which soon for doubt left little room,
The other must have met as sharp a doom—
Himself, his ship and shipmates whirled away
In Ocean's wild tempestuous embrace
To some unknown unfathomable Tomb.
Then did the anguish-smitten Father pray
The youngest, last remaining of his race
To leave a calling where such risks were rife.
And live at home, his age's staff and stay.
So, with what grace he might, though grieving sore,
The stripling gave his dutiful consent
page 29 Henceforth to follow some pursuit ashore,
Where Death, the Shade that dogs the steps of Life,
Upon his prey though equally intent,
Because less startling, seems less imminent.

V.

To tutors now and long-left tasks restored,
The sea-emboldened, self-reliant Boy
Soon grew enamoured of his new employ.
And many things those tutors never meant
Into a mind of such inquiring bent
His classics and his metaphysics poured.
But most he loved, could ne'er enough adore
The Godlike spirit of that grand Greek lore
That first taught Man his glorious being's height;
Taught him to stand, the Universe before,
Erect in moral, intellectual might,
And brave, in strength of Soul, the adverse infinite.
How would their strains his kindling bosom warm,
Those daring darling Poets, who enshrined
The freest Spirit in the purest Form—
In matchless Beauty such consummate Mind.
How would he triumph with the Theban Maid
Who, in no armour but instinctive sense,
The panoply of conscious right, arrayed,
Her lofty sentiment her sole defence,
Risked all the murderous rage of tyrant force I
To snatch a burial for a brother's corse;
Though all the gods—all worldly wisdom's saws,
All cherished loves and all Convention's laws,
Denounced herself and spurned her holy cause.
Antigone could teach him that the test
Of right and wrong lay in his own free breast;
page 30 That right was right, despite high-seated wrong
And throned Authority by Custom strong!
That Man of all external aid bereft,
Had still himself and staunch endurance left;
Could stand above all Circumstance elate
And trust high Nature in the fight with Fate.
And when he read the agonizing cries
That vulture-tortured Giant in the skies
Utters in deathless and sublime despair,
Doomed for his love to Man that woe to bear;
And all the sad majestic converse, round
The pinnacles of Caucasus snow-crownt
Swelling like solemn Music, and again
Dying along the illimitable air,
As, one by one, supernal visitants
Come floating up to watch the ghastly pants
And writhings of the Titan, and with vain
Compassion, taunts—temptations vainer still—
Assail his grand unconquerable Will,
And bid him break his voluntary chain,
Abandon Man, scorn that vicarious pain,
And hail the gloomy Tyrant's selfish reign;
When all the student's sense of justice rose,
Stirred by the dauntless Poet's great appeal,
In wrath against the author of such woes,
And his young heart would passionately feel
For the doomed donor of the god-wrong fire;
Think you he ne'er was tempted to inquire,
Was that outworn Olympian rule of Zeus
The only tyranny men called divine?
Was there no other nature-startling use
Of absolute power—no other punishment
Of love, inflicted on the innocent
page 31 At which instinctive Justice would repine?
But most his soul was wonderstruck to see
To what a height humanity could reach
In that divinest hemlock-drinker—he
Who welcomed Death less evil than the breach
Of fealty to his country's laws, or scant
Reliance on the faith he came to teach;
The truths his nature forced him to proclaim—
The necessary outcome of his frame,
Mental and moral—by the innate law
Of evolution for its excellence
Provided—as inevitable thence,
As from the sap of each peculiar plant
The special blossom earth and air must draw—
Trust absolute in the perfect Power above,
His perfect goodness; and what these must prove
(For with the ill around, what other just
Conclusion could he reach, with such a trust?)
That sole relief of every human want,
Soother and solace of the general sigh—
The soul' sunbodied immortality.
And where was ever a sublimer page
Than that which paints the Godsent Prophet-Sage
Cheerily urging with his latest breath
His lofty creed upon his weeping band
Of friends—his very gaoler too, unmanned;
Then standing forth, and with dilating eyes, 1
That look straightforward—bold and calm—bulh Wise'
Into the dread Eternity so nigh,
With one libation to the gods on high,
Drinking the Elixir both of life and death!
And as the deadly influence upward stole
And sobs broke forth he could no more console,
page 32 Lifting the mantle from his failing sight,
Just ere his soaring spirit winged its flight,
To make with accents faint his last bequest—
While haply in those eyes supreme o'er pain
A moment's humorous glimmer shone again—
That votive cock to the medicinal God
Of herbs—his soul's last evidence to be
Of joy at shaking off this mortal clod,
And his triumphant gratitude attest
To one whose potent drug had set him free.

