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They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;

They sink in man's despair, without its calm;

And slaves, without the liberty in Christdom, Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm:

Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly The harvest of its memories cannot reap,

Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly.

Let them weep! let them weep!

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their look is dread to see,

150

For they mind you of their angels in high places,

With eyes turned on Deity. "How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart,

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?

Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path!
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath." 160

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

What was he doing, the great god Pan,1
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river?

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river,
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,
And hacked and hewed as a great god can

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I 2

1 the goat-footed god, traditional inventor of the shepherd's flute

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These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best?

Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height

This perfection, succeed with life's dayspring, death's minute of night?

(With that stoop of the soul which in bending Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul upraises it too)

The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete,

As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet.

Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known,

I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own.

There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink,

I am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think)

Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst

E'en the Giver in one gift.

love if I durst!

Behold, I could

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But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake

God's own speed in the one way of love: I

abstain for love's sake.

- What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appall?

In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all?

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what Began?

Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,

140

And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power,

To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the

marvellous dower

Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,

Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole?

And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest)

the mistake,

Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, and bid him awake

150

From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set

Clear and safe in new light and new life, a new harmony yet

To be run, and continued, .and ended or endure !

who

knows? The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make sure;

By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss,

And the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles in this.

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From thy will stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread Sabaoth:1

I will? the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loth

To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare

Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my despair?

This; 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!

See the King I would help him but cannot,

the wishes fall through.

Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,

To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would - knowing which,

I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak

through me now!

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