THE TORCH-BEARERS—II

THE BOOK OF EARTH

WORKS OF ALFRED NOYES

• Collected Poems—3 Vols.
• The Lord of Misrule
• A Belgian Christmas Eve
• The Wine-Press
• Walking Shadows—Prose
• Tales of the Mermaid Tavern
• Sherwood
• The Enchanted Island and Other Poems
• Drake: An English Epic
• Poems
• The Flower of Old Japan
• The Golden Hynde
• The New Morning
• The Torch-Bearers—
• Watchers of the Sky
• The Book of Earth

THE TORCH-BEARERS—II

THE BOOK OF
EARTH

BY
ALFRED NOYES

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXXV

Copyright, 1925, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I—THE BOOK OF EARTH

I
The Grand Canyon

Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth.

Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon,

Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine,

I came to the dreadful brink.

I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth

Splitting apart, into two hemispheres,

Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god.

On the brink of the Grand Canyon,

Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows,

From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down,

Down from abyss to abyss,

Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming

Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings,

The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,

Æons unborn, and the unimagined end.

There, on the terrible brink, against the sky,

I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting

Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped

Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges

That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down.

A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock,

The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light

It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it.

It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun.

All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots.

I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men.

Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss

Endlessly on.

Far down, as a cloud sailed over,

A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs,

Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite,

Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow

With smouldering colours of those buried fires

Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb.

And there, so far below that not a sound,

Even in that desert air, rose from its bed,

I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado,

The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade,

The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains,

For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder,

Rolls to the broad Pacific.

From Flaming Gorge,

Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain

Of subject canyons, the green river flows,

Linking them all together in one vast gulch,

But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn,

With names like pictures, for six hundred miles:

Black Canyon, where it rushes in opal foam;

Red Canyon, where it sleeks to jade again

And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below;

Split-Mountain Canyon, with its cottonwood trees;

And, opening out of this, Whirlpool Ravine,

Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls

With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire;

Kingfisher Canyon, gorgeous as the plumes

Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues;

Glen Canyon, where the Cave of Music rang

Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song;

Vermilion Cliffs, like sunset clouds congealed

To solid crags; the Valley of Surprise

Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass;

Labyrinth Canyon, and the Valley of Echoes;

Cataract Canyon, rolling boulders down

In floods of emerald thunder; Gunnison’s Valley

Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail;

Then, for a hundred miles, Desolation Canyon,

Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road

Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world;

Gray Canyon next; then Marble Canyon, stained

With iron-rust above, but brightly veined

As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it;

Then deep Still-water.

And all these conjunct

In one huge chasm, were but the towering gates

And dim approaches to the august abyss

That opened here,—one sempiternal page

Baring those awful hieroglyphs of stone,

Seven systems, and seven ages, darkly scrolled

In the deep Book of Earth.

Across the gulf

I looked to that vast coast opposed, whose crests

Of raw rough amethyst, over the Canyon, flamed,

A league away, or ten. No eye could tell.

All measure was lost. The tallest pine was a feather

Under my feet, in that ocean of violet gloom.

Then, with a dizzying brain, I saw below me,

A little way out, a tiny shape, like a gnat

Flying and spinning,—now like a gilded grain

Of dust in a shaft of light, now sharp and black

Over a blood-red sandstone precipice.

“Look!”

The Indian guide thrust out a lean dark hand

That hid a hundred forests, and pointed to it,

Muttering low, “Big Eagle!”

All that day,

Riding along the brink, we found no end.

Still, on the right, the pageant of the Abyss

Unfolded. There gigantic walls of rock,

Sheer as the world’s end, seemed to float in air

Over the hollow of space, and change their forms

Like soft blue wood-smoke, with each change of light.

Here massed red boulders, over the Angel Trail

Darkened to thunder, or like a sunset burned.

Here, while the mind reeled from the imagined plunge,

Tall amethystine towers, dark Matterhorns,

Rose out of shadowy nothingness to crown

Their mighty heads with morning.

Here, wild crags

Black and abrupt, over the swimming dimness

Of coloured mist, and under the moving clouds,

Themselves appeared to move, stately and slow

As the moon moves, with an invisible pace,

Or darkling planets, quietly onward steal

Through their immense dominion.

There, far down,

A phantom sword, a search-beam of the sun,

Glanced upon purple pyramids, and set

One facet aflame in each, the rest in gloom;

While from their own deep chasms of shadow, that seemed

Small inch-wide rings of darkness round them, rose

Tabular foothills, mesas, hard and bright,

Bevelled and flat, like gems; or, softly bloomed

Like alabaster, stained with lucid wine;

Then slowly changed, under the changing clouds,

Where the light sharpened, into monstrous tombs

Of trap-rock, hornblende, greenstone and basalt.