VI.

Next with uprooting Metaphysics toyed
The youth—their tangled subtleties enjoyed;
Nor, as his tutors counselled would confine
His tasks to careworn, truth-adoring Locke;
Eager to learn what "paying out more line "
Where Locke had cast it, led to—solid rock,
Mud, quicksand, or the fathomless profound.
The more line ran, more depth there seemed to sound.
It took him, as you know, to that rare creed,
Etherial, beautiful—the fertile seed,
First dropped by Locke, our goodly Bishop caught
And sowed and reared into rich food for thought,
Heavy with ears of amaranthine gold
That yet may yield their glorious hundredfold.
"All possible ideas are mere sensations,
Or our reflections on them," Locke insists;
"But half the first are Sense's own creations,
No faithful types of what in truth exists;
Not in the rose the red, nor in light-rays
Its texture splits, but in the eyes that gaze;
Not in the fire, but in our frames, the heat;
page 33 Not in the honey, but our tongues the sweet;
Not in the thunder, but our ears, the roar;
These are impressions on the brain—no more:
But form, solidity, extension, power
To move or rest, are Matter's genuine dower,
Her real outside existence." Nay—pursue
Your doubt," cries Berkeley; "probe them through
and through,
And you will find these qualities you flatter
Yourself you prove essential in this Matter,
No more substantial than its red and blue."
And then the mighty mitred Analyst,
Silk-aproned but sincere Psychologist
And Sage—by few believed, by all beloved,
"With subtlest power "unanswerably proved,
What no man in his senses can admit,"
(The phrase of little truth and not much wit,
Is Reid's—though Hume had first acknowledged it)
Proved that all things we hear, see, feel around,
Have no such base as Matter—only hold
Existence in pure Spirit—their sole ground:
Forces are they, from Infinite Mind proceeding.
Spiritually active, wheresoever it be,
On finite mind to print, in order due,
Sensations, not deceptive nor misleading—
But spiritual coin as spiritual Coiner, true,
And real with Spirit's sole reality.
So Berkeley said and proved his flawless case.
But Hume came sliding in with smiling face,
Veiling the grimmest strength in easy grace;
The pleasant playful Giant—gentle Chief
Of sceptics, dealing blows without a sign
Of effort—slashing with a sword so fine—
page 34 Killing with lightning-touches bright and brief;
So wise, so good; whose adversaries found
His silken glove a Cestus iron-bound,
When staggering all the gladiator press
He proved—or seemed to prove—to their distress
And ours, that Thought itself and Consciousness
Had no such base as Mind—which only meant
Trains of impressions and ideas that went
And came in nothing'—neither more nor less;
For no recipient spirit could be perceived,
And Matter was already gone and shent;
And he had settled to his own content
(To such a dogma, ye who can, consent!)
No Cause did ever yet produce Effect
However Custom may the two connect.
Therefore for pictures we within us find,
No Power without—above—of any kind
Need be, or could be, as their cause assigned.
So must we Matter, Mind, God, Soul, alike
Out of the ranks of real existence strike:
And yet as Mind and Matter both, without
Or spite of Reason, must be still believed—
Nature took care of that—that much achieved—
The only clear conclusion was dim Doubt.

