As mute as any dream there, and escape As a soul from the body, out of doors,-
Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane, And wander on the hills an hour or two, Then back again before the house should stir.
Or else I sat on in my chamber green,
And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed
My prayers without the vicar; read my books,
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits. . so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth- 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
I read much. From many a volume, Love re-emphasised Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast Grew tender with the memory of his eyes, And Elian made mine wet. The trick of Greek And Latin, he had taught me, as he would Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives If such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked man Who heaps his single platter with goats' cheese And scarlet berries; or like any man
What my father taught before
Who loves but one, and so gives all at once, Because he has it, rather than because He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave; And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil Across the boy's audacious front, and swept With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks, He wrapt his little daughter in his large Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no.
But, after I had read for memory,
I read for hope. The path my father's foot Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off, (What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh And passed) alone I carried on, and set My child-heart 'gainst the thorny underwood, To reach the grassy shelter of the trees. Ah, babe i' the wood, without a brother-babe! My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird, Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.
Sublimest danger, over which none weeps, When any young wayfaring soul goes forth Alone, unconscious of the perilous road, The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes, To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!-you think it fine, You clap hands-‘A fair day !'—you cheer him on, As if the worst, could happen, were to rest Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold, Behold!-the world of books is still the world; And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there Are winged like angels.
Every knife that strikes, Is edged from elemental fire to assail A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong Because of weakness. Power is justified,
Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown Covers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,
There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings, That shake the ashes of the grave aside
From their calm locks, and undiscomfited Look stedfast truths against Time's changing mask. True, many a prophet teaches in the roads; True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens Upon his own head in strong martyrdom, In order to light men a moment's space. But stay!-who judges?—who distinguishes 'Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight, And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin, To serve king David? who discerns at once The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow For Alaric as well as Charlemagne ?
Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers
From conjurors? The child, there? Would you leave That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns? Or even in the catacombs, . . his torch Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!
I read books bad and good-some bad and good At once: good aims not always make good books; Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove God's being so definitely, that man's doubt Grows self-defined the other side the line, Made Atheist by suggestion; moral books, Exasperating to license; genial books, Discounting from the human dignity;
And merry books, which set you weeping when
The sun shines,ay, and melancholy books, Which make you laugh that any one should weep In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.
The world of books is still the world, I write, And both worlds have God's providence, thank God, To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed, Among the breakers, some hard swimming through The deeps-I lost breath in my soul sometimes And cried God save me if there's any God.' But, even so, God save me; and, being dashed From error on to error, every turn
Still brought me nearer to the central truth.
All this anguish in the thick Of men's opinions. . press and counterpress Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now Emergent.. all the best of it perhaps, But throws you back upon a noble trust And use of your own instinct,-merely proves Pure reason stronger than bare inference At strongest. Try it,-fix against heaven's wall Your scaling ladders of high logic-mount Step by step!-Sight goes faster; that still ray Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell, And why, you know not—(did you eliminate, That such as you, indeed, should analyse?) Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.
The cygnet finds the water: but the man Is born in ignorance of his element, And feels out blind at first, disorganised By sin i' the blood,—his spirit-insight dulled And crossed by his sensations. Presently
We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; Then mark, be reverent, be obedient,- For those dumb motions of imperfect life Are oracles of vital Deity
Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say, A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph
Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's,— The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old scripture.
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father's name;
Piled high, packed large, where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom-thus, my soul,
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