There,—under isles of pine, washed round with mist,

Dark isles that seemed to sail through heaven, and cliffs

That towered like Teneriffe,—far, far below,

Striving to link those huge dissolving steeps,

Gigantic causeways drowned or swam in vain,

Column on column, arch on broken arch,

Groping and winding, like the foundered spans

Of lost Atlantis, under the weltering deep.

For, over them, the abysmal tides of air,

Inconstant as the colours of the sea,

From amethyst into wreathing opal flowed,

Ebbed into rose through grey, then melted all

In universal amethyst again.

There, wild cathedrals, with light-splintering spires,

Shone like a dream in the Eternal mind

And changed as earth and sea and heaven must change.

Over them soared a promontory, black

As night, but in the deepening gulf beyond,

Far down in that vast hollow of violet air,

Winding between the huge Plutonian walls,

The semblance of a ruined city lay.

Dungeons flung wide, and palaces brought low,

Altars and temples, wrecked and overthrown,

Gigantic stairs that climbed into the light

And found no hope, and ended in the void:

It burned and darkened, a city of porphyry,

Paved with obsidian, walled with serpentine,

Beautiful, desolate, stricken as by strange gods

Who, long ago, from cloudy summits, flung

Boulder on mountainous boulder of blood-red marl

Into a gulf so deep that, when they fell,

The soft wine-tinted mists closed over them

Like ocean, and the Indian heard no sound.

II
Night and the Abyss

A lonely cabin, like an eagle’s nest,

Lodged us that night upon the monstrous brink,

And roofed us from the burning desert stars;

But, on my couch of hemlock as I lay,

The Book of Earth still opened in my dreams.

Below me, only guessed by the slow sound

Of forests, through unfathomable gulfs

Of midnight, vaster, more mysterious now,

Breathed that invisible Presence of deep awe.

Through the wide open window, once, a moth

Beat its dark wings, and flew—out—over that,

Brave little fluttering atheist, unaware

Of aught beyond the reach of his antennæ,

Thinking his light quick thoughts; while, under him,

God opened His immeasurable Abyss.

All night I heard the insistent whisper rise:

One page of Earth’s abysmal Book lies bare.

Read—in its awful hieroglyphs of stone—

His own deep scripture. Is its music sealed?

Or is the inscrutable secret growing clearer?

Then, like the night-wind, soughing through the pines,

Another voice replied, cold with despair:

It opens, and it opens. By what Power?

A silent river, hastening to the sea,

Age after age, through crumbling desert rocks

Clove the dread chasm. Wild snows that had their birth

In Ocean-mists, and folded their white wings

Among far mountains, fed that sharp-edged stream.

Ask Ocean whence it came. Ask Earth. Ask Heaven.

I see the manifold instruments as they move,

Remote or near, with intricate inter-play;

But that which moves them, and determines all

Remains in darkness. Man must bow his head

Before the Inscrutable.

Then, far off, I heard,

As from a deeper gulf, the antiphonal voice:

It opens, and it opens, and it opens,—

The abyss of Heaven, the rock-leaved Book of Earth,

And that Abyss as dreadful and profound

Locked in each atom.

Under the high stars,

Man creeps, too infinitesimal to be scanned;

And, over all the worlds that dwindle away

Beyond the uttermost microscopic sight,

He towers—a god.

Midway, between the height

That crushes, and the depth that flatters him,

He stands within the little ring of light

He calls his knowledge. Its horizon-line,

The frontier of the dark, was narrow, once;

And he could bear it. But the light is growing;

The ring is widening; and, with each increase,

The frontiers of the night are widening, too.

They grow and grow. The very blaze of truth

That drives them back, enlarges the grim coasts

Of utter darkness.

Man must bow his head

Before the Inscrutable.

Then, from far within,

The insistent whisper rose:

Man is himself

The key to all he seeks.

He is not exiled from this majesty,

But is himself a part of it. To know

Himself, and read this Book of Earth aright;

Flooding it as his ancient poets, once,

Illumed old legends with their inborn fire,

Were to discover music that out-soars

His plodding thought, and all his fables, too;

A song of truth that deepens, not destroys

The ethereal realm of wonder; and still lures

The spirit of man on more adventurous quests

Into the wildest mystery of all,

The miracle of reality, which he shares.

But O, what art could guide me through that maze?

What kingly shade unlock the music sealed

In that dread volume?

Sons of an earlier age,

Poet and painter stretched no guiding hand.