Thus Locke by Berkeley—Berkeley thus by Hume,
Was pounced on in retributive swift doom,
Hand over hand, as children play, so pat,
Each crushing his great predecessor flat:
So swiftly hurried down the eddving tide
Of speculation which began to flow
In the far East three thousand years ago
When doubting dusky Sages threw aside
page 35 Their faith in those symbolic wheel spoke arms
And double heads of deities of Ind;
And some mild paddy-fed pale-blooded crew
Of subtle theorists argued nought was true,
Nought real but Brahma—him in whom inhere
All magic-lantern shadows that appear
As living shapes in this illusive sphere.
Then Brahma's essence, subtilised and thinned,
In Kapila's self-styled "Perfect Wisdom" grew
To Absolute Spirit—Thinking Substance pure
And abstract as that pure unworldly Jew,
The spiritual Spinoza, ever drew.
But earlier still, in wild recoil more sure
From Brahmin tyranny of creed and caste,
The o'er-refining Orient fancy passed
To dreams the maddest ever Reasoning spun.
In that high-moralled faith that still has charms
(Because its founder's self, made God, replaced
And vivified so soon for vulgar taste
The No-God he had taught) to sway such swarms,
Dusk Aryan and Turanian tawny-skinned;
That fullest-millioned Faith beneath the Sun,
Which Sakya Muni—princely eremite—
First saddened into—sickened with the sight
Of sorrow and pain inseparable seeming
From life—his own a pleasure-sated blight
With high desire forlornly through it gleaming;
So with a proud deliberate despair
Conceived his monstrous method of redeeming.
By guiding, souls back to their primal night
Of non-existence; which his pupil and friend
Kisyapa teaches they already share,
Therein are based—begin—and ought to end;
page 36 Nor rests, like Hume, content in doubt to pause,
But from his metaphysic "Basket" draws
Negation of all spirit—God—first cause—
Brahma or Absolute Being—all and each
Creator and created—matter—mind
Alike chimeras; wisdom's highest reach
To know this nothingness: the soul's true aim
To lose eustence and partake the same;
Extinguished then, with consciousness consigned
To darkness—blown out like a taper's flame,
To enter so "Nirvana"'—there to be
Absurdly blest with blan Noneentity.

VII.

"Well—posed with that result of logic-fence,
Our student tried the school of Common Sense.
But soon the irreverent youth came bouncing thence:
"What," cried he," is it not a false pretence
That makes of Metaphysics but a name,
And theirs to Science a preposterous claim
"Who dare their doughty reasoning begin
By begging—nay, with beggars' impudence
Demanding the one point at issue here;
The only one that Logic seemed to hurt—
Dare for superior density assert
The victory their acuteness could not win?
O Reid and Brown, my crafty friends! 'tis clear
You found when sorely gravelled by this Hume
'Twas harder far to prove than to assume;
An easier feat for souls of sluggish pace
To seize the palm-wreath than to run the race:
Boldly to claim the stakes—while beaten they
Throw up the game their business 'tis to play!"

page 37

VIII.

How gladly then he roved from such chopped hay
To fields that seemed all clover, green and gay,
Though hedged with worse than Indian orange-thorns—
Sharp subtleties for Doubt's intrusive horns.
Did not those free-souled Germans point the way
To regions bathed in Truth's unclouded day?
Where Knowledge hampered by no faintest trace
Of Doubt might soar secure in pride of place,
And Faith fold Science in a fond embrace?
Did not great Kant in pedant's jargon show.
As mathematic truths from Reason—so
Do moral from the inborn Conscience flow '
By mere necessity?—those mightier facts
And fixed conditions in which Reason acts—
The Soul—the Universe—but pre-suppose
And force you to the grand Idea behind
Whence both must spring, wherein are both combined—
To God—the source of all that thinks or knows,
All Being's boundless origin and close?
Was not that cold, cloud-cleaving Aeronaut.
Potent, with swoln balloon of subtlest thought,
With Logic's self, triumphantly to lift
Man's deathless Hope into an atmosphere
Serene above the wayward dust and drift
Of Logic—from Sensation's vapours clear?
Did not poor Faith, doubt-prest from shift to shift.
Find a safe refuge in that "Reason pure?"
Trusting ensconced in Science so obscure—
A pachydermatous Philosophy
Of scarce pronounceable hard names, to be
Both scoff and sceptic proof: and might not she,
page 38 That lofty Hope, in such environment
Of prickly briars of Thought—a tangle rude—
Sit like the Beauty in the long-charmed wood,
Secure—supreme—inviolable? pent
In hard, repellent reasonings reasonings that defy
Assault—and there kept living
Like bright-eyed toad with rock encompassed round;
Buried in chaff of dialectics dry,
A chrysalis (like that with reeled off floss,
Bared of its dress, all amber gleam and gloss
The careful schoolboy hides in homely bran)
Whence a new Psyche should emergy for Man?
Like Psyche's sell—from blue Italy
Prepared to cross the rude rough-handling sea,
Laid up in wood and iron, sound a
In naked beauty from all chance of chafe—
So closely presses round her spiritual
And limbs of tender marble and white grace,
The hard-caked sawdust of her packing-case.

