"'With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
The good physician Melampus, loving them all,
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.
"'For him the woods were a home and gave him the key
Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers.
The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we
To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours.…'
"'With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
The good physician Melampus, loving them all,
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.
"'For him the woods were a home and gave him the key
Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers.
The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we
To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours.…'
"Here by another road we come to a teaching which is also the Gospels': that to apprehend the highest truth one must have a mind of extreme humility. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,' 'Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the kingdom of God is within you,' 'And He took a little child and set him in the midst of them,' &c. Poetry cannot make these sayings any truer than they are, but it can illuminate for us the depths of their truth, and so (be it humbly said) can help their acceptance by man. If they come down from heaven, derived from arguments too high for his ken, poetry confirms them by arguments taken from his own earth, instructing him the while to read it as—
"'An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet
Buried, and breathing, and to be,'
"'An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet
Buried, and breathing, and to be,'
"And teaching him, 'made lowly wise,' that the truth of the highest heavens lies scattered about his feet.
"'Melampus dwelt among men, physician and sage,
He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed,
Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage
Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.
He played on men, as his master Phœbus on strings
Melodious: as the God did he drive and check,
Through love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.'
"'Melampus dwelt among men, physician and sage,
He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed,
Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage
Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.
He played on men, as his master Phœbus on strings
Melodious: as the God did he drive and check,
Through love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.'
"I think, if we consider the essence of this teaching, we shall have no difficulty now in understanding why Mr. Meredith's hopes harp so persistently on the 'young generations,' why our duty to them is to him 'the cry of the conscience of life,' or why, as he studies Earth, he maintains that—
"'Deepest at her springs,
Most filial, is an eye to love her young.'"