Even the gaunt spirit, whom the Mantuan led

Through the dark chasms and fiery clefts of pain,

Could set a bound to his own realms of night,

Enwall then round, build his own stairs to heaven,

And slept now, prisoned, in his own coiling towers....

Leonardo—found a shell among the hills,

A sea-shell, turned to stone, as at the gaze

Of his own cold Medusa. His dark eyes,

Hawk-swift to hunt the subtle lines of law

Through all the forms of beauty, on that wild height

Saw how the waves of a forgotten world

Had washed and sculptured every soaring crag,

Ere Italy was born. He stood alone,—

His rose-red cloak out-rippling on the breeze,—

A wondering sun-god. Through the mountain-peaks,

The rumour of a phantom ocean rolled.

It tossed a flying rainbow at his feet

And vanished....

Milton—walked in Paradise.

He saw the golden compasses of God

Turning through darkness to create the world.

He saw the creatures of a thousand æons

Rise, in six days, out of the mire and clay,

Pawing for freedom. With the great blind power

Of his own song, he riveted one more clasp,

Though wrought of fabulous gold, on that dark Book,

Not to be loosed for centuries.

Nearer yet,

Goethe, the torch of science in his own hand,

Poet and seeker, pressed into the dark,

Caught one mysterious gleam from flower and leaf,

And one from man’s own frame, of that which binds

All forms of life together. He turned aside

And lost it, saying, “I wait for light, more light.”

And these all towered among celestial glories,

And wore their legends like prophetic robes;

But who should teach me, in this deeper night,

The tale of this despised and wandering house,

Our lodge among the stars; the song of Earth;

Her birth in a mist of fire,—a ball of flame,

Slowly contracting, crusting, cracking and folding

Into deep valleys and mountains that still changed

And slowly rose and sank like age-long waves

On the dark ocean of ever-dissolving forms;

Earth, a magical globe, an elfin sphere,

Quietly turning through boundlessness,

Budding with miracles, burgeoning into life;

A murmuring forest of ferns, where the misty sun

Saw wingèd monsters fighting to bring forth men;

Earth, and her savage youth, her monstrous lusts,

Mastered and curbed, till these, too, pulsed into music,

And became for man the fountain of his own power;

Earth, on her shining way,

Coloured and warmed by the sun, and quietly spinning

Her towns and seas to shadow and light in turn;

Earth, by what brooding Power

Endowed at birth with those dread potencies

Which out of her teeming womb at last brought forth

Creatures that loved and sinned, laughed, wept and prayed,

Died, and returned to the unknown Power that made them;

Earth, and that tale of men, the kings of thought,

Who strove to read her secret in the rocks,

And turned, amid wild calumny and wrong,

The lucid sword-like search-beams of the mind

On the dark passion that through uncounted æons

Crept, fought, and climbed to the celestial gates,

Three gates in one, one heavenly gate in three,

Whose golden names are Beauty, Goodness, Truth.

Then, without sound, like an unspoken prayer,

The voice I heard upon the mountain height,

Out of a deeper gulf of midnight rose,

Within me, or without, invoking One

To whom this dust, not of itself, would pray:

Muse of the World, O terrible, beautiful Spirit,

Throned in pure light, since all the worlds obey

Thy golden law which, even here on earth,

Though followed blindly, leads to thy pure realm,

Couldst thou deliver me from this night at last,

Teach me the burning syllables of thy tongue

That I, even I, out of the mire and clay,

With face uplifted, and with arms upstretched

To the Eternal Sun of Truth, might raise

My song of adoration, not in vain.

Throned above Time, thou sawest when earth was born

In darkness, though none else was there to see;

For there was fury in the dark, and fire,

And power, and that creative pulse of thine,

The throb of music, the deep rhythmic throes

Of That which made and binds all worlds in one.

...

In the beginning, God made heaven and earth.

One sentence burned upon the formless dark—

One sentence, and no more, from that high realm.

The long-sought consummation of all law,

Through all this manifold universe, might shine clear

In those eight words one day; not yet; not yet!

They would be larger, then;

Not the glib prelude to a lifeless creed,

But wide as the unbounded realms of thought,

The last great simplification of them all,

The single formula, like an infinite sphere

Enfolding Space and Time, atoms and suns,

With all the wild fantastic hosts of life

And all their generations, through all worlds,

In one pure phrase of music, like a star

Seen in a distant sky.

I could not reach it.

All night I waited for the word in vain.

III
The Wings

Night greyed, and up the immeasurable abyss,

Brimmed with a blacker night than ocean knew,

The dawn-wind, like a host of spirits, flowed,

Chanting those airy melodies which, long since,

The same wild breath, obeying the same law,

Taught the first pine-woods in the primal world.