But, O conclusion lame and impotent!
O rage of vigorous reasoning vainly spent!
Those great ideas—-Time. Spacere and Cause—'tis plain.
Though notions connate with the nascent brain.
Have in essential fact no solid ground—
Only within the human soul are found;
Though necessary bases of our thought
Are from no prototypes beyond us brought:
That God is but a sort of ghost confined
To haunt the shadowy chambers of the min;
As if within a glass-roofed palace grew
Some strange grand Tree of mystic shape and
With various virtues wondrously arrayed—
page 39 With mighty fronds and majesty of shade.
And towering crest sufficiently sublime;
Within those vitreous walls compelled, no doubt.
By nature's laws luxuriantly to sprout,
But with no fellow—no resemblance known,
Or able to exist in any clime
Mid the green glories of the world without;
A most magnificent, yet monstrous cheat,
Proud overgrowth of artificial heat,
And that peculiar edifice alone.
"Why, if this God's a product of our own,
Which ends in us, though there perforce it breeds,
A doubtful light which but to darkness leads,"
Our student thought—" what waste of toil and time,
These more than acrobatic feats to climb
Such crags precipitous, such slippery heights,
Where no rewarding view our toil requites;
No vision of the City long-desired,
Though brief as that in Moslem myths—perchance
Seen standing—sudden—silent—sunrise-fired,
Before the desert-wanderer's awestruck glance,
Far stretching multitudinous array!
Of gilded domes and snowy minarets,
Ami tiers of long arcades, rich-roofed with frets
More delicate than frostwork! then, again,
Gone—vanished! and a hundred years in vain
Resought, but gladdening nevermore the day;
Not e'en such glimpse, O mighty Kant!—at most
when we have reached your height at so much cost,
In densest fog we see a finger-post,
You say directs us to that City fair;
But is no proof of any City there!
page 40 Some letters on its arms obscurely seen
Your spectacles discover; what they mean,
In worse than three-tongued wedge-rows sealed up last,
We have to take from you on trust at last.

"And, then, that 'Reason practical '—that creed
Of Action that its own high laws must breed;
Will must be free, whatever you may prove;
Run where it lists, yet always in a groove—'
Why, we are drifting back to Brown and Reid

IX.

So to that Spirit erect and pure, he next
Resorted (with these fancied failures vexed)
The march majestic and the genuine ring
Of whose high eloquence on one high theme,
How best aloft the expanded soul may wing
Her way, and best sustain her flight supreme—
Had all the warranty a life could bring.
The faithful mirror of his faith—sublime
In self-dependent stateliness severe,
And steadfast single eminence of aim:—
Fichte—whose name recalls a dearer Fame—
A trenchant towering Spirit as grand and true!
Of those who think, profoundest and the prime;
He whose capacious soul's ascending Sphere
Oft looms obscure while flashing brightness through
Dull mists it kindles till they disappear;
Who, rolling back the ponderous stone of Time,
Makes the dead Past, up starting from the gloom,
In Truth's rough Poesy lightning-bathed, out bloom
The living Present, whose loud shams—with might
page 41 And hammer like his own white-knuckled Thor's,
And love that for the culprit's sake abhors
The crime,—his prophet-hand was sent to smite!—
Fichte—great voice to rouse, great heart to cheer!
This greater could not hear it and not leap
In unison, "Deep calling unto Deep"—
Could not from such a credence and career
Withhold the dower of his undying praise;
Which saw therein the far-reflected gleam
Of high-end eavouring old illustrious days—
Heard solemn echoes or the etherial flow
Of Attic pacings of the Portico
And whispers from the groves of Academe,
Where Truth alone by sages world-renowned
Was sought, and made Life's rule at once when found;—
Fichte struck out once more for truths that shine
Instinctive and immediately divine.
In consciousness is all of God we know;
But consciousness proclaims him; neither dim
Nor doubtful He; all Being's source and stream;
Nature exists in us, and we in Him.
For "Me'" and "Not-Me"—Universe and Soul
Are one—not two—and Consciousness the whole:
I its passive, Soul its active side;
In Consciousness are both contained—allied;
And from the Soul though Nature takes its rise,
It limits none the less and modifies
I worker, whose material it supplies;
Spirit is all—and Matter there is none
But part and product of the Soul alone.
And what ideal does Consciousness proclaim
As all we know of Him whom "God" we name?—
That active principle, which clearly seen
page 42 Is working out, whatever intervene,
The triumph in the universe and Man,
Of all that's useful, beautiful, and good;
Thai Force which forwards its consummate plan
Of progress endless towards the perfect Day
of moral Order's universal sway;
And to the Soul above all tumuli cries
Of one high Duly sill to be pursued,
With that "Divine Idea" to harmonise
The Will, and all its faculties subdued
Into devout co operative mood,
Press forward freely to the ennobling prize

