“The Secret, hath it been told you, and what is your message to me?”
It is nought but the wide-world story how the earth and the heavens began,
How the gods are glad and angry, and a Deity once was man.
I had thought, “Perchance in the cities where the rulers of India dwell,
Whose orders flash from the far land, who girdle the earth with a spell,
They have fathomed the depths we float on, or measured the unknown main—”
Sadly they turn from the venture, and say that the quest is vain.
Is life, then, a dream and delusion, and where shall the dreamer awake?
Is the world seen like shadows on water, and what if the mirror break?
Shall it pass as a camp that is struck, as a tent that is gathered and gone