Pan

Ah ! Nature, would that I before I pass
Might thrill with joy of thy communion
One childlife only knowing thee from far !
Love we may well, for surely one were nought
Without the other, intermarrying breath ;
Nature the systole, thought the diastole
Of one Divine forever-beating Heart.
Feeding from her maternal breast we grow
Full to our height of stately dominance.
And yet create, yea dower as we grow
Her with all colour, form and comeliness.
Nature the heaving of a tender breast
Revealing inspiration from within,
Sweet rending of a calyx, telling clear
Expansion of the spirit's folded flower,
Nature the lake where looking long we fall
With our own likeness tremulous in love.

Surely the blind bliss buoying up a lark
Floating in sunlight over nests in May,
Bliss of mere living, amorous ecstasy,
Undulates echo from a lover's heart
That palpitates above a maiden won !
Simple the bird-bliss, but the human flushed
With solemn lights from two immensities
Of Past and Future, from the battle-field
Where joy was wrested a rich spoil from pain,
From vistas of the eagle-visioned soul
That widen aye to far infinity,
Whence comes the sisters Joy and Sorrow meet
Oft by the same mysterious fount of tears.

Ah ! must the bird-bliss, full irradiate
As any dewdrop thrilling in the morn,
Waver, exhale like dew, or like a seed
Orbed fair before it moulders in the dark
Moist earth to formless mystery of growth,
Falter at filming of a far-off cloud,
Feel unaware a trouble in the spring
Of young serene unhazed limpidity ;
Changefully fed through channels of long years.
Emerge profound experience of Man,
Fruition dusk of sorrow and of sin?
Wait only till the dew returns in rain.
Wait only till the formless germ shall flower,
Wait only till the stream becomes the sea,
Wait only till humanity fulfils
The cycle of a destiny sublime,
Entering bliss more mellow and more large,
Yet like the bird's fall flawless and serene I —
All mortal happiness a reflex faint
From hidden rainbow far transcending ours. . .

Last culminating unaware decline
Must we toward the drear aphelion,
Once more expansive? hath the Universe
Infinite systems, each one with his own
Orbit of growth, his fringe of dulse and shells.
High-water and low- water line for each?
What if our spirits and our bodies here
But re-emerge ever transmigrated
Through everlasting from the Ineffable ?
May they not still be with us after all,
Heroes and seers unto whom we yearn
O'er yon far sundering ocean of wan years ?
Renewing ever an immortal youth —
Straitened, amazed, and weary in the rush
Unresting of the Universal Life,
Sloughing old personality, anon
Among the living with a more or less.
But ever foster-children of the time ?

Yet unaware we light upon a stray
So lonely, weird, unfellowed among men.
So startling with resemblance to the world
Of tribes uncouth, outlandish and remote,
Or those we marvelling hold commune with
All indistinct through fading portraiture
Of art or creeds outworn, faint chronicles ;
Grim pleasantry of nature it appears
To keep this old-world denizen till now
Alone bewildered in an alien age !
Or hath he slept some strange enchanted sleep
While generations fleeted slowly by ?
Behold ! how wan and withered the fresh page
Of Life he read in when he sank to rest
Now he resumes ! above his shoulder look !
In sooth I know how many pages on
O world we are ! Yet something it may chance
We have let slip of what may profit still !
. . . Come then lift high the choral hymn of praise
That ever grows from rolling world and sea.
From angel, fiend, and hesitating man,
Who only with bewildered air sustains
That ever-pealing anthem unto One
Whose Form is the all-glorious Universe,
In ever-shifting accent, symbol, word,
Reverent, loving, wondering, with awe,
Humbly elate that in us for awhile
He deigns to lighten into consciousness.
That in the Son of Man Love full-beheld
His face, and lo ! it was the face of God.

You blessed innocent living animals,
Through whom yon mountains self-involved in gloom,
And yon far fathomless unresting sea.
Sounding the whole harmonic scale of things.
Pass ever in slow travail up to man,
Have I not loved you, conscious brotherhood,
Ah ! how much more than cold unlovely men
Dead callous all to man's prerogative.
Shut in some frigid blank fool's privilege
Of state or wealth and trampling fellow fools !
These have I loved not ; rather mellow birds
Upon the bough and sheeny creeping things
Among green grass, red stjuirrels in the beech,
Such have I loved, some faithful-hearted hound
Shaggy, brown-eyed, that pants with lolling tongue,
Fair antlered deer of my ancestral glades,
All these companions chosen have I loved.
All these with what men foolish libellous
(For all is life) have named inanimate —
Cohesion, chemical affinities,
These but the earliest grey gleam of Love
Dawning in light, air, water, rock or stone,
And in faint fringes of organic life
Already blossoming through rainbow -rise
Of sweet desire to spiritual love !