We are the voices.

Could man only

Spell our tongue,

He might learn

The inscrutable secret

And grow young.

Young as we are

Who, on shores

Unknown to man,

Long, long since,

In waves and woods

Our song began.

Ere his footsteps

Printed earth,

Wild ferns and grass

Breathed it. No man

Heard that whispering

Spirit pass.

Not one mortal

Lay and listened.

There was none

Even to hear

The sea-wave crumbling

In the sun.

None to hear

Our choral pine-woods

Chanting deep,

Even as now

Our solemn cadence

Haunts your sleep.

Ear was none

To heed or hear

When earth was young.

Even now

Man understands not

Our strange tongue.

There came a clearer rustle of nearer boughs.

A bird cried, once, a sharp ecstatic cry

As if it saw an angel.

He stood there

Against the window’s dusky square of sky,

Carrying the long curled crosier of a fern,

My singer of the woods, my Shadow-of-a-Leaf,

The invisible friend with whom I used to talk

In childhood, and that none but I could see,—

Shadow-of-a-Leaf, shy whisperer of the songs

That none could capture, and so few could hear;

A creature of the misty hills of home,

Quick as the thought that hides in the deep heart

When the loud world goes by; vivid to me

As flesh and blood, yet with an elfin strain

That set him free of earth, free to run wild

Through all the ethereal kingdoms of the mind,

His dark eyes fey with wonder at the world,

And that profoundest mystery of all,

The miracle of reality; clear, strange eyes,

Deep-sighted, joyous, touched with hidden tears.

Often he left me when I was not worthy;

And many a time I locked my heart against him,

Only to find him creeping in again

Like memory, or a wild vine through a window

When I most needed that still voice of his

Which never yet spoke louder than the breath

Of conscience in my soul. He would return

Quietly as the rustling of a bough

After the bird has flown; and, through a rift

Of evening sky, the shining eyes of a child,

The cold clear ripple of thrushes after rain,

The sound of a mountain-brook, or a breaking wave

Would teach my slumbering soul the ways of love.

He looked at me, more gently than of late,

And spoke (O, if this world had ears to hear

The sound of falling dew, the power that wrote

The Paradiso might recall that voice!)

It is near daybreak. I am faithful still;

And I am here to answer all your need.

The hills are old, but not so old as I;

The blackbird’s eyes are young, but not so young

As mine that know the wonder of their sight.

Eagles have wings. Mine are too swift to see;

For while I stand and whisper at your side,

Time dwindles to a shadow....

Like a mist

The world dissolved around us as he spoke.

I saw him standing dark against the sky.

I heard him, murmuring like a spirit in trance,—

Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud....

Then, slowly emerging from that mist of dreams,

As at an incantation, a lost world

Arose, and shone before me in the dawn.

II—THE GREEKS

I
Pythagoras

I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD

Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud.

In the still garden that Pythagoras made,

The Temple of the Muses, firm as truth,

Lucid as beauty, the white marriage-song

Made visible, of beauty and truth in one,

Flushed with the deepening East.

It was no dream.

The thrush that with his long beak shook and beat

The dark striped snail-shell on the marble flags

Between the cool white columns told me this.

The birds among the silvery olives pealed

So many jargoning rivulet-throated bells

That in their golden clashings discord drowned,

And one wild harmony closed and crowned them all

And yet, as if the spread wings of a hawk

Froze in the sky above them, every note

Died on an instant.

Over the sparkling grass

The long dark shadows of ash and pine began

To shrink, as though the rising of the sun

Menaced, not only shadows, but the world.

A frightened bird flew, crying, and scattering dew

Blindly away; though, on this dawn of dawns,

Nothing had changed. The Golden Brotherhood stole

Up through the drifts of wet rose-laurel bloom

As on so many a dawn for many a year,

To make their morning vows.

They thronged the porch,

The lean athletes of truth, trained body and mind,

For their immortal trial. Among them towered

Milon, the soldier-wrestler. His brown limbs

Moved with the panther’s grace, the warrior’s pride;

Milon, who in the Olympic contests won

Crown after crown, but wore them on broad brows

Cut like fine steel for thought; and, in his eyes,

Carried the light of those deep distances

That challenge the spirit of man.

They entered in;

And, like the very Muses following them,

Theano, and her Golden Sisterhood,

First of that chosen womanhood, by the grace

Of whose heaven-walking souls the race ascends,

Passed through the shining porch.

It was no dream.