High thought: yet haply Hindu still; so like
The course—nor much unlike the goal—to those
The later Bud the soul propose
Dropping the dreary nihilistic phases
Of Sakya's faith too purely insane to strike
The fancy of the myriads, else its foes;
Backsliding into healthier dreams and brighter,
In Burmah or Nepaul: or such as lie
Obscurely hidden in the mystic cry,
The shaveling in red robes and yellow mitre,
In snowy Thibetan devoutly raises
At Lama-ridden Lhassa, when he phrases
In one short shibboleth his prayers and praises:
"Gem in the Lotus-flower. Amen!" whereby
He breathes his aspiration to proceed—
His soul's intense desire to wing its flight
Through A-Lons of blest Being—height o'er height,
Till evermore suffused with purer light
It merge—from death, disease, old age and need.
And all the griefs of gross existence freed,—
page 43 Perfect, in Buddha's Soul—its boundless meed—
Absorbed in that All-perfect Infinite!
A heterodox "Nirvana," worthier far
By ages of vast virtue to be won;
No' taper flame blown out'—a blissful star
Lost in the splendour of the noonday sun.

"True," thought the lad, "this Man was true, indeed;
A noble Teacher of a noble Creed!
But should a sage so lofty laps gain
Towards pure assumption's unassured domain?
Revert to doubtful regions long resigned,
Basing our Berkeley's Universe of Mind
On Common Sense—though of a nobler kind
Than puzzled Reid could for poor Matter find?
'What must be, must'—' It is because it is'—
Is proud Philosophy reduced to this?
Yet, to persuade us how the Soul may climb
Triumphant o'er material Space and Time,
Stronger than all that dialectic strife.
His most convincing logic was his life;
Of truths the stern philosopher had taught
Proof most profound, perhaps, the patriot brought,
When, finishing his last great fight for God,
And many a rapt impassioned period,
Down from his desk the mighty Master came,
Unmoved by murmur low, or plaudit loud,
Or fervent blessing from the student-crowd;
And left the loved arena of his fame
With shouldered musket in the ranks to stand,
And fall or conquer for his Father-land."

page 44

X.

Then Schelling plies the metaphysic ball,
Which reason's racket-sill will strike aloft
To overfly sensation's bounding wall,
Though to the ground aft is fall.
Those two Ideas we prate about so oft,
The Soul—the Universe—are really two,
And are identified—O, not in you,
Nor any finite Consciousness so small.
But only in the Absolute—the All.
Spirit is Matter that it self surve;
And Matter, spirit' sundiscerning phase;
They are the magnet's two opposing poles
And each the other balances—controls:
Both in a centre of indifference rest,
Which their essential being is confest:
As in the magnet's every point—we see
In all the works of Nature just these three
But that which bounds them all and each degree.
The Absolute—the Magnet's self—must be,
Except at Being's most exalted height—
Impersonal—uncoscious—infinite;
For God—that Absolute—still strives in vain,
In Nature's blind inferior works: nor can
In any form Self-Consciousness attain.
Save in the highest reasoning power of Man,
That central point, which Soul and Nature gain;—
Unconscious else the Universal Pan,

