Rhymes and rhymes in the range of the times!

Are mine for the moment stronger?
Yet hate me not, but abide your lot;
I last but a moment longer.

This faded leaf, our names are as brief;
What room is left for a hater?
Yet the yellow leaf hates the greener
leaf,

For it hangs one moment later.

Greater than I is that your cry?

And men will live to see it. Well- if it be so -so it is, you know; And if it be so, so be it.

Brief, brief is a summer leaf,

But this is the time of hollies. O hollies and ivies and evergreens, How I hate the spites and the follies!

LITERARY SQUABBLES

Originally printed in 'Punch,' March 7, 1846, where it was entitled 'After-thought.' It was included, with its present title, in the 'Library Edition of the 'Poems,' 1872-73. See p. 791.

Aн God! the petty fools of rhyme

That shriek and sweat in pigmy wars Before the stony face of Time,

And look'd at by the silent stars;

Who hate each other for a song,

And do their little best to bite And pinch their brethren in the throng, And scratch the very dead for spite;

And strain to make an inch of room

For their sweet selves, and cannot hear The sullen Lethe rolling doom

On them and theirs and all things here;

When one small touch of Charity

Could lift them nearer Godlike state Than if the crowded Orb should cry

Like those who cried Diana great.

And I too talk, and lose the touch
I talk of. Surely, after all,

The noblest answer unto such

Is perfect stillness when they brawl.

THE VICTIM

Printed in 1867 at the private press of Sir Ivor Bertie Guest, at Canford Manor, near Wimborne; contributed to Good Words' for January, 1868; and included in the Holy Grail' volume, 1870.

I

A PLAGUE upon the people fell,

A famine after laid them low; Then thorpe and byre arose in fire,

For on them brake the sudden foe; So thick they died the people cried,

'The Gods are moved against the land.'
The Priest in horror about his altar
To Thor and Odin lifted a hand:
Help us from famine
And plague and strife!
What would you have of us?
Human life?

Were it our nearest,
Were it our dearest, -
Answer, O answer!-
We give you his life.'

II

But still the foeman spoil'd and burn'd,
And cattle died, and deer in wood,
And bird in air, and fishes turn'd

And whiten'd all the rolling flood;
And dead men lay all over the way,

Or down in a furrow scathed with flame; And ever and aye the Priesthood moan'd, Till at last it seem'd that an answer

came:

'The King is happy In child and wife; Take you his dearest, Give us a life.'

III

The Priest went out by heath and hill;
The King was hunting in the wild;
They found the mother sitting still;

She cast her arms about the child.
The child was only eight summers old,
His beauty still with his years increased,
His face was ruddy, his hair was gold;
He seem'd a victim due to the priest.
The Priest beheld him,
And cried with joy,

The Gods have answer'd;
We give them the boy.'

The Trojan, while his neatherds were abroad;

Nor her that o'er her wounded hunter wept
Her deity false in human-amorous tears; 90
Nor whom her beardless apple-arbiter
Decided fairest. Rather, O ye Gods,
Poet-like, as the great Sicilian called
Calliope to grace his golden verse
Ay, and this Kypris also did I take
That popular name of thine to shadow
forth

The all-generating powers and genial heat Of Nature, when she strikes thro' the thick blood

Of cattle, and light is large, and lambs are glad

99

Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers;

Which things appear the work of mighty Gods.

The Gods! and if I go my work is left Unfinish'd-if I go. The Gods, who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,

Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm! and such,
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm,
Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain
Letting his own life go. The Gods, the
Gods!

III

If all be atoms, how then should the Gods Being atomic not be dissoluble,

Not follow the great law? My master held

That Gods there are, for all men so believe.
I prest my footsteps into his, and meant
Surely to lead my Memmius in a train
Of flowery clauses onward to the proof 12c
That Gods there are, and deathless.
Meant? I meant?

I have forgotten what I meant; my mind
Stumbles, and all my faculties are lamed.

'Look where another of our Gods, the Sun,

Apollo, Delius, or of older use
All-seeing Hyperion - what you will
Has mounted yonder; since he never sware,
Except his wrath were wreak'd on wretched

man,