(Roth-thalhorn, Gletscherhorn, Ebne Fluh, Mittaghorn, Grosshorn,

Breithorn and Tschingelhorn)—

Standing there like a wall and sending their glaciers to the valley.

* * * * *

[And far behind the wall, far miles and miles, but invisible from here,

Great rivers of ice between the glistening black and scarred crags

Flow, tossing and twisted, with sea-green escarpments and fissures, and

scaly snaky moraines, and glittering snowfields above them, sharp on the

dark blue sky,

All stretching, far as the eye may see, in endless silence,

Save for the fitful rattle of falling rocks, or muffled roar of an

avalanche.]

* * * * *

But at the end of the train, and closing it and the valley,

Rises a huge bare cliff, the frowning G’spaltenhorn,

Diabolic and dark, an inferno of crags and pinnacles.

* * * * *

This on one side; on the other the landscape opens

To lower valleys and pastures—the huts of Gimmelwald and Mürren,

Lying serene in the sunlight, with herds of cows just visible,

And the blue-vista’d gorge of Lauterbrunnen running down to the distant

hills of the twin lakes,

And tiny villages and towns, half seen and half imagined,

All folded in light and glory—as the peaks above are folded.

* * * * *

And there below us, in the huts of the upper pastures, the herdsmen

gather and milk the cows, and in their great cauldrons warm the milk,

and strain and press the cheeses;

Staying a few weeks in one spot till the feed is exhausted, and then

leading the tinkling-belled herd by precipitous paths to other huts and

pastures,

All summer long, till the autumnal return to the lowlands;

And in the little chalets the daily life goes on, with knitting and

spinning and beating of flax, and storage of winter fuel and fodder;

And men with small short scythes mow the slopes of grass almost too

steep to stand on, or carry their heavy wooden brantes of milk, braced

to their shoulders, down the mountain-bases;

And for a brief season the stream of visitors arrives, and the hotels

wake from sleep, and distant music is heard;

And guides and climbers sally forth with lanterns in the dark, and are

glad if they may remain for a few minutes at early morning in the thin

icy wind of some silent summit;

And even tiny invisible trains attempt to ascend the unimaginable

mountains.

* * * * *

But here on this little palm of grass, Earth’s hand uplifted,

All is the same as though the centuries moved not;

And the peaks stand round and wreathe themselves in clouds, and take the

colors and the lights of morning and evening;

And the moon sails, and an occasional eagle, overhead;

And the valleys plunge below in depths and darks invisible;

And the butterflies and flowers quiver and leap in the light and living

air;

And we, in our turn, on the little dancing-ground of centuries,

Forming a circle, dance—till the mountains too wheel round us.

A VILLAGE CHURCH

A stump of oak—a huge old ruin of a tree, shored up with props;

And close beside it a vast and splendid Yew—still flourishing though

fully a thousand years of age—

With congregated stems upstanding, straight as a gothic pillar, and

mighty outspread arms on every side—a home for birds for countless

generations;

And almost underneath the branches of the yew, sunk somewhat in the

ground,

A tiny little Church—squat roof and belfry—with Saxon walling and low

dark Norman doorway.

* * * * *

And evening falls, and to us sitting in the lane

From the low door as from some cavern-mouth of the Earth

Come sounds of old old chants and murmur of ancient prayers, and the

wailing of responses,

Wafted—and a faint faint odor of incense (for High Church is the

service),

And dimly seen, as through the mists of time, the glint of candles on

the altar-table.

* * * * *

Voices indeed of Time and the Earth, like some strange incantation,

Issuing from the gloom beneath the Yew-tree,

Coming adown forgotten centuries—

Voices and echoes of ages of Christianity, borne onward with the sound

of Norman and Saxon chisels:

Phrases that Chrysostom wrote, or good St. Basil; or borrowed from

primitive liturgies of the earliest Christians;

Scraps of antiphonies sung within the Catacombs; tags, litanies and

Kyrie Eleisons, adapted from pagan rituals;

Fragments of Creeds and Glorias from the days of Athanasius and the

Councils; or sanctioned by the use of Sarum;

Gregorian chants, and quaint melodic strains from far Greek sources:

These blent together,

And laden with hopes and fears of hearts long buried,

Come issuing from the doorway.

* * * * *

And all the while under the evening sky

The landscape stretches, so fair, so calm, so actual,

And in the air the delicious waft of hawthorn-blossom

Floats, and the red June sunset hangs in the West,

And high in the branches of the Yew, a peacock,

Preening its feathers, sits.

* * * * *

How strange!

To think of the old old life for a thousand years that has gathered

round these stones, and since the yew was a seedling planted,

Of the generations of men and women to whom the Church has been the

centre of their days—their first and latest home;

The old clock striking the hours and the quarters through years and

decades,

The old bell tolling its way through the centuries, with pendulum-swing

of life-times;

The infants and wide-eyed children brought in for baptism; and after

eighty years brought in again—mere broken husks of aged folk—for burial;

And their children the same, and theirs again the same, and theirs, and

theirs;

Till at length by the font where the monk once muttered his Latin

blessing, a smug young curate stands and lisps the service;

The marriages, the festivals, the long tradition of the mass and the

holy communion from that last supper in Jerusalem;

The glow of religious adoration, and the pain of broken hearts, age

after age; the hopes of Heaven, the nightmare doubts of Hell;

And the trio of Gods aloft, looking on all the time,

The Father, the Son, and the Ghost,

And the dear Mother Mary, a little aside, apart,

And the crowd of Saints in the background—

The council-chamber of heaven.

* * * * *

And the terrestrial councils held in the Church,

The conferences of the local Barons with the clergy, the visitations of

Bishops,

The stormy scenes in the vestry, while the congregation is waiting in

the pews;

The Folk-motes called in the Churchyard, the preparations for defence in

time of civil war;

The fierce fights on occasions all round the building and amongst the

tomb-stones; and up the stone stairs of the Tower—the monks and priests

laying about them with heavy candlesticks.

* * * * *

To think of it all:

Of the images that have stood in those niches and been cast down and

broken to shards;

And of the tapestries and altar-cloths that have been woven and stitched

with pious care, and that have long since faded away—

And the little church still standing!

And still the old vague-toned Gregorian phrases wandering down, and

still the golden voice of Chrysostom sounding from afar over the hubbub

of the ages,

Floating on the waft of incense, and mingling with the breath of the

hawthorn, this June night, 1900.

* * * * *

How wonderful!

The romance, the poetry, the heart-yearnings—

As once perhaps they gathered round some Greek Temple:

[Where the young man, having washed his body and offered a sacrifice

before the laurel-crowned priest, poured out his heart in prayer to

Apollo, touching the knees of the god with a leafy olive-wand;

Or the expectant mother came to Juno Lucina with a branch of palm in her

hands;

Or the old man at midnight, with a propitiatory offering, to the shrine

of Proserpine:]

So, all these centuries and round the village church,

A like romance has gathered.

* * * * *

And presently an alien folk will come, with alien thoughts and customs;

And this little shrine half-buried in the ground, with its candles and

incense and stuffy dingy interior,

And its three Gods sitting up aloft, and its doubtful glances at Mary,

Will seem as far back and strange as anything Greek or Egyptian.

* * * * *

Thus as I dreamed, wandering away in thought through the long long past

and future,

The service ended, and in the last glow of sunset

Out came a crowd of gaily-colored girls in silks and muslin, and village

youths, and a top-hat squire or two—all modern as modern—

And knowing or recking nothing of Chrysostom and Basil:

Into the sweet evening air and dusk they came, with cheerful babble,

Discussing the local fashions or last event in politics,

When sudden a yell rang out in the sky, like the yell of a monstrous

cat,

And with a great rush of wings, and to a chorus of exclamations,

The peacock flew from its tree overhead to the East and into the Night.

SHEFFIELD

Where a spur of the moors runs forward into the great town,

And above the squalid bare steep streets, over a deserted quarry, the

naked rock lifts itself into the light,

There, lifted above the smoke, I stood,

And below lay Sheffield.

* * * * *

The great wind blew over the world,

The great soft Southwest, making a clear light along the far horizon;

The sky overhead was serenest blue, and here and there a solitary white

cloud scudded swiftly below it.