In the bright marble, under the sandalled feet,

And in the glimmering columns as they passed,

The reflex of their flowing vestments glowed

White, violet, saffron, like another dawn.

...

Before them, through the temple’s fragrant gloom,

The Muses, in their dim half-circle, towered;

And, in the midst, over the smouldering myrrh,

The form of Hestia.

In her mighty shadow,

Pythagoras, with a scroll in his right hand,

Arose and spoke.

“Our work is well-nigh done.

Our enemies are closing round us now.

I have given the sacred scrolls into the hands

Of Lysis; and, though all else be destroyed,

If but a Golden Verse or two live on

In other lands, and kindle other souls

To seek the law, our work is not in vain.

If it be death that comes to us, we shall lose

Nothing that could endure. It was not chance

That sent us on this pilgrimage through time,

But that which lives within us, the desire

Of gods, to know what once was dark in heaven.

Gods were not gods who, in eternal bliss,

Had never known this wonder—the deep joy

Of coming home. But we have purchased it,

And now return, enriched with memories

Of mortal love, terrestrial grief and pain,

Into our own lost realm.”

His dark eyes flashed.

He lifted his proud head as one who heard

Strains of immortal music even now.

He towered among the Muses in the dusk,

And then, as though he, too, were carved in stone,

And all their voices breathed through his own voice,

“Fear nothing now,” he said. “Our foes can steal

The burdens we lay down, but nothing more.

All that we are we keep. They strike at shadows

And cannot hurt us. Little as we may know,

We have learned at least to know the abiding Power

From these poor masks of clay. This dust, this flesh,

All that we see and touch, are shadows of it,

And hourly change and perish. Have we not seen

Cities and nations, all that is built of earth,

Fleeting into the darkness, like grey clouds,

And only one thing constant—the great law,

The eternal order of their march to death?

Have we not seen it written upon the hills?

The continents and seas do not endure.

They change their borders. Where the seas are now

Mountains will rise; and, where the land was, once,

The dark Atlantic ends the world for man.

But all these changes are not wrought by chance.

They follow a great order. It may be

That all things are repeated and reborn;

And, in their mighty periods, men return

And pass through their forgotten lives anew.

It may be; for, at times, the mind recalls—

Or half recalls—the turning of a road,

A statue on a hill, a passing face....

It may be; for our universe is bound

In rhythm; and the setting star will rise.

This many a cunning ballad-singer knows

Who haunts the mind of man with dark refrains;

Or those deep poets who foretell in verse

The restoration of the world’s great Year.

Time never fails. Not Tanais, or the Nile

Can flow for ever. They spring up and perish;

But, after many changes, it may be

These, too, return, with Egypt and her kings.”

He paused a moment; then compassion, grief,

Wonder and triumph, like one music, spoke

Farewell to shadows, from his own deep soul

Rapt, in pure vision, above the vanishing world:

“The torrents drag the rocks into the sea.

The great sea smiles, and overflows the land.

It hollows out the valleys and returns.

The sea has washed the shining rocks away

And cleft the headland with its golden fields

That once bound Sicily to her mother’s breast.

Pharos, that was an island, far from shore

When Homer sang, is wedded now and one

With Egypt. The wild height where Sappho stood,

The beautiful, white, immortal promontory,

Crowned with Apollo’s temple, long ago

The struggling seas have severed from the land.

And those fair Grecian cities, Helice

And Buris, wondering fishermen see, far down,

With snowy walls and columns all aslant,

Trembling under the unremembering wave.

The waters of Anigris, that were sweet

As love, are bitter as death. There was a time

When Etna did not burn. A time will come

When it will cease to burn; for all things change;

And mightier things by far have changed than these

In the slow lapse of never-ending time.

I have seen an anchor on the naked hills,

And ocean-shells among the mountain-tops.

Continents, oceans, all things pass away;

But One, One only; for the Eternal Mind

Enfolds all changes, and can never change.”

II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE

Night on Crotona, night without a star.

I heard the mob, outside the Temple, roaring

Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!

Before the flushed white columns, in the glare

Of all those angry torches, Cylon stood

Wickedly smiling. “They have barred the doors.

Pythagoras and his forty chosen souls

Are all within. They are trapped, and they shall die.

It will be best to whet the people’s rage

Before we lay the axe, or set the torch

Against the Muses’ temple. One wild howl

Of ‘sacrilege’ may defeat us.”—This he called

“Faith in the people.”

He moistened his dry lips,

And raised his hand. The savage clamouring ceased.

One breathless moment, ere he spoke, he paused,

Gathering his thoughts. His thin white weasel face

Narrowed, his eyes contracted. In their pain

—Pain pitiable, a torment of the mind—

A bitter memory burned, of how he sued

To join that golden brotherhood in vain.