O wondrous interchange of services,
Honours and functions in the universe !
Disdainful isolation in a world
Where nought may be sufficing to itself,
And where the noblest may the least suffice :
Wherefore wise lovers count not anything
In all the worlds for common or unclean.
The meanest reptile, if it only be.
By only being proves a right to be,
A use that failing the machinery
Of all the worlds had fallen out of gear.
Thou fated slayer, slay not like a beast,
In a blind panic, but remembering.
Look steadily till through the loathly crust
A soul puts forth a feeler seeking thine !
Creatures uncouth, yet these are on their way.
Blind and still distant from the goal you touch,
Yet fellow pilgrims verily with you ;
Dare you affirm there live not anywhere.
Nor in the teeming infinite dark womb
Of awful Nature ever shall be born,
Beings of glory so transcending yours
As ye transcend some annulated worm ?
Nay day by day the lower forms are lost,
Yield all their own and re-emerge in man :
And so the coral of our myriad lives
Accumulates the sunny reef to be —
While yet in part, a soothing dream to me,
We may remingle with the lowlier life. . . .

O blood that boils restless rebellious !
O passionate desiring and despair !
Say shall ye lapse anon to whence ye came,
Subside once more into the lovelier life
Of aimless airs unfettered and serene,
Of buoyant seas that sparkle under them,
Of unrepining cool meek-blooded flowers
Fair quiet fragrant, into laughing grass
Dishevelled and deflowered of warm wind ?
Life faint of heart, pale, haunting, insincere
Divine aspiring like an ermine robe
Fretted to dust with moths of every day !
Sink, sink, O swell of vain-aspiring wave
Into your trough of earlier lowlihead,
Pass to some innocent elfin of sleek fur,
His nest the ripe wheat and his wine the dew !

And shall we climb, ascension infinite,
From star to star? explore from world to world —
Gods reigning yonder in the tranquil stars ?
Death ! what is Death ? a turning-point of
Life
Winding so sharp the way dips out of sight,
Seeming to end, yet winding on for ever
Through teeming glories of the Infiinite.
Look with bold eyes unquailing in the face
Of that foul haunting phantom, it will fade,
Melt to the face of some familiar friend. . . .

One selfsame Spirit breathing evermore
Rouses in each the momentary wave,
One water and one motion and one wind.
Now feeble undulation myriadfold,
Now headlong mountain thunder-clothed and crowned
With foamy lightning ; such we name Zerduscht,
Dante, Spinoza, or Napoleon —
The motion travels, and the wave subsides. . .

May cold ascetic hard, ill-favoured, crude
Ever persuade me vision and fond play
Of sense about fair fleshly loveliness
Of youth in man or woman is accurst —
Since God hath made the spirit, but a fiend
Hath mocked it with a syren phantoinflesh ?—
Nay, to mine ear 'tis rankest blasphemy !
For is not flesh the shadow of the soul,
Her younger sister, both alike Divine ?
Yea verily ! for when I love a friend
How may I sunder body from the soul ?
Few win my love, but they who win it seem
Ever well-favoured to me, and I greet
All comeliness of colour and of form,
Mere side reverse of spiritual grace.
Yea, limbs well turned and bodies almondsmooth
Full fair and white in maiden or in youth,

With what sense-thrillings may attend on these ;
All lusty might of supple athletic men ;
Are surely worthy reverence like flowers,
Or like the culminating heart and soul.
Only to each one yield his very own :
Yield to young sense his toy of fantasy,
And never frown until he glides to steal
The royal sceptre from Intelligence,
Or crown of light from spiritual Love.
Nor dare to maim lives infinite Divine
Seeking to graft one pale monotonous flower ;
For is not Being thirsting to exhaust
His all exhaustless capability ?
Evil mere vantage-ground for an advance,
If not for thee, yet for the universe,
And so for thee as member of the whole.

But well may Nature's innocent wantoning
Be loved of men : she whispers of the nest
Whence we have flown, she lisps our language low,
A sweet child-mimic, she is very fair.
Hiding coy secrets from her lovers all
Who will abide and listen at her heart ;
Yea she will sorrow with your sorrow, sing,
Dance, leap for gladness if your mood be gay,
Flout ne'er nor lightly fling away your love,
Or lure to whelm in labyrinths of woe.
Her gentle breath, her breath is very sweet,
Breath of lush vegetation in the dew
Of a warm summer evening heavy faint
With slumbrous prodigal unbosoming
Of secret odours, delicate and shy !
If quiet lying heart to heart with her
Lost in the tranquil limpid of her eyes,
Will she not lull us with a lullaby
Soft marvellous, with spell beyond belief
To soothe one worn with conflict and with pain,
Sweet as a revelation from a star,
Sweet as a melody from elfin land
Woven from breath of grasses and frail flowers
And airs low tinkling tiny twinkling bells,
Will she not whisper of a lovelier life,
Beautiful, true, spontaneous and calm.
Guileless and gentle, bountiful and free ?