The great soft wind! How it blew in gusts as it would unroot the very

rocks, eddying and whistling round the angles!

The great autumnal wind! bearing from the valley below clouds of paper

and rubbish instead of dead leaves.

* * * * *

Yet the smoke still lay over Sheffield.

Sullenly it crawled and spread;

Round the bases of the tall chimneys, over the roofs of the houses, in

waves—and the city was like a city of chimneys and spires rising out of

a troubled sea—

From the windward side where the roads were shining wet with recent

rain,

Right across the city, gathering, mounting, as it went,

To the Eastward side where it stood high like a wall, blotting the land

beyond,

Sullenly it crawled and spread.

* * * * *

Dead leaden sound of forge-hammers,

Gaping mouths of chimneys,

Lumbering and rattling of huge drays through the streets,

Pallid faces moving to and fro in myriads,

The sun, so brilliant here, to those below like a red ball just visible,

hanging;

The drunkard reeling past; the file-cutter humped over his bench, with

ceaseless skill of chisel and hammer cutting his hundred thousand

file-teeth per day—lead-poison and paralysis slowly creeping through his

frame;

The gaunt woman in the lens-grinding shop, preparing spectacle-glasses

without end for the grindstone—in eager dumb mechanical haste, for her

work is piecework;

Barefoot skin-diseased children picking the ash-heaps over, sallow

hollow-cheeked young men, prematurely aged ones,

The attic, the miserable garret under the defective roof,

The mattress on the floor, the few coals in the corner,

White jets of steam, long ribbons of black smoke,

Furnaces glaring through the night, beams of lurid light thrown

obliquely up through the smoke,

Nightworkers returning home wearied in the dismal dawn—

Ah! how long? how long?

* * * * *

And as I lifted my eyes, lo! across the great wearied throbbing city the

far unblemished hills,

Hills of thick moss and heather,

Coming near in the clear light, in the recent rain yet shining.

And over them along the horizon moving, the gorgeous procession of

shining clouds,

And beyond them, lo! in fancy, the sea and the shores of other lands,

And the great globe itself curving with its land and its sea and its

clouds in supreme beauty among the stars.

A LANCASHIRE MILL-HAND

She died at the age of sixty-three, mother of a family of four children,

and having during that time worked for fifty-three years in a Lancashire

cotton-mill!

You know the scene: the great oblong ugly factory, in five or six tiers,

all windows, alive with lights on a dark winter’s morning, and again

with the same lights in the evening; and all day within, the thump and

scream of the machinery, and the thick smell of hot oil and cotton

fluff, and the crowds of drab-faced drab-dressed men and women and

children—the mill-hands—going to and fro or serving the machines;

And, outside, the sad smoke-laden sky, and rows of dingy streets, and

waste tracks where no grass grows, and tall chimneys belching dirt, and

the same same outlook for miles.

Here she had grown up a bright-eyed strenuous girl, to blushing

maidenhood, and had become a young woman, and in time married; and here

she lived, and bore her family, and died.

* * * * *

In those days—it happens even now—whole families, father, mother and

children, would go out (locking up the house behind them) to work in the

Mills; thus to earn perhaps a decent combined wage.

And in this instance it was so. But the mother worked hardest of all:

her one idea—her blind religion—being work: to bring up her children to

work—never to give in.

During the last twenty-four years of her life she never missed a single

work-morning being at the mill at 6 a.m.

Even before that, on each occasion of her confinement, she would only

allow herself three weeks off. When she returned to the mill she would

leave the new-born babe every morning at the house of a nursing woman on

the way.

The youngest-born—and he it was who told it all—said he remembered very

well as a child being picked out of bed in the early dawn, wrapped in a

shawl, and carried through the streets, just as he was, to the house of

an old woman.

Here his mother would just pop him down, and hurry on to _work_.

* * * * *

At the last, after her half-century of toil, she was terribly broken

with bronchitis. Often, after going out at 5.30 a.m. into the cutting

winds of winter, the gas-lamps would reveal her leaning for a while,

wheezing and coughing, in the shelter of a doorway to get her breath and

strength.

Nevertheless she never missed a single day, or even a quarter.

She never gave in till the very last.

Then one day at dinner-time she came home and went to bed.

But at 9 p.m. the youngest son going up found her dressed!—“O yes, the

house wanted tidying, and she would attend to it, as she was going to

work in the morning, and there was no one else to do so!”

But in the morning there _was_ someone else, and the house was tidied

without her;

For she lay in her chamber, dead.

A TRADE

In a little stinking shop, hardly seven feet square—

Just one room in a London back street, where nearly every room lodges a

family—

With two or three little paraffin stoves in, and bowls and pots horribly

steaming, for dyeing gloves—

A man, some forty years old, burly and well-brained but broken down and

bloated with drink, plying a trade.

“Do you see?” he says, “I buy these white evening kids, what have been

cast off, from the slop-dealers, at so much a score. Then I gets a woman

to mend ’em and put buttons on, and then I dyes ’em black, in these ’ere

pots.

[As good as new, d’you see? See how they shine when they’re got up—and

the black’ll never come orf.]

Then I goes out into the markets—Leather Lane and the street-markets I

mean—and sells them at sixpence a pair.

[Yes, and I mean to get a stamp and stamp ’em inside; then they’ll be

_just_ like new.]

O it aint so bad in mild weather, but when it’s like this, cold and

rainy, folk won’t stop to buy nothing, they won’t.”

* * * * *

And there were the gloves, shriveled, black, and hanging in rows on

stretched strings, like the corpses of weasels and moles strung by

gamekeepers in the woods;

And there was the filthy suffocating odor of the den and the chemicals,

and the intelligent eye of the man wavering in slavery to his protruding

lower lip.

“Lor!” he said, “I often stay here at nights as well as days. I don’t

live with my wife now. She’s a regular bad ’un!”

THE PLOUGHBOY

The blackbirds sing so sweetly in the morning;

They are building a nest yonder in the hedgerow, where I pass at

sunrise: and I think their song is sweeter then than else at any time of

day.

I take care not to disturb them: they work as hard as anybody for their

living.

And I think they know me now, they are that bold. But they do not follow

in the furrow, like the wagtails and robins; they seem to hang to the

grass-lands.

* * * * *

It is pleasant then, in the morning: the air is so sweet.

And the smell of the earth—and I like the warm smell of the horses.

Jeannie goes in the furrow, and Rob on the fallow: they go very steady;

And when the ground is soft-like, it’s good enough going, but when it’s

stiff it stretches your arms a bit:

Lord! it does make you sweat!

THE JACKDAW

Chork! chork!

The white sea-cliff, the crawling waves, the fringe of weed between,

Midway a cleft in the rock—from above, from below, unseen.

* * * * *

Chork! chork!

The sun alone looks in where my nest is; the moon shines in the blinking

eyes of my children.

Sweet is the warm night nestling all together, sweet the dawn by the

fresh air fanned,

Sweet to arise and soar into the blue weather—to see the brown fields

and pastures inland!

* * * * *

To sail inland, a dozen together, to the feeding grounds, and unearth

the fat white slugs, (chork! chork!)

To roam and range with the others—how sweet!—and yet not with them,

Forgetting never

My own particular cleft in the rock and the tuft of sea-poppies beside

it—like yellow flames burning—

And the red wide throats of my chicks as they catch my black shadow upon

them, returning.

BY THE MERSEY

I watched the sunlight on the river Mersey—all glorious with sailing

clouds and shadows—and sailing craft and steamers on the tide—a stirring

sight!

And heard the clang and clamor of Liverpool behind me;

And saw in front the crowded ferry-boats crossing, and gulls in clusters

swooping down for garbage;

[Two steps on the green water with webbed feet—and up again, their full

beaks raised in air!]

* * * * *

And the great Atlantic liner lay at the landing-stage, towering up, a

mighty wall of iron, full thirty feet, over the little people who rushed

to and fro below, completing the last shipments and farewells.

For even now the gong sounded in the ship’s interior; and all was

ready—every rope in place;

The shrouds and stays were taut on mast and spar;

Two slender wires, Marconi’s, at the stern, ran sloping down from

mizen-truck to wheel-house,

Ready to catch (far out at sea) a faint thrill from the home-land.

