IV.

THOUGHT: POETRY: BOOKS.

THE INNER VISION.

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path there be or none,
While a fair region round the traveller lies
Which he forbears again to look upon;
Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,
The work of fancy, or some happy tone
Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
If Thought and Love desert us, from that day
Let us break off all commerce with the Muse:
With Thought and Love companions of our way,-
Whate'er the senses take or may refuse,--

The mind's internal Heaven shall shed her dews
Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

THOUGHT.

THOUGHT is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought;

Souls to souls can never teach

What unto themselves was taught.

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We are spirits clad in veils;

Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails
To remove the shadowy screen.

Heart to heart was never known;
Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone

Of a temple once complete.

Like the stars that gem the sky,
Far apart, though seeming near,
In our light we scattered lie;
All is thus but starlight here.

What is social company

But a babbling summer stream?

What our wise philosophy

But the glancing of a dream?

Only when the sun of love

Melts the scattered stars of thought,

Only when we live above

What the dim-eyed world hath taught,

Only when our souls are fed

By the fount which gave them birth, And by inspiration led

Which they never drew from earth,

We, like parted drops of rain,

Swelling till they meet and run,

Shall be all absorbed again,

Melting, flowing into one.

CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH.

AND yet-and yet-in these our ghostly lives,
Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,
How if our waking life, like that of sleep,
Be all a dream in that eternal life

To which we wake not till we sleep in death?
How if, I say, the senses we now trust
For date of sensible comparison,-

Ay, ev'n the Reason's self that dates with them,
Should be in essence of intensity

Hereafter so transcended, and awoke

To a perceptive subtlety so keen

As to confess themselves befooled before,
In all that now they will avouch for most?
One man-like this-but only so much longer
As life is longer than a summer's day,
Believed himself a king upon his throne,
And played at hazard with his fellows' lives,
Who cheaply dreamed away their lives to him.
The sailor dreamed of tossing on the flood:
The soldier, of his laurels grown in blood :
The lover, of the beauty that he knew
Must yet dissolve to dusty residue :
The merchant and the miser of his bags
Of fingered gold; the beggar of his rags :
And all this stage of earth on which we seem
Such busy actors, and the parts we played
Substantial as the shadow of a shade,
And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!

From the Spanish of PEDRO CALDERON,
Translation of EDWARD FITZGERALD.