This sturdy world is hard to knock,
Though hit it as you may,
It moves, unmindful of the shock,—
In its accustomed way.
It laughs a little cynic laugh
And says: “Fall into line,
The use of Mose’ rod and staff
Is but for the divine.
“Come, son, or thou must surely die,
One fool the more or less
Will not provoke a mournful cry,
Nor cause an hour’s distress.
“So know thy best, be like the rest,
And stop thy foolish knocking,
Who cares for ‘vision’ and for ‘quest,’
Save one, the quest of shopping.”
A VISION
To-day I had a vision of the thing
Which we call life—the sum of human life—
In person of an upright monster-man,
Decked in a foot-long robe of many hues,
Whose front was squares of yellow, red and green,
And blue and purple and the violet,
Whose back was sombre brown, but mostly black;
His large and bony feet strode heavily,
A-trampling, upon beings in his path,
On men and women and on little babes,
And crushed them in the dust without a pity,
Once in a while he lifted to his breast
Some one with fondling pleasure, and did bear
The favorite aloft, that all might see
His glory’s contrast to their misery;
But then at length, he tired of even such,
And cast them down into the common dust.
I looked upon his visage, strangest this,
A blending of the human and the beast:—
But then the vision vanished, and I heard
A cry and circling of the Pheonix bird.
SIGNS CELESTIAL
I read in the mystic Kabbala
That there is a creature in heaven
To which the most blessed Jehovah
Two wonderful tokens hath given:
A word in its forehead at morning,
A word in its forehead at night,
Like jewels those words are adorning
The creature with glory and light.