The little tug’s towing-cable strained too at the monster; but still

four mighty hawsers held her fast;

And still she delayed to move, and still the folk, on ship and shore,

with jokes and quips beguiled the hour of parting.

* * * * *

Then sudden rang a bugle from the deck. Down came blue peter; and the

foghorn sounded.

The hawsers fell, and she was free. A moment more, magnificent, she

glided down the river.

* * * * *

And instantly from all the decks (from some of the portholes too) there

burst a flutter of waving hands and scarves—a fringe of white, answered

by such another fringe on shore;

And instantly I saw—what I had missed before—

[Stronger, it seemed, than even cable and hawser, more numerous and

tense than shrouds and stays, finer and subtler than Marconi wires,]

A thousand invisible threads which bound the ship, and would not be cast

off or loosed or snapt,

But tugged and strained at living human hearts—and strained and tugged

and tore—

Till hearts were sore and broken:

Threads of some unseen world—that stretched and stretched, and floated

like fair gossamers in the evening light—

So fine and strong, so stronger even than steel;

And followed lengthening as the great ship faded—lost in the glory of

sunset—

Far out to the Atlantic.

IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY

How lovely!

This vast vast dome—and the suspended sounds within it!

Sounds and echoes of the great city vibrating tirelessly night and day;

Voices and footfalls, of the little creatures that walk about its floor,

half-lost in the huge concave;

Suspended whispers, from its walls, of far forgotten centuries.

* * * * *

How lovely!

All the myriad books—well-nigh two millions of volumes—the interminable

iron galleries, the forty miles or so of closely-packed shelves;

The immense catalogue—itself a small library—of over a thousand volumes;

The thousands of editions of the Bible and parts of the Bible, with

texts, commentaries, translations in every known tongue—these alone

occupying sixteen volumes of catalogue;

The thousands of Shakespeare books, or of Aristotle, the hundreds of

Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Goethe, Voltaire, Byron;

The mountain-peaks of literature, and the myriads of lesser hills and

shoulders and points—the mole-hills and grass-blades even;

The interminable discussions of the Schoolmen and Grammarians, the

equally interminable discussions of modern Science—the investigations

into ghostly geometries of four or five dimensions, or into the values

of _c_ and _g_ in the Lunar Theory, or into the alternation of

generations in some obscure Annelids;

How bewildering! how impossible to sum up and estimate!

* * * * *

And then to think how slight it all is—

A little remnant of faded thought;

A little dust just crumbled through the fingers, hardly more;

The residue and deposit of ages;

The dead leaves, the skeleton foliage, which generations of trees have

cast upon the earth—and which with infinite care we sort and catalogue!

And then to leave the mouldy stuffy vault, and go out, and breathe

freely,

How lovely!

One living bud upon a little branch,

One face that looks and passes in the street,

And these contain it all.

* * * * *

How lovely!

To think there are all these books—and one need not read them;

To think of all the patient purblind accumulations, all the dry-as-dust,

the fatuous drivel, the maundering vanity, the endless repetitions of

vain things,

The endless care and industry and science used to sort out the pearls

from the vast heap—

[And we only know they are pearls because we already have the same

within ourselves—]

And to think we need not stop to count them.

* * * * *

What is it, such a library?

It is the homage of industrious dulness to the human soul.

[Once there lived a man—he actually thought and felt—he wrote even a

single sentence of sense—he uttered a word from his heart.

Then all the nations said, “O if we may but attain to save this divine

spark from oblivion, let us erect even such a labyrinthine monument as

this.”]

* * * * *

Come, come away!

The single hair of Buddha encased in a dágoba-mountain of brick and

mortar grows now, even such a hair, upon thy loved one’s head.

Come, come away! leave books, traditions, all the dross of centuries,

Clean, clean thy wings, and fly through other worlds.

Heaven’s stars shine all around thee;

Deep in thy Heart the ageless celestial Museum

Waits its explorer. All that they said—those wise ones—

They say and repeat it now, where the plough-boy drives his furrow:

Be still, O Soul, and know that thou art God.

EMPIRE

_Blind, fooled, and staggering from her throne, I saw her fall,

Clutching at the gaud of Empire;

And wondering, round her, sons and daughter-nations stood—

What madness had possessed her,

But when they lifted her, the heart was dead,

Withered within the body, and all the veins

Were choked with yellow dirt._

* * * * *

O England, fooled and blind,

Come look, if but a moment, on yourself!

See, through your streets—what should be living sap of your free blood—

These brutish squalid joyless drink-sodden populations flowing;

And in your mills and factories the weary faces, sad monotonous lives,

Or miles of cottage tenements with weakly red-eyed children, worn-out

mothers.

See, from your offices and shops at closing hours, the morbid stream—as

from unhealthy glands within the body—

Crowds issuing of anæmic youths and girls, pale, prematurely sexual,

With flabby minds and bodies (held together chiefly by their clothes)

and perky pick-me-up manners;

See, on the land, where at least there should be courage and grit and

sinew,

A thin-legged slouching apathetic population, ignorant even of

agriculture,

And in the mines and coal-pits, instead of lusty power, poor rickety

limbs and ill-built bodies;

And ask yourself the searching question straight,

How out of such roots shall a strong nation grow?

* * * * *

And then look upward, at the surface show and flaunt of society,

Those that are well-fed, and (out of the labor of the others) have

plenty of chink in their pockets—

The club and drawing-room life—

Look well, look well, and see the feebleness and insincerity of it:

The scores and scores of thousands of titled and moneyed persons—a vast

and ever-growing multitude—living the lives of idiots,

_Faiblesse oblige_ their motto:

Of men scarce fit even to be good officers, much less good

administrators; of women hardly worthy to be mothers;

A society wielding enormous wealth and privilege, skilled chiefly in the

finesse of personal gain and advancement, and honeycombed by cynicism

and unbelief:

And for the rest, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands swarming in

commercial dens and exchanges,

The life of the successful business man, the company promoter, the

lawyer; the manufacturer, traveller, factor, dealer, merchant,

speculator; the bank, the counting-house, the big store, the director’s

office; the advertising agent, and the vendor of patent medicines;

Think of all these, and of the ideals beneath and behind them—and ask

again the question,

How out of such stuff can a strong nation grow?

* * * * *

Where (and the question must be faced),

Where, anywhere over the surface of England to-day, do the necessary

conditions exist for the outcrop of a decent population—if only a body

of a few hundreds at a time?

Where are the conditions for the growth of men and women,

Healthy and well-formed of limb, self-reliant, enterprising, alert,

skilled in the use of tools, able to cope with Nature in her moods, and

with the Earth for their sustenance, loving and trustful of each other,

united and invincible in silent faith?

Where is the Statesman who makes it the main item of his programme to

produce such a population? Where the Capitalist, where the Landlord?

Where indeed—in a country in which Politics are but a game of party

bluff, where Labor is a modified slavery, and where Land (for such

purposes as indicated) is simply not to be had?

* * * * *

And the answer comes: The conditions do not exist.

The conditions (says the doctor) of life and vitality are gone—already

the process of decay has set in, which only a swift crisis can arrest:

The heart is dying down,

Withering within the body; and the veins

Are choked with yellow dirt.

* * * * *

And this Thing cries for Empire.

* * * * *

This Thing from all her smoky cities and slums, her idiot clubs and

drawing-rooms, and her brokers’ dens,

Cries out to give her blessings to the world!

And even while she cries

Stand Ireland and India at her doors

In rags and famine.

* * * * *

These are her blessings of Empire!

Ireland (dear Sister-isle, so near at hand, so fertile, once so

prosperous),

Rack-rented, drained, her wealth by absentees in London wasted, her

people with deep curses emigrating;

India the same—her life-blood sucked—but worse:

Perhaps in twenty years five hundred millions sterling, from her

famished myriads,

Taken to feed the luxury of Britain,

Taken, without return—

While Britain wonders with a pious pretence of innocence

Why famine follows the flag.

* * * * *

Last, but not least, insult is added to injury.

For, while she prates the blessings of her Empire, contempt and studied

indifference are her methods of administering it:

An empty House to hear the burden of the sorrows of India,

And Irish questions treated with derision.

