(Resignation.)
Such is the author's purpose in these poems. He recognises in each thing a part of the whole: and the poet must know even as he sees, or breathes, as by a spontaneous, half-passive exercise of a faculty: he must receive rather than seek.
“Action and suffering tho' he know, He hath not lived, if he lives so.”
Connected with this view of life as “a placid and continuous whole,” is the principle which will be found here manifested in different modes, and thro' different phases of event, of the permanence and changelessness of natural laws, and of the large necessity wherewith they compel life and man. This is the thought which animates the “Fragment of an ‘Antigone:’” “The World and the Quietest” has no other scope than this:—
“Critias, long since, I know, (For fate decreed it so), Long since the world hath set its heart to live. Long since, with credulous zeal, It turns life's mighty wheel: Still doth for laborers send; Who still their labor give. And still expects an end.”—p. 109.
This principle is brought a step futher into the relations of life in “The Sick King in Bokhara,” the following passage from which claims to be quoted, not less for its vividness as description, than in illustration of this thought:—
“In vain, therefore, with wistful eyes Gazing up hither, the poor man Who loiters by the high-heaped booths Below there in the Registan
“Says: ‘Happy he who lodges there! With silken raiment, store of rice, And, for this drought, all kinds of fruits, Grape-syrup, squares of colored ice,
“‘With cherries served in drifts of snow.’ In vain hath a king power to build Houses, arcades, enamelled mosques, And to make orchard-closes filled
“With curious fruit trees brought from far, With cisterns for the winter rain; And, in the desert, spacious inns In divers places;—if that pain