VI
I found Thee in my heart, O Lord,
As in some secret shrine;
I knelt, I waited for Thy word,
I joyed to name Thee mine.
I feared to give myself away
To that or this; beside
Thy altar on my face I lay,
And in strong need I cried.
Those hours are past. Thou art not mine,
And therefore I rejoice,
I wait within no holy shrine,
I faint not for the voice.
In Thee we live; and every wind
Of heaven is Thine; blown free
To west, to east, the God unshrined
Is still discovering me.
IN THE CATHEDRAL CLOSE
In the Dean’s porch a nest of clay
With five small tenants may be seen,
Five solemn faces, each as wise
As though its owner were a Dean;
Five downy fledglings in a row,
Packed close, as in the antique pew
The school-girls are whose foreheads clear
At the Venite shine on you.
Day after day the swallows sit
With scarce a stir, with scarce a sound,
But dreaming and digesting much
They grow thus wise and soft and round.
They watch the Canons come to dine,
And hear the mullion-bars across,
Over the fragrant fruit and wine
Deep talk of rood-screen and reredos.
Her hands with field-flowers drench’d, a child
Leaps past in wind-blown dress and hair,
The swallows turn their heads askew—
Five judges deem that she is fair.
Prelusive touches sound within,
Straightway they recognize the sign,
And, blandly nodding, they approve
The minuet of Rubinstein.
They mark the cousins’ schoolboy talk,
(Male birds flown wide from minster bell),
And blink at each broad term of art,
Binomial or bicycle.
Ah! downy young ones, soft and warm,
Doth such a stillness mask from sight
Such swiftness? can such peace conceal
Passion and ecstasy of flight?
Yet somewhere ’mid your Eastern suns,
Under a white Greek architrave
At morn, or when the shaft of fire
Lies large upon the Indian wave,
A sense of something dear gone-by
Will stir, strange longings thrill the heart
For a small world embowered and close,
Of which ye some time were a part.
The dew-drench’d flowers, the child’s glad eyes
Your joy unhuman shall control,
And in your wings a light and wind
Shall move from the Maestro’s soul.
FIRST LOVE
My long first year of perfect love,
My deep new dream of joy;
She was a little chubby girl,
I was a chubby boy.
I wore a crimson frock, white drawers,
A belt, a crown was on it;
She wore some angel’s kind of dress
And such a tiny bonnet,
Old-fashioned, but the soft brown hair
Would never keep its place;
A little maid with violet eyes,
And sunshine in her face.
O my child-queen, in those lost days
How sweet was daily living!
How humble and how proud I grew,
How rich by merely giving!
She went to school, the parlour-maid
Slow stepping to her trot;
That parlour-maid, ah, did she feel
How lofty was her lot!
Across the road I saw her lift
My Queen, and with a sigh
I envied Raleigh; my new coat
Was hung a peg too high.
A hoard of never-given gifts
I cherished,—priceless pelf;
’Twas two whole days ere I devour’d
That peppermint myself.
In Church I only prayed for her—
“O God bless Lucy Hill;”
Child, may His angels keep their arms
Ever around you still.
But when the hymn came round, with heart
That feared some heart’s surprising
Its secret sweet, I climb’d the seat
’Mid rustling and uprising;
And there against her mother’s arm
The sleeping child was leaning,
While far away the hymn went on,
The music and the meaning.
Oh I have loved with more of pain
Since then, with more of passion,
Loved with the aching in my love
After our grown-up fashion;
Yet could I almost be content
To lose here at your feet
A year or two, you murmuring elm,
To dream a dream so sweet.
THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE: AN ODE
(By a Western Spinning Dervish)
I spin, I spin, around, around,
And close my eyes,
And let the bile arise
From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;
Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again!
How the whole globe swells within my brain,
The stars inside my lids appear,
The murmur of the spheres I hear
Throbbing and beating in each ear;
Right in my navel I can feel
The centre of the world’s great wheel.
Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,
No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great Whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
BEAU RIVAGE HOTEL
SATURDAY EVENING
Below there’s a brumming and strumming
And twiddling and fiddling amain,
And sweeping of muslins and laughter,
And pattering of luminous rain.
Fair England, resplendent Columbia,
Gaul, Teuton,—how precious a smother!
But the happiest is brisk little Polly
To galop with only her brother.
And up to the fourth étage landing,
Come the violins’ passionate cries,
Where the pale femme-de-chambre is sitting
With sleep in her beautiful eyes.