* * * * *

O England, thou old hypocrite, thou sham, thou bully of weak nations

whom thou wert called to aid,

Thy day of ruin surely is near at hand,

Save for one thing—which scarcely may be hoped for—

Save that a heart of grace within thee rise

And stay the greed of gold—which else must slay thee.

* * * * *

For now I see thee like a great old tree,

A Mother of the forest,

Prone on the ground and hollow to the core, with branches spread and

stretched about the world.

And truly these thy seedlings scattered round

May spring and prosper, and even here and there

One of thy great arms elbowed in the earth,

Or severed from the trunk, may live again;

But Thou—thy tale of ancient glory is told—

I fear thou canst but die.

* * * * *

_And better so perhaps; for what is good shall live._

_The brotherhood of nations and of men_

_Comes on apace. New dreams of youth bestir_

_The ancient heart of the earth—fair dreams of love_

_And equal freedom for all folk and races._

_The day is past for idle talk of Empire;_

_And who would glory in dominating others—_

_Be it man or nation—he already has writ_

_His condemnation clear in all men’s hearts._

_’Tis better he should die._

THE BRITISH, A.D. 1901

As the light descends to drown and redeem the world,

And the sea quivers answering to its depths,

And the rocks and trees stand up in the blue air like transparent

creatures,

And the wheeling pigeons are a part of it all,

So is Love among the children of men—

Without which they have no being.

* * * * *

For I seemed to see in vision a people that knew not Love,

With cold-mutton faces and cod-fish eyes hurrying around,

Intent on endless quests, and gathering wealth in high and low places,

and picking over the scrap-heaps of the world,

And building up carefully their own good names and reputations,

And following up clues of knowledge and philanthropy, and feeding

piously and punctually the lusts of their bodies.

And it was like half-blind folk in a dark place hurrying up and down,

Hurting against one another in lost and aimless confusion,

Weary and senseless, stupefied and without originality,

Because indeed the one thing that might make life rational and vital was

absent.

* * * * *

And it seemed to me that the most ignorant unbred girl or boy amongst

them, who loved another and worshiped in mortal form a divine creature,

Knew more and possessed more even than them all.

PORTLAND

In the grey North-East of winter the great granite rock, see, overhung

with cloud!

And from the top no portion of the mainland visible—only a few war-ships

below, and Chesil Bank, its far end rising into fog.

But behind, on the high plateau of the rock, among the quarries,

Where neither the sea nor the ships nor the mainland, but only the

dreary piles of stone and drearier prison-walls, can at any time be

descried, and the arméd sentinels,

There, behold! the convicts in gangs, ten or twelve to a gang—and to

each gang one or two warders, with muskets—

The sullen heavy-faced convicts, and (in that place) every day more

sullen growing—hauling at trollies, or quarrying or dressing the stone:

Damned,

Without interest in life.

* * * * *

And so onward, through more warders, some with and some without muskets,

And through huge stone gateways and bastions, and through heavy clamped

doors, with endless turning of keys;

Till at last amid all this absurd and lumbering display of brute force,

as if for wild beasts—behind bars thick enough to confine an elephant—

Lo! a well-known face!

A gentle unharmful face, making the whole apparatus look foolish and

ashamed of itself—

The face of your friend whom you came to see—

So tender and hesitating, thoughtful, and lover of children:

His face, also alas! grown monotone,

And like a caged wild animal’s indeed,

With dull and quavering eyes, that fill with tears,

And lips whose tremulous smile belies the words

They speak so bravely.

* * * * *

And so more clanging of doors and turning of keys, and this one left

behind again, clamped down,

And buried in stone and iron.

* * * * *

Damned,

Without interest in life:

Neither to speak nor to hear, to speed nor to welcome, a word of

fellowship, a single act of kindness;

[Even a warder for tucking the scanty blanket round an ailing prisoner

was fined;]

Never to use nor exercise the sense of helpfulness—the source of all

human virtue;

Never to feed but only starve the soul;

Is this the Doom?

To hear no news from the outer world, save at unimaginable intervals a

letter;

To read no book—save some goody-goody inhuman rubbish recommended by the

Chaplain;

To nauseate, and yet to hunger ravenously for the same scant ever-same

food;

To sicken at and hate the same insults and loud imperatives of the

jailer, unendingly continued, unendingly borne—the same idiotic vacancy

of the cell—

The three-legged stool, the can, the barred little window;

The same long hours of the night with pain at the heart, the sound of

silly fingers every hour at the slide of the spyhole, and the flashing

of the night-officer’s lantern in one’s face;

The recurring effort of the irritated mind and starved body to compose

themselves to sleep;

In vain: the same same thoughts thought over and over and over and over

again;

The same little stock of memories and fancies brought with one into this

whited sepulchre—getting smaller and slighter daily—now like a wheel

with ever rapider motion going round and round,

Till the brain itself is reeling.

* * * * *

[And now a Fear, perhaps for the safety of some loved one outside, leaps

into the grinning circle and courses with it; and now another, perhaps

for one’s own fate in the years still in front; and now—worst of all

phantoms—the Dread that one’s mind is giving way: till, in fact, out of

momentary sleep awaking to the same awful nightmare, a chill runs down

the back, the body breaks in sweat, forms gibber and voices jabber—and

presently the doctor is called.]

* * * * *

Mind starved and body starved, and heart, too, starved—

Is this the Doom of Man to his outcast fellow?

* * * * *

Only for those whose minds and hearts are already stunted—for the merely

brutish by nature—the fate reserved is easier.

For them, two thoughts alone dominate—Hunger, the ever-present craving

for food, the counting and computing of meals in prospect, sufficiently

degrading;

And Sex, the everlasting curiosity and imagination (and act if

possible);

But no word, no possibility presented to them, of Manhood; no word, no

possibility, of Love.

And so for those who care not that such possibilities should be

presented,

Is the easier fate reserved!

CHINA, A.D. 1900

Far in the interior of China,

Along low-lying plains and great river-valleys, and by lake-sides, and

far away up into hilly and even mountainous regions,

Behold! an immense population, rooted in the land, rooted in the clan

and the family,

The most productive and stable on the whole Earth.

* * * * *

A garden one might say—a land of rich and _recherché_ crops, of rice and

tea and silk and sugar and cotton and oranges;

Do you see it?—stretching away endlessly over river-lines and lakes, and

the gentle undulations of the lowlands, and up the escarpments of the

higher hills;

The innumerable patchwork of cultivation—the poignant verdure of the

young rice; the sombre green of orange groves; the lines of tea-shrubs,

well-hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the pollard mulberries;

the plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam and clover;

The little brown and green-tiled cottages with spreading recurved eaves,

the clumps of feathery bamboo, or of sugar-canes;

The endless silver threads of irrigation-canals and ditches, skirting

the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above tier, and

serpentining down to the lower slopes and plains—

The accumulated result, these, of centuries of ingenious industry, and

of innumerable public and private benefactions, continued from age to

age;

The grand canal of the Delta-plain extending, a thronged waterway, for

six hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages

innumerable;

The chain-pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the water up

slopes and hillsides, from tier to tier, from channel to channel;

The endless rills and cascades flowing down again, into pockets and

hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and plain;

The bits of rock and wild wood left here and there, with the angles of

Buddhist temples projecting from among the trees;

The azalea and rhododendron bushes, and the wild deer and pheasants

unharmed;

The sounds of music and the gong—the Sin-fa sung at eventide—and the air

of contentment and peace pervading;

A garden you might call the land, for its wealth of crops and flowers,

A town almost for its population.

* * * * *

A population denser, on a large scale, than anywhere else on the earth—

Five or six acre holdings, elbowing each other, with lesser and larger,

continuously over immense tracts, and running to plentiful

market-centres;

A country of few roads, but of innumerable footpaths and waterways.

* * * * *

Here, rooted in the land, rooted in the family,

Each family clinging to its portion of ancestral earth, each offshoot of

the family desiring nothing so much as to secure its own patrimonial

field,

Each member of the family answerable primarily to the family-assembly

for his misdeeds or defalcations,

All bound together in the common worship of ancestors, and in reverence

for the past and its sanctioned beliefs and accumulated prejudices and

superstitions;

With many ancient wise simple customs and ordinances, coming down from

remote centuries, and the time of Confucius,

This vast population abides—the most stable and the most productive in

the world.

* * * * *

And Government touches it but lightly—can touch it but lightly.