Behold, then, three-and-twenty centuries passed,
The stately Ship of Western Thought at Last
page 45 Striking and stranded on the barren shore
Where struck that Buddhist bark so long before.
Left high and dry with all its phantom freight;
Thither impelled by that satiric fate
That dogs our intellectual pride, and brings
Shipwreck with its conviction shallow and vain,
That 'tis a storm charmed cruiser, this poor brain.
'Built, rigged, and manned to circumnavigate
The mighty round of all existing things.
So Schelling digs where Kásyapa had dug;
Magniloquent, yet microscopic elf, So makes all
Nature but the high-plumed hearse
Of God gone dead; so, whipping out his cord,
O metaphysical and monstrous Thug!
Strangles Creation's life out; in a word,
Finding the Universe within himself,
Leaves nought but Self within the Universe.

"Alas!" thought Ranolf, "were it wrong to call
This the most drear of metaphysic dreams—
The most revolting, mean result of all?
The Being, then, of highest worth it seems,
Which that World-ghost, that blind and senseless force
Evolves in its uncaused unconscious course,
Is but this inefficient soul of ours—
The one God, Man—for all his boasted powers
A clay-clad, wingless, weal; ephemeral,
A worm upon this earth-speck doomed to crawl.
Is he the sole Intelligence? can he
The crown and climax of all Being be
Throughout that million-starred immensity?
Prove it by demonstration flawless, strong;
The wild conclusion proves some premiss wrong;
page 46 Absurd, as if those dwellers by old Nile
Had, in mere Scarabeus-worship vile.
Crowned with a beetle their great Pyramid—
The Monarch Builder out of sight and hid."

XI.

To mystic depths and mistier. Hegel shrouds
Himself and Faith in denselier-rolling clouds.
Like Arab genie sore opprest in fight;
His splendour flashes through redoubled night
Thoughts are the same as Things; and what is true
Of one must be so of the other too;
So Non-existence, as a thought, must be
Tike pure Existence, a reality.
Of Being absolute, and uncombined
With qualities of any form or kind,
What can we know or predicate aright?
Is not Non-being in the self-same plight?
The positive and negative descried
In all things, must be these and nought beside;
For each Idea or Object (which you please—
Both are the same) developes into these;
But these destroy and shut each other out,
A negative is all they bring about;
But as the idea is there, and must remain.
That negative must be denied again.
As Abstract Space, for instance, cannot be
Conceived as boundless, or as bounded either;
Yet must be one, to be at all, you see,
Then cannot be at all, because 'tis neither:
A negative that meets denial clear.
For space is something after all, and here.
page 47 That last negation, then, the Idea revives,
And real essential Being to it gives
In the "Conditioned" where alone it lives.
Those magnet-poles, the two extremes, are gone,
And in the central point survive alone
Object and Subject, Universe and Soul,
Are in that centre, one and real, and whole;
Each in itself a nothing we may call,
But their relation to each other—all.
Like alkali and acid, they attract
Each other, meet, and perish in the act—
The effervescence rests the only fact
So the "Becoming"—the immediate spring
From Nought to Somewhat, is the vital thing;
"Well, well!" broke out our student here, "at least
It cannot be denied this great High Priest
Of metaphysic Mysteries, has the wit,
The ant-lion boasts who scoops his coneshaped pit
In subtlest sand, and there securely hides;
And when into the trap the victim slides,
And strives in vain to climb the slipping sides,
Down, deeper down, the crafty digger goes,
And o'er his prey such blinding dust showers throws,
He triumphs quickly, and the intruder draws
Bewildered into those remorseless jaws
But when unflinching Hegel flatly laid
The axiom down he would not have gainsaid,
Disdaining compromise—dispute—or flout
(Settling so coolly Hamlet's staggering doubt)
"To Be is Not-to-be "—and" Not-to-be
"To Be "—agree to that, or disagree,
"'Tis Logic's first great axiom, and most true!"
What Could a youth with risible organs do,
page 48 At this, Philosophy's last grand exploit?
But "ding the book the distance of a quoit"
Away, and with a shout of laughter loud,
Take to his pipe and blow—as clear a cloud.