For when the Master saw him, he discerned

A spirit in darkness, violent, empty of thought,

But full of shallow vanity, cunning lies,

Intense ambition.

All now was turned to hate;

Hate the destroyer of men, the wrecker of cities,

The last disease of nations; hate, the fire

That eats away the heart; hate, the lean rat

That gnaws the brain, till even reason glares

Like madness through blind eyes; hate, the thin snake

That coils like whip-cord round the victim’s soul

And strangles it; hate, that slides up through his throat,

And with its flat and quivering head usurps

The function of his tongue,—to sting and sting,

Till all that poison which is now his life

Is drained, and he lies dead; hate, that still lives,

And for the power to strike and sting again,

May yet destroy this world.

So Cylon stood,

Quivering a moment, in the fiery glare,

Over the multitude.

Then, in his right hand,

He shook a roll of parchment over his head,

Crying, The Master said it!

At that word,

A snarl, as of a myriad-throated beast,

Broke out again, and deepened into a roar—

Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!

Cylon upheld his hand, as if to bless

A stormy sea with calm. The howling died

Into a deadly hush. With twisted lips

He spoke.

“This is their Scroll, the Sacred Word,

The Secret Doctrine of their Golden Order!

Hear it!”

Then, interweaving truth with lies,

Till even the truth struck like a venomed dart

Into his hearers’ minds, he read aloud

His cunningly chosen fragments.

At the end,

He tore the scroll, and trampled it underfoot.

“Ye have heard,” he said. “Ye are kin to all the beasts!

And, when ye die, your souls again inhabit

Bodies of beasts, wild beasts, and beasts of burden.

Even yet more loathsome—he that will not starve

His flesh, and tame himself and all mankind

To bear this golden yoke shall, after death,

Dwell in the flesh of swine. He that rejects

This wisdom shall, hereafter, seek the light

Through endless years, with toads, asps, creeping things.

Thus would they exile all our happier gods!

Away with Bacchus and his feasts of joy!

Back, Aphrodite, to your shameful foam!

Men must be tamed, like beasts.

The Master said it!

And wherefore? There are certain lordly souls

Who rise above the beasts, and talk with gods.

These are his Golden Brotherhood; these must rule!

Ye heard that verse from Homer—whom he loves—

Homer, the sycophant, who could call a prince

‘The shepherd of his people.’ What are ye,

Even in this life, then, but their bleating flocks?

The Master said it!

Homer—his demi-god,

Ye know his kind; ye know whence Homer sprang;

An old blind beggarman, singing for his food,

Through every city in Greece”—(This Cylon called

Honouring the people)—“already he is outworn,

Forgotten, without a word for this young age;

And great Pythagoras crowns him!

When they choose

Their Golden Brotherhood, they lay down their laws,

Declaring none may rule until he learn,

Prostrate himself in reverence to the dead,

And pass, through golden discipline, to power

Over himself and you; but—mark this well—

Under Pythagoras! Discipline! Ah, that path

Is narrow and difficult. Only three hundred souls,

Aristocrats of knowledge, have attained

This glory. It is against the people’s will

To know, or to acknowledge those that know,

Or let their knowledge lead them for one hour.

For see—see how the gods have driven them mad,

Even in their knowledge! In their own Sacred Scroll,

Pythagoras, who derives you from the beasts,

Affirms that earth, this earth beneath our feet,

Spins like a little planet round the sun!”

A brutal bellowing, as of Asian bulls,

Boomed from a thousand mouths. (This Cylon called

The laughter of the people and their gods.)

He raised his hand. It ceased.

“This is their knowledge,

And this,” he cried, “their charter to obscure

What all men know, the natural face of things.

This proves their right to rule us from above.

They meet here nightly. Nightly they conspire

Against your rights, your liberties, and mine.

Was it not they who, when the people rose

In Sybaris, housed her noble fugitives here?

And was it not Pythagoras who refused

To send them back to Sybaris and their death?

Was it not this that plunged us into war

With Sybaris; and, when victory crowned our arms,

Who but Pythagoras robbed us of its fruits?

We gathered booty, and he called it theft.

We burned their palaces, and he called it hate.

We avenged our sons. He called it butchery,

And said the wild beast wakes again in man.

What have we gained, then? Nothing but the pride

Of saving those Pythagoras wished to save;

Counting gold dross, and serving his pure gods.

The Master said it. What is your judgment, then?”

He stretched one hand, appealing to the crowd,

And one to the white still Temple.

“Death! Death! Death!”

