"There is nowhere else," and in the wintry ground
When we have laid the darlings of our love—
The little lad with eyes of blue,
The little maid with curls of gold,
Or the beloved aged face
On which each passing year stamps a diviner grace—
That is the end of all, the narrow bound.
Why look our eyes above
To an unreal home which mortal never knew—
Fold the hands on the breast, the clay-cold fingers fold?
No waking comes there to the uncaring dead!
"There is nowhere else," she said.
Strange; is it old or new, this deep distress?
Or do the generations, as they press
Onward for ever, onward still,
Finding no truth to fill
Their starving yearning souls, from year to year
Feign some new form of fear
To fright them, some new terror
Couched on the path of error,
Some cold and desolate word which, like a blow,
Forbids the current of their faith to flow,
Makes slow their pulse's eager beat,
And, chilling all their wonted heat,
Leaves them to darkling thoughts and dreads a prey,
Uncheered by dawning shaft or setting ray?
Ah, old it is, indeed, and nowise new.
This is the poison-growth that grew
In the old thinkers' fancy-haunted ground.
They, blinded by some keen too-vivid gleam
Of the Unseen, to which all things did seem
To shape themselves and tend,
Solved, by some Giant Force, the Mystery of Things,
And, soaring all too high on Fancy's wings,
Saw in dead matter both their Source and End.
They felt the self-same shock and pain
As I who hear these prattlings cold to-day.
Not otherwise of old the fool to his heart did say.
"There is no other place of joy or grief,
Nor wrong in doubt, nor merit in belief:
There is no God, nor Lord of quick and dead;
There is nowhere else," they said.
And, indeed, if any to whom life's path were rough
Should say as you, he had cause maybe at sight.
For lo, the way is steep and hard enough,
And wrong is tangled and confused with right;
And from all the world there goes a solemn sound
Of lamentations, rising from the ground,
Confused as that which shocks the wondering ear
Of one who, gliding on the still lagune,
Finds the oar's liquid plash and tune
Broken by wild cries of frenzy and of fear,
And knows the Isle of Madness drawing near;
And the scheme of things, if scheme there be indeed,
Is a book deeper than our eyes may read,
Full of wild paradox, and vain endeavour,
And hopes and faiths which find completion never.
For such a one, in seasons of dismay
And deep depression and despair,
Clouds come ofttimes to veil the face of day,
And there is no ray left of all the beams of gold,
The glow, the radiance bright, the unclouded faith of old.
But you, poor child forlorn,
Ah! better were it you were never born;
Better that you had thrown your life away
On some coarse lump of clay;
Better defeat, disgrace, childlessness, all
That can a solitary life befall,
Than to have all things and yet be
Self-bound to dark despondency,
And self-tormented, beyond reach of doubt,
By some cold word that puts all yearnings out.
"There is nowhere else," she said:
This is the outcome of their crude Belief
Who are, beyond all rescue and relief,
Being self-slain and numbered with the dead.
"There is no God but Force,
Which, working always on its destined course,
Speeds on its way and knows no thought of change.
Within the germ the molecule fares free,
Holding the potency of what shall be;
Within the little germ lurks the heaven-reaching tree:
No break is there in all the cosmic show.
What place is there, in all the Scheme Immense,
For a remote unworking Excellence
Which may not be perceived by any sense,
Which makes no humble blade of grass to grow,
Which adds no single link to things and thoughts we know?"
"For everything that is, indeed,
Bears with it its own seed;
It cannot change or cease and be no more:
For ever all things are even as they were before
Or if, by long degrees and slow,
More complex doth the organism grow,
It makes no break in the eternal plan;
There is no gulf that yawns between the herb and man."
Poor child, what is it they have taught,
Who through deep glooms and desert wastes of thought
Have brought to such as you their dreary creed?
Have they no care, indeed,
For all the glorious gains of man's long past,
For all our higher hope of what shall be at last?
"All things are moulded in one mould;
They spring, they are, they fade by one compulsion cold—
Some dark necessity we cannot know,
Which bids them wax and grow,—
That is sufficient cause for all things, quick and dead!"
"There is no Cause else," she said.
Oh, poor indeed, and in evil case,
Who shouldst be far from sound of doubt
As a maiden in some restful place
Whose busy life, year in year out,
Is made of gentle worship, homely days
Marked by their growing sum of prayer and praise,
The church spire pointing to the longed-for sky,
The heaven that opens to the cloistered eye.
For us, for us, who mid the weary strife
And jangling discords of our life
Are day by day opprest,
'Twere little wonder were our souls distrest,
God, and the life to be, and all our early trust
Being far from us expelled and thrust;
But for you, child, who cannot know at all
To what hidden laws we stand or fall,
To what bad heights the wrong within may grow,
To what dark deeps the stream of hopeless lives may flow!
For let the doubter babble as he can,
There is no wit in man
Which can make Force rise higher still
Up to the heights of Will,—
No phase of Force which finite minds can know
Can self-determined grow,
And of itself elect what shall its essence be:
The same to all eternity,
Unchanged, unshaped, it goes upon its blinded way;
Nor can all forces nor all laws
Bring ceasing to the scheme, nor any pause,
Nor shape it to the mould in which to be—
Form from the wingèd seed the myriad-branching tree,—
Nor guide the force once sped, so that it turn
To Water-floods that quench or Fires that burn,
Or now to the electric current change,
Or draw all things by some attraction strange.
Or in the brain of man, working unseen, sublime,
Transcend the narrow bounds of Space and Time.