With its few officials, its scanty taxation (about half-a-crown per

head), and with the extensive administration of justice and affairs by

the clan and the family—little scope is left for Government.

The great equalized mass-population pursues its even and accustomed way,

nor pays attention to edicts and foreign treaties, unless these commend

themselves independently;

Pays readier respect, in such matters, to the edicts and utterances of

its literary men, and the deliberations of the Academy.

* * * * *

And religious theorizing touches it but lightly—can touch it but

lightly.

Established on the bedrock of actual life, and on the living unity and

community of present, past, and future generations,

Each man stands bound already, and by the most powerful ties, to the

social body—nor needs the dreams and promises of heaven to reassure him.

And all are bound to the Earth.

Rendering back to it as a sacred duty every atom that the Earth supplies

to them (not insensately sending it in sewers to the sea),

By the way of abject common sense they have sought the gates of

Paradise—and to found on human soil their City Celestial!

* * * * *

And this is an outline of the nation which the Western nations would

fain remodel on their own lines—

The pyramids standing on their own apexes wanting to overturn the

pyramid which rests foursquare on its base!

But China remembers too well the time when it too endured the

absurdities of monopolized Land and Capital, of private property in

water and other necessaries, of glaring wealth and poverty, and the

practical enslavement of one man by another;

It remembers even yet the discomfort of standing on its own apex,

And oddly enough has no intention of returning to those times.

_Standing beyond Time,_

_As the Earth to the bodies of all men gives footing and free passage,

yet draws them to itself with final overmastering force, and is their

bodies—_

_So I their souls._

* * * * *

_I am the ground of thy soul;_

_And I am that which draws thee unbeknown—veiled Eros. Visitor of thy

long night-time;_

_And I that give thee form from ancient ages,_

_Thine own—yet in due time to return to Me_

_Standing beyond Time._

WHO BUT THE LOVER SHOULD KNOW

Ah! who but the lover at last should know Death is?

* * * * *

To give one’s body to the earth;

To rise through the roots of the trees and to feel once more the

sunshine—floating as a leaf in air;

To star out months together with mosses and bog-plants on the lonely

mountain-sides, to lurk under the speckled fungi in the woods, looking

up at the traveller as he passes;

To be sucked in, in the mad rush of the sap through the veins of the

chestnut in spring, and to burst in its great shining buds;

To catch at, dimly as in dreams, the wonderful thoughts that sweep

through—the great rushing prophetic dreams of the life-laden earth;

To feel the call of existence in new and strange fashion;

* * * * *

To arise and ascend;

To mix with the animals roaming over the Earth;

To be and to include them—to put on purposely the mask which they put

innocently on;

To be one of two swallows clinging to the southern wall, twittering,

discussing sites for a nest; to be a snake basking coiled on a rock in

the sun;

To rejoice in my swiftness and strength, my inevitable action and

instinct;

To pass into the bodies of men and women, to be arrayed in their hair,

and to look forth out of their eyes;

To be the long lines of habit in them, the food that is sweet in their

mouths, the poison that is bitter;

To be the thoughts that they think, and the dreams that they dream; to

circle very close;

To circle closer than all thought; to touch and startle—like the sound

of distant music heard through the rushing of a storm;

To be the presentation of new unsuspected ideals:

* * * * *

To be buried in the ground;

To be buried deep in the ground of all existence;

To lie in the soil whence all human life springs, and whither it returns

again;

Listening as in a dream of joy to the sound of innumerable voices,

And to the sound of innumerable footsteps coming nearer through all the

ages;

To see and to be unseen; to hear and to be that which no ear hath heard;

To turn an open impartial eye without blame on every creature; to hold

up a mirror,

So tallying nature that to it all men and things run to look upon

themselves and learn their parts;

To give products and receive materials;

To have the adit, to be the hidden link, the life which does not appear;

To love without sorrow; and to send love forth to bathe the world,

healing it from its wounds:

* * * * *

Ah! who at last but the lover should know what Death is?

THE EVERLASTING NOW

When all life has been rich in experience shall not

Death be rich in experience also?

* * * * *

Hold fast to the actual, and do not go outside good sense;

Do not let your mind stray into a world of negations and

impossibilities, or try to image some future time when it will be unable

to image anything—for there is no sense in that.

Do not wander too far into time at all, lest with the everlasting

Now—the centre of all life and experience, and your own true lover—

You fail to keep your first appointment.

NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME

Amid all the turmoil and the care—the worry, the fever, the anxiety,

The gloomy outlook, fears, forebodings,

The effort to keep up with the rush of supposed necessities, supposed

duties,

The effort to catch the flying point of light, to reach the haven of

Peace—always in the future—

Amid all, glides in the little word Now.

* * * * *

As when the winds of March with their long brooms sweep the dead leaves

from the surface of the ground, and the Earth in virgin beauty with the

growing grass once more appears;

So when all this debris of thought from the Past, of anxiety about the

Morrow, is at last swept away,

Does the vast ever-Present beneath reveal its perfect rondure.

A SUMMER DAY

Seeing once again the ethereal blue of the sky—the limpid air—the

all-enfolding sunlight,

Here in the great tumultuous abounding city, or again in the far woods

among the fallen oak-boles and the fox-gloves,

The far floating ever haunting shimmer of uncaught beauty:

I recognise that in all and everywhere it is the same:

Somehow to hold and have this in oneself—

This light and everlasting space,

This real eternal, whence the sensible light and space are born—

Somehow to hold from all things still a little aloof for this;

No rock that stands above the river’s edge—but that which illumines the

rock;

No brown sail in the bay—but the sweet undirected air that wafts it;

No pleasure, but the greater which lets the pleasure go or come;

Not anything, but that which brings to all things grace and light.

* * * * *

Still the far clouds just rim the Western sky—domed masses clear above,

below lost in the summer haze:

So vast the orb of heaven enfolds the earth—the rocks and seas and

rivers—and the dream-walking millions of the earth;

So vast the soul of every man enfolds his mortal deeds and thoughts,

Deeds, thoughts, desires, confused and contrary, vexing each other and

vexed, in myriads, every shade and color, form and tongue, strange

wanderers,

Dream-walking, till at length the real day may dawn.

THE CENTRAL CALM

Drawing back for a moment from Time, and its superficial claims and

conclusions,

Realising for a moment the artistic nature of the utterance of the

Universe:

That all is for expression, and that for this end commencement and

finale, first evolved and latest evolved, are equally important;

That Progress is a word which may be applied to any world-movement or

individual career in the same sense as it may be applied to the

performance of a musical work,

Which progresses indeed to its final chord, yet the conclusion of the

whole is not in the final chord, but in that which runs beneath and

inspires the entire web—in that which from first to last the whole

complex succession of chords and phrases indicates:

Realising this,

Realising—thus for a moment withdrawn—that there is no need to hurry, no

need to dash against the bars;

But that Time itself rushing on with amazing swiftness in its vast and

endless round, with suns and systems, ages and geologic epochs, races

and tribes of beings, mineral, vegetable, animal, and ethereal, circle

beyond circle, infallibly fulfils and gives utterance to the glorious

whole:

Like one in the calm that is the centre of a cyclone—guarded by the very

tornado around—

Undisturbed, yet having access equally to every side,

I drink of the deep well of rest and joy,

And sit with all the gods in Paradise.

WIDENING CIRCLES

There is no gap nor any flaw.

I establish my base of operations here, you establish yours in distant

grounds, a million years back or a million years forward:

It makes no difference,

Our widening circles inevitably meet and interfuse some time.

WHEN I LOOK UPON YOUR FACES

Children, dear children, when I look upon your faces,

Lo! all the hidden griefs, the sorrows and the vain imaginings,

The longings, and the desperate struggles and hatreds,

The jealousies, angers—and the sudden joys, breaking the heart’s doors

open—

Pass in dumb show before me.

Like figures in a dream I see them there gesticulating—behind a veil, in

silence.

* * * * *

And still you move to your daily ways and works, seeming so

unconcerned—as I to mine—

And still the waves of Time wash down between us,

And soon shall wash even you and all your dreams

Into the void—and mine.

* * * * *

But even so, dear children, I forebode

Deliverance;

Some better thing than all our dreams and longings:

One Life—and all these images in their strange procession,

Its mystic intimation.