Under the flaring torches, the long waves

Of tense hot faces opened a thousand mouths,

Little blue pits of shadow that raced along them,

And shook the red smoke with one volleying roar,—

Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!

...

But, in the Temple, through those massive walls,

While Cylon spoke, no whisper had been heard;

Only, at times, a murmur, when he paused,

As of a ninth wave breaking, far away.

The half-moon of the Muses, crowned with calm,

Towered through the dimness. Under their giant knees,

In their immortal shadow, those who knew

How little was their knowledge waited death

Proudly, around their Master. Robed in white,

Beautiful as Apollo in old age,

He stood amongst them, laying a gentle hand,

One last caress, upon that dearest head

Bowed there before him, his own daughter’s hair.

Then, tenderly, the god within him moved

His mortal lips; and, in the darkness there,

He spoke, as though the music of the spheres

Welled from his heart, to ease the hurts of death.

“Not tears, belovèd. Give it welcome, rather!

Soon, though they spared us, this blind flesh would fail.

They are saving us the weary mile or two

That end a dusty journey. The dull stains

Of travel; the soiled vesture; the sick heart

That hoped at every turning of the road

To see the Perfect City, and hoped in vain,

Shall grieve us now no more. Now, at the last,

After a stern novitiate, iron test,

And grinding failures, the great light draws near,

And we shall pass together, through the Veil.”

He bowed his head. It was their hour of prayer;

And, from among the Muses in the dark,

A woman’s voice, a voice in ecstasy,

As if a wound should bless the sword that made it,

Breathed through the night the music of their law:

Close not thine eyes in sleep

Till thou hast searched thy memories of the day,

Graved in thy heart the vow thou didst not keep,

And called each wandering thought back to the way.

Pray to the gods! Their aid,

Their aid alone can crown thy work aright;

Teach thee that song whereof all worlds were made;

Rend the last veil, and feed thine eyes with light.

Naught shall deceive thee, then.

All creatures of the sea and earth and air,

The circling stars, the warring tribes of men

Shall make one harmony, and thy soul shall hear.

Out of this prison of clay

With lifted face, a mask of struggling fire,

With arms of flesh and bone stretched up to pray,

Dumb, thou shalt hear that Voice of thy desire.

Thou that wast brought so low;

And through those lower lives hast risen again,

Kin to the beasts, with power at last to know

Thine own proud banishment and diviner pain;

Courage, O conquering soul!

For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,

Though worlds on worlds into that darkness roll,

The gods abide; and of their race art thou!

There was a thunder of axes at the doors;

A glare as of a furnace; and the cry,

Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!

Then, over the streaming smoke and the wild light

That like a stormy sunset sank away

Into a darker night, the deeper mist

Rolled down, and of that death I knew no more.

II
Aristotle

I. YOUTH AND THE SEA

The mists unfolded on a sparkling coast

Washed by a violet sea.

It was no dream.

The clustering irised bubbles in the foam,

The grinding stir as through the shining pebbles

The wave ran back; the little drifts of smoke

Where wet black rocks dried grey in the hot sun;

The pods of sea-weed, crackling underfoot,

All told me this.

My comrade at my side,

Moved like a shadow. I turned a promontory,

And like a memory of my own lost youth,

Shining and far, across the gulf I saw

Stagira, like a little city of snow,

Under the Thracian hills.

Nothing had changed.

I saw the City where that Greek was born

Who ranged all art, all life, and lit a fire

That shines yet, after twice a thousand years;

And strange, but strange as truth, it was to hear

No slightest change in that old rhythmic sound

Of waves against the shore.

Then, at my side,

My soul’s companion whispered, all unseen,

‘Two thousand years have hidden him from the world,

Robed him in grey and bearded him with eld,

Untrue to his warm life. There was a time

When he was young as truth is; and the sun

Browned his young body, danced in his young grey eyes;

And look—the time is now.’

There, as he spoke,

I saw among the rocks on my right hand,

Lying, face downward, over a deep rock-pool,

A youth, so still that, till a herring-gull swooped

And sheered away from him with a startled cry

And a wild flutter of its brown mottled wings,

I had not seen him.

Quietly we drew near,

As shadows may, unseen.

He pored intent

Upon a sea-anemone, like a flower

Opening its disk of blue and crimson rays

Under the lucid water.

He stretched his hand,

And with a sea-gull’s feather, touched its heart.

The bright disk shrank, and closed, as though a flower

Turned instantly to fruit, ripe, soft, and round

As the pursed lips of a sea-god hiding there.

They fastened, sucking, on the quill and held it.

Young Aristotle laughed. He rose to his feet.