LIFE BEHIND LIFE

What joys, what strange joys, lurk behind the actual!

See how great the pleasures of the body, of eating, drinking, resting;

or of the mind, of knowledge, ambition, power;

And yet behind these what strange pleasures:

Pleasures of fierce pain endured, pleasures of the body exposed to

bullet-wounds, scourges, fire—shattered and cast away;

Pleasures of pleasure refused, of simple withdrawnness and indifference,

or of mastery and ascendancy.

Ever breaking out behind the actual some unknown force or being,

Throwing the whilom body off like a husk, with its former capacities and

needs,

Creating new joys, fiercer wilder than those of old.

THE STUPID OLD BODY

Do not pay too much attention to the stupid old Body.

* * * * *

When you have trained it, made it healthy, beautiful, and your willing

servant,

Why, do not then reverse the order and become its slave and attendant.

[The dog must follow its master—not the master the dog.]

Remember that if you walk away from it and leave it behind, it will have

to follow you—it will grow by following, by continually reaching up to

you.

Incredibly beautiful it will become, and suffused by a kind of

intelligence.

But if you turn and wait upon it—and its mouth and its belly and its

sex-wants and all its little ape-tricks—preparing and dishing up

pleasures and satisfactions for these,

Why, then instead of the body becoming like you, you will become like

the body,

Incredibly stupid and unformed—going back in the path of evolution—you

too with fish-mouth and toad-belly, and imprisoned in your own members,

as it were an Ariel in a blundering Caliban.

* * * * *

Therefore quite lightly and decisively at each turning point in the path

leave your body a little behind—

With its hungers and sleeps, and funny little needs and vanities—paying

no attention to them;

Slipping out at least a few steps in advance, till it catch you up

again,

Absolutely determined not to be finally bound or weighted down by it,

Or fossilized into one set form—

Which alone after all is Death.

THE WANDERING LUNATIC MIND

Do not pay too much attention to the wandering lunatic Mind.

* * * * *

When you have trained it, informed it, made it clear, decisive, and your

flexible instrument and tool,

Why, do not then reverse the order and become the mere fatuous attendant

and exhibitor of its acrobatic feats (like a keeper who shows off a

monkey).

Remember that if you walk away from it, leaving it as dead, paying it no

attention whatever—it will have to follow you—it will grow by following,

by reaching up to you, from the known to the unknown, continually;

It will become at last the rainbow-tinted garment and shining

interpreter of Yourself, and incredibly beautiful.

But if you turn and wait always upon it, and its idiotic cares and

anxieties, and endless dream-chains of argument and imagination—

Feeding them and the microbe-swarms of thought continually, wasting upon

them your life-force;

Why, then, instead of your Mind becoming your true companion and

interpreter, it will develop antics and a St. Vitus’ dance of its own,

and the form of a wandering lunatic,

Incredibly tangle-haired and diseased and unclean,

In whose features you, in sadness and in vain, will search for your own

image—terrified lest you find it not, and terrified too lest you find

it.

* * * * *

Therefore quite decisively, day by day and at every juncture, leave your

Mind for a time in silence and abeyance;

With its tyrannous thoughts and demands, and funny little fears and

fancies—the long legacy of ages of animal evolution;

Slipping out and going your own way into the Unseen—feeling with your

feet if necessary through the darkness—till some day it may follow you;

Absolutely determined not to be bound by any of its conclusions; or

fossilized in any pattern that it may invent;

For this were to give up your kingdom, and bow down your neck to Death.

AS A MOULD FOR SOME FAIR FORM

As a mould for some fair form is made of plaster, and then when it is

made and the form is cast therein, the plaster is broken and flung

aside—

So, and for a form fairer than aught thou canst imagine, thy body, thy

intellect, thy pursuits and accomplishments, and all that thou dost now

call thyself,

Are the mould which in time will have to be broken and flung aside.

Their outlines are the inverse of thy true form: looking on them thou

beholdest—what thou art not.

NOTHING LESS THAN ALL

All, all—and nothing less than all.

* * * * *

Ever men say: Here lies the truth, There lies the truth—Take this, cast

that aside—Throw in thy lot with us—We are the wise, the rest are fools.

But I am as one dumb—I try to speak, to say what is in my mind, but

words fail me.

I go with these wise folk a little way, and then I draw back again; I

throw in my lot with them, and then alas! I throw in with the fools.

I stultify myself, and am like a thing of no shape.

* * * * *

The fault is mine, that I cannot say what I want to say—I cannot for the

life of me answer the questions that are continually being asked.

Is it for pleasure and the world and the present, or for death and

translation and spirituality, that we must live? Is it for asceticism

and control, or for ingenuity and sweet enjoyment?

Does the truth lie with the East or with the West—with Buddhists and the

followers of Lao Tsze, or with those who span seas and rivers by bridges

and wing aerial flights by machinery?

Is it best to be an idler or a worker, an accepted person or a criminal?

Shall the town be my home, with its rush of interests and sympathies,

its fascinations and magnetisms of the crowded pavements?

Or the country, with its gracious solitude and the pure breath and

beauty of the air and the fields?

Shall I give my life (how gladly!) to my one, my only lover—absorbed, we

two, our days, in single devotion to each other—

Or shall I pour it out upon a hundred and a thousand beautiful forms (so

beautiful) to spread from them as in an ever-widening ring to others?

Which is the most desirable or useful trade—to be a musician, or a

geologist, or a navvy? to work laughing and joking with one’s mates in a

big workshop, or to walk at the plough-tail all day in the quiet

landscape under the slow changes of the weather and the clouds?

To be a mathematician tracking in one’s study the hidden properties of

curves and closed figures, or an astronomer noting the star-transits on

which a nation’s time-reckoning depends?

To be a file-forger with hooved palm sweating before one’s fire in

summer, or a cobbler cursing the brittleness of his wax in winter?

Or a potter or a moulder or a parson or a prostitute or a

town-councillor?

Is it better to be surly and rude, or sympathetic and suave, to be

quick-tempered or patient, hot-blooded or cold-blooded, ’cute or simple,

moral or immoral?

To join the society for the suppression of Vice, or to be one of the

persons to be supprest? to be partial to drink, or to be a teetotaler?

* * * * *

For the life of me I cannot answer all these questions—I acknowledge

that I am a fool.

Sometimes with this inability to take sides comes a strange terror of

losing all outline, of losing my identity, my proper consciousness,

everything;

Till I think of the Present and the work I have actually to do—and then

comes relief;

Then instantly everything is decided—one’s place, and the part one has

to play—nor is there any doubt whatever about the next move.

For the moment I am pledged to this or that;

Yet I feel that in the end I must accept all,

And shall be content with nothing less than all.

BELIEVE YOURSELF A WHOLE

Believe yourself a Whole.

These needs, these desires, these faculties—

This of eating and drinking, the great pleasure of food, the need of

sex-converse and of renewal in and from the bodies of others;

The faculty of sight, the wonderful panorama of the visible, and of

hearing;

The inquisitive roaming brain, the love of society and good fellowship;

The joy of contest, the yearnings of Religion, the mystic impulses of

night, of Nature, of solitude;

All these and a thousand other impulses, capacities, determinations, are

indeed Yourself—the output and evidence and delineation of Yourself.

They cannot (in any permanent sense) be peeled off and thrown away;

They spring inevitably deep down out of yourself—and will recur again

wherever you are.

There is no creature in the whole range of Being from the highest to the

lowest which does not exhibit these and similar capacities, or the germs

of them, in itself.

You are that Whole which Nature also is—and yet you are that Whole in

your own peculiar way.

* * * * *

Were your eyes destroyed, still the faculty of sight were not destroyed:

Out of the same roots again as before would the optic apparatus spring.

Should you die of starvation you would only begin immediately after

death to take food in another way; and the impulse of union which is at

the base of sex lies so deep down that the first reawakening of

consciousness would restore it.

* * * * *

Believe yourself a Whole, indivisible, indefeasible,

Reawakening ever under these, under those, conditions,

Expanding thus far, expanding less far, expanding farther;

Expanding this side, expanding that side, expanding all sides;

Ever diverse yet the same, the same yet diverse—inexhaustibly continuous

with the rest;

And made for love—to embrace all, to be united ultimately with all.