“Come and see this!” he called.

Under the cliff

Nicomachus arose, and drawing his robe

More closely round him, crossed the slippery rocks

To join his son.

There, side by side, they crouched

Over the limpid pool,—the grey physician

And eager boy.

“See, how it grips the feather!

And grips the rock, too. Yet it has no roots.

Your sea-flowers turn to animals with mouths.

Take out the quill. Now it turns back again

Into a flower; look—look—what lovely colours,

What marvellous artistry.

This never was formed

By chance. It has an aim beyond this pool.

What does it mean? This unity of design?

This delicate scale of life that seems to ascend

Without a break, through all the forms of earth

From plants to men? The sea-sponge that I found

Grew like a blind rock-rooted clump of moss

Dilating in water, shrinking in the sun;

I know it for a strange sea-animal now,

Shaped like the brain of a man. Can it be true

That, as the poets fable in their songs

Of Aphrodite, life itself was born

Here, in the sea?”

Nicomachus looked at him.

“That’s a dark riddle, my son. You will not hear

An answer in the groves of Academe,

Not even from Plato. When you go to Athens

Next year, remember, among the loftiest flights

Of their philosophy, that the living truth

Is here on earth if we could only see it.

This, this at least, all true Asclepiads know.

Remember, always, in that battle of words,

The truth that father handed down to son

Through the long line of men that served their kind

From Æsculapius, father of us all,

To you his own descendant:—naught avails

In science, till the light you seize from heaven

Shines through the clear sharp fact beneath your feet.

This is the test of both—that, in their wedding,

The light that was a disembodied dream

Burns through the fact, and makes a lanthorn of it,

Transfigures it, confirms it, gives it new

And deeper meanings; and itself, in turn,

Is thereby seen more truly.

Use your eyes;

And you, or those that follow you, will outsoar

Pythagoras.

He believed the soul descends

From the pure realm of gods; is clothed with clay;

And, struggling upward through a myriad forms,

After a myriad lives and deaths, returns

Enriched with all those memories, lord of all

That knowledge, master of all those griefs and pains

As else it could not be, home to the gods,

Itself a god, prepared for the full bliss,

The living consummation of the whole.

Earth must be old, if all these things are true.

But take this tale and read it. If it seem

Only a tale, the light in it has turned

Dark facts to lanthorns for me. There are tales

More true than any fragment of the truth.

One of his homeless clan (who came to me

Dying), his last disciple’s wandering son,

Gave me the scroll. I give it now to you,—

The young swift-footed runner with the fire.

You’ll find strange thoughts; and, woven into the close,

His Golden Verses, with a thought more strange.”

Then, from his breast, the Asclepiad drew a scroll,

Smooth as old ivory, honey-stained by time,

A wand of whispering magic; and the boy

Seized it with brown young hands.

His father smiled

And turned away, between the shining pools

To seek Stagira. Under his sandalled feet

The sea-weeds crackled. His footsteps crunched away

Along the beach.

Upon a sun-warmed rock

The boy outspread the curled papyrus-roll,

Keeping each corner in place with a small grey stone.

There, while the white robe drifting down the coast

Grew smaller and smaller, till at last it seemed

A flake of vanishing foam, he lay full length,

Reading the tale.

The salt on his brown skin

Dried to a faint white powder in the sun.

Over him, growing bold, the peering gulls

Wheeled closer, as he lay there, tranced and still;

Till, through the tale, the golden verses breathed

Like a returning music, rhythmic tones

Changed by new voices, coloured by new minds,

Yet speaking still for one time-conquering soul,

As on the shore the wandering ripples changed

And tossed new spray-drops into the sparkling air,

Yet pulsed with the ancient breathing of the sea:

Guard the immortal fire.

Honour the glorious line of the great dead.

To the new height let all thy soul aspire;

But let those memories be thy wine and bread.

Quench not in any shrine

The smouldering storax. In no human heart

Quench what love kindled. Faintly though it shine,

Not till it wholly dies the gods depart.

Truth has remembering eyes.

The wind-blown throng will clamour at Falsehood’s gate.

Has Falsehood triumphed? Let the world despise

Thy constant mind. Stand thou aside, and wait.

Write not thy thoughts on snow.

Grave them in rock to front the thundering sky.

From Time’s proud feast, when it is time to go,

Take the dark road; bid one more world good-bye.

The lie may steal an hour.

The truth has living roots, and they strike deep.

A moment’s glory kills the rootless flower,

While the true stem is gathering strength in sleep.

Out of this earth, this dust,

Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;

Out of these cosmic throes of wrath, and lust,