THE BODY WITHIN THE BODY

When life like a ghastly panorama stretches before the eye of the

spirit—

A festal procession, as it were, continually gulfing itself in a

quicksand;

When—waking as in a nightmare at dead of night—

One thinks of all the disease, the weariness, the suffering of the world

as it is:

Of the cancer eating slowly onward with its roots entwined in the

vitals—the vista of agony and defeat by the curséd thing;

Of the incurable filth, the venom in the lungs, breeding slime and death

within one through the interminable months;

And these but samples of what waits, more or less, for almost all;

When one thinks of the sudden senseless accidents which are for ever

occurring—the ship returning home, full, with brimming hearts, from the

Antipodes, ripped on a rock and gone in a moment to the bottom;

A lurch, somewhere, of the shrinking earth-strata, and a whole city

tumbled in shrieks and ruin;

The ‘weight’ coming on in the coal-pit, the ominous fall of small stones

from the roof, the awful cracking of the great oak-props, the hurried

rush of the miners and their swifter still entombment;

The breaking of a cable, or of a driving band in machinery, a flaw in a

wheel, a random step on a stairway—and husband torn from wife, and

mother from child, or child from mother;

Death and destruction and the messengers of death and destruction in

myriad forms still waiting to fulfil the inevitable doom;

When, I say, the necessity arises to face all this—and face it out

* * * * *

Then somehow, underneath it all,

I seem to see that the strands of affection and love, auroral, shooting

from one to another—so tender, so true, and life-long,

And longer than life—holding together the present and past generations;

The currents of love and thought streaming in the watches of the night

from far and near, from one to another,

(Streaming all the more powerfully for the very hindrances and disasters

which arrive or threaten,)

And building in the bustle of the day such likeness of their dreams as

may be—

That these inner are after all more real in some sense than the outer

things—that they surpass in actual vitality and significance even all

this artillery of horrors.

* * * * *

I dream that these are the fibres and nerves of a body that lies within

the outer body of society,

A network, an innumerable vast interlocked ramification, slowly being

built up—all dear lovers and friends, all families, groups, all peoples,

nations, all times, all worlds perhaps—

Of which the outer similitudes and shells, like the minute cells of an

organism, are shed and die in endless multitudes with continual decay

and corruption;

But the real individuals persist and are members of a Body, archetypal,

eterne,

Glorious, the centre and perfection of life and organisation,

And the source of all the Light in the universe.

IN AN OLD QUARRY

Once in an old quarry,

In a heathery nook among the rocks, unclothed as I reclined in the sun,

facing only the great hills and the sky;

Millions of years floating softly down through the aerial blue,

Thy words—millions millions of human forms—

I saw descending.

* * * * *

Tiny, into the tissue of grass and tree and herb passing—into the mouths

and bodies of men and animals—and here and there a fitting home in the

sex-cells finding,

At length, clothed mortal men and women,

Out on the actual world I saw them step:

Thy words—thy wandering words—each one alone, so lost, so meaningless,

Each seeking his true mates, if so to spell

One sentence of thy great world-wisdom out.

THE SOUL TO THE BODY

Now at last after thousands of years, dear Body, from thy prison

emerging,

Thy agelong tomb and sepulchre,

[Where, with what swathing-bands, like Lazarus, what mummy-cloths, what

cerements of fashion custom ignorance, thou wast bound,]

Strange chrysalis, thy dead sheath bursting!

Strange glorious Lover!

To feel again thy arms enfolding, to breathe the fragrance of thy

sun-kist skin, how sweet!

* * * * *

What long estrangement, dear, what nightmare has it been, divided us?

From far away what long slow exodus?

Why to the tomb in ages past didst thou descend—of Death and dread

Corruption?—

While I, poor ghost, went wandering belated, and homeless and forlorn

about the world?

For, as the delicate vein-winged gnat from its watery case, as Eve from

Adam’s side, as Psyche from the dark embrace of Eros,

So from thee gliding, far-back, long ago—dimly I mind me now—

Slow-differenced, this wondering wandering Self was I.

* * * * *

[Dimly I mind the agelong alienation:

Thou body, of thy mate bereft, and falling unclean, diseased, by devils

possest, in mire and filth—

Blind Maenad by thy own senses led astray!

While I, poor soul, half formed and maimed of half,

Abstract, absurd, amazed, and crucified,

To arid and unending toils was doomed, and loneliness.]

* * * * *

After it all to thee, dear, to return,

To feel again thy close-enfolding arms—how sweet!

To know Thee now at last—(long veiled and hidden)—

Through Nature moving, as the Sun and Moon

Move through the crystal heaven, self-sent, divine,

Transparent, tameless, more than spirit or matter;

Dear body, brushing with thy feet the grasses, or resting outlined by

the rocks and sea—

To rest with thee, content, in perfect union,

O in such deep and fathomless joy to rest beside thee,

Thy mate and friend, stricken with doubts no more.

* * * * *

Now once more in thy lungs the winds of heaven—as out there in the

forest-branches—nestle;

The waters flowing in the brooks flow on in crimson tide through artery

and vein; and lift the little valve-doors and pass by with whispered

secrets from the clouds and hills.

Sweet now the food-fruits pass without corruption inward and outward of

the body’s frame;

Clean is the ark and holy chamber of the woman, the seed-vessel of the

man;

And clean the body all suffused with passion

Till the right mate arrives.

* * * * *

O Love, with fragrance of whose wine the world is vanquished!

Great Ocean swaying far from atom to atom! sweet aromatic transpiration

of the clods!

Diffused vast Life, now here, now there, in definite lightning-flash thy

visible work fulfilling!

For this, even for thy habitation, hast thou prepared these bodies.

* * * * *

And thou, little one, so soon to dissolve into earth and air and sea,

Thy form, my love, I accept—and am no more divided from thee.

TO BECOME A CREATOR

I heard a Voice saying:

See now in the end you shall stand Lord of the World.

* * * * *

When those desires which are injurious to others have departed from

you—when all desires born of hate;

When you have become strong to conquer the world, strong to endure and

conquer so the hatred and the injuriousness of others;

When what you will, you will with the whole force of your nature,

undivided,

Undivided by fear, conscience, conventions, and the distinctions of self

and not-self;

Then, lo! all that you wish—all that your heart forms for an image of

its longings—shall take shape before you;

You shall create the things which are the fulfilment of your needs;

There is nothing that shall not be yours.

* * * * *

For this world you see around—these trees, mountains, these high city

streets and the myriad faces that pass among them—are not all these but

images?

Images, to the Heart of which with restless longing you have indeed so

often sought to penetrate.

Say then, if you attain to be ruler of your own thoughts, and of the

images which spring from your heart, is it so much that you should be

arbiter also of these others, and touch to the Heart they spring from?

* * * * *

For deep down there is, may-be, no difference—

And when the desires that are born of Hate and Fear and Distrust are

gone, there is no difference.

* * * * *

And I said: Am I not my own thoughts, and when these die, shall I not

also die?

And the Voice said: Look again—

These thoughts, these images, that pass before you—they pass before You.

Then how can they be Yourself?

Nevertheless it is true that they proceed from you.

They proceed from the Heart, and the mind perceives them.

And so it shall be eternally.

* * * * *

And all This, and all that you see, and all that you think, and all that

you experience, is the evidence of Yourself,

Yourself coming to you over the ages.

Therefore go forth—and be in truth thine own Creator—

No longer in fear and trembling but in kingship and power meeting the

mystery of the world;

By the pure and beautiful desires which spring within thee, like

fountain-waters from a hillside welling (which flow and grow into an

endless stream running ever towards the centre of the Earth)—by these

guided,

Take with unerring choice, and make and mould, and carve and cut and

force thy way,

To the centre of all creation—to the Heart indeed of all lovers.

AFTER FIFTY YEARS

Looking back now, after fifty years and more, when the main work of life

is done,

When its acquisitions, its results, its alliances, are before me, and

but few new elements remain to be added,

I ask myself: What is the gist, what the end, what the gain of it all?

What shall I take with me now when Death comes—as one coming homeward

takes a flower in his hand for a token that he has strayed in gracious

fields?

* * * * *

Is it applause and fame? But this, if it came to me, were only as a

little stir of wind might be, to one seeking his lover in the night: a

pleasant breeze—that yet might blow his lamp out!

Is it all the pleasure of life that I have had—in the beautiful woods

and on the mountains, in the sun and in the waters, in social life and

jollity, in my actual work?

Yea, these things were beautiful, but I have passed and left them and

can return no more. The fields remain, but the flowers I plucked there

are fading already on my bosom.

Is it all my acquisitions—of goods, of skill, of knowledge, of

character—but what are they for myself but weariness, save I can yield

them to the hands of one I love?

* * * * *

O little heart, where my friends my dear ones live, thou alone

remainest!

While I live thou livest, and while thou livest they live, whose home is

within thy walls.

Methinks that when I die I still shall hold Thee;

Methinks that when the world fades my little heart shall grow,

And grow and grow into another World,

And be my Paradise where I shall find

My lovers, and they me, for evermore.

OUT OF THE HOUSE OF CHILDHOOD

To take by leaving, to hold by letting go.

* * * * *

Now, when out of the house of your childhood you are departing,

Where you suffered, where you joyed, in the old confused childish way,

not certainly distinguishing things,

Now suddenly, as you leave, how it all becomes clear, as in a kind of

new and incomparable light!

This is the corner where your little bed stood against the wall, this

the window where the moon peeped, and the white and ghostly dawn came;

These are the closed rooms and chests into which you were so seldom

permitted to look; this was the daily routine of life which for some

inscrutable reason was so rigidly adhered to;

These are the stairs where up and down moved such queer

processions—funerals and weddings, and bustling visitors and elderly

aunts and uncles, and the parson and the doctor in their turn;

And you were bade stand aside since you could not understand—

But now you understand it all.

* * * * *

Now, leaving it all,

The window truly for you will never stand open again, nor the sweet

night-air through it blow—never again for you on the little coverlet of

your bed will the moonlight fall;

And yet mayhap for the first time will the wind really blow and the

moonlight fall,

For the first time shall you really see the face of your father whom you

used to meet so often on the stairs.

All the spaces and corners of the house, and the swinging of the doors,

and the tones and voices of those behind them, shall be full of meanings

which were hidden from you while you dwelt among them.

* * * * *

Nor shall they ever leave you.

Never so long as yourself lasts shall you forget your mother smoothing

out the pillow under your head, last thing at night, and kissing you as

you slept;

Nay, every year so long as you live shall you understand that act

better—shall you come closer in reality to her whom as a child you saw

but through a glass darkly.

* * * * *

Leaving and again leaving, and ever leaving go of the surfaces of

objects,

So taking the heart of them with us,

This is the law.

* * * * *

The beauty of a certain scene in Nature,

The beauty, the incomparable beauty of the face and presence of the

loved one;

The sweetness of pleasure—of food, of music, of exercise, or of rest and

sleep;

All these are good to obtain and to hold;

Yet (when the need arises) to be able to dispense with them—that is

indeed to hold and to realise them even more deeply.

* * * * *

When at last Death comes, then all of Life shall be to us as the house

of our childhood—

For the first time we shall really possess it.

But who is ready to die to life now, he even now possesses it.

LITTLE BROOK WITHOUT A NAME

Little brook without a name, that hast been my companion so many years;

Hardly more than a yard wide, yet scampering down through the fields, so

bright so pure, from the moorland a mile away;—

The willows hang over thee, and the alders and hazels; and the oak and

the ash dip their feet in thy waves;

And on thy sunny banks in Spring the first primroses peep, and

celandines, and the wild hyacinths lavish fragrance on the breeze—

Little brook, so simple so unassuming—and yet how many things love thee!

* * * * *

Here where I have my nest,

[And the white-throat through the day and through the long night sits

patient on her brood among the grasses,]

Lo! Sun and Moon look down and glass themselves in thy waters,

[In the faithful watchful eyes of the bird they lovingly glass

themselves;]

And the wren creeps like a mouse from twig to twig, and utters her thin

sweet note; and the willow-warbler chimes his endless cadence of

gratitude; and the night-jar sweeps silently by in the dusk, and the

pheasant at midday comes down from the wood to drink;

And the trout balances itself hour-long against the stream, watching for

its prey; or retires under a stone to rest;

And the water-rats nibble off the willow leaves and carry them below the

wave to their nests—or sit on a dry stone to trim their whiskers;

And the little mouse, the water-shrew, walks (even like Jesus Christ)

upon the flood, paddling quickly over the surface with its half-webbed

feet;

And the may-fly practises for the millionth time the miracle of the

resurrection, floating up an ungainly grub from the mud below, and in an

instant, in the twinkling of an eye (even from the jaws of the baffled

trout) emerging, an aerial fairy with pearl-green wings;

And the caddis-fly from its quaint disguise likewise emerges;

And the bee, as ever, hums, and the butterfly floats, and the little

winged beauty with shining mail of crimson and blue—the

ruby-tail—searches in and out of every crevice and chink for a suitable

place for her eggs;

And the early daffodil and narcissus from the garden stray forward to

peer into thy mirror; and the wild garlic in the shade, and in the sun

the king-cups, fringe thy margin;

And the prick-eared earth-people, the rabbits, in the stillness of early

morning play beside thee undisturbed, while the level sunbeams yet grope

through the dewy grass;

And the land-rail cranes its neck, to peer and peep from its cover;

And the weasel canters by on its quest, and the loose-jointed fox

returning from a foray;

And the squirrel on a tree-root—its tail stretched far behind—leans

forward to kiss thee,

Little brook,

For so many things love thee.

Say, what indeed art Thou—that hast been my companion now these twenty

years?

Thou, with thy gracious retinue of summer, and thy fringes and lace-work

of frost in winter, and icy tassels bobbing in the stream;

And sound of human voices from thy bosom all the day, and mystic song at

night beneath the stars—

What art Thou, say!

While I have sat here, lo! thou hast scampered away, little brook, with

all thy lace-work and tassels,

Three hundred and fifty thousand miles;

So quiet, so soft—and no one knew what a traveller thou wert;

Three hundred and fifty thousand miles in these few years, and so thou

hast flowed for centuries;

And all the birds and fish and little quadrupeds have gone with thee,

and herbs and flowers;

Yet I sit here and prate as though I knew all about thee;

And the country-folk too, who reckon thou camest to turn the Mill—they

think they know all about thee.

* * * * *

But now I see how, soft-footed, thou passest by on a secret quest,

Cantering quietly down through the grasses,

And gatherest even from all wide earth and heaven thy waters together—to

lave these turfy banks and the roots of the primroses;

I see how thou sheddest refreshment and life on thousands of

creatures—who ask no questions;

Nor disdainest even to give the old millwheel a turn as thou goest, or

bring me a tiny thought or two from thy store in cloudland,

Little brook, so strange, so mystical,

That all things love—though they know not what thy Name is.

I see where thou passest graciously by, and hastenest seaward,

Scattering once more thy waters to earth and heaven;

And I pray thee take again these thoughts thou hast brought me,

And bear away on thy bosom, and scatter them likewise.

LO! WHAT A WORLD I CREATE

Lo! what a world I create for my own, my lovers.

* * * * *

As the moonbeams in winter gliding along the forest-glades reveal the

beauty of the trees—the hushed soft masses of light and darkness, the

mysterious depths, the thousand fairy outlines—all merged and blent in

one serene Presence;

As a figure dimly seen, from glade to glade, from perspective to

perspective, through the wilderness wanders content—his soul with the

forest-soul mated;

So dear friends, dear lovers, through this world of mine that I weave

for you here, methinks sometimes I see you moving.

* * * * *

And I wait of you that in time you also spread worlds equally beautiful,

more beautiful, for me,

[Not in written words only, but in spoken words, or the mere sound of

the voice or look of the face, and in beauties of body and limb and

brain and heart, and in beauty of deed and action, and in a thousand

ways,]

Forest-glades and glooms where I in turn (as indeed already) may dwell

and dream and be content, mated to the soul thereof.

* * * * *

Thus, dear ones, building up these spheres of ourselves continually for

the joyance of each other, it shall come about that at length

We shall need no other world, no other worlds.

THE END

A NOTE ON

“TOWARDS DEMOCRACY”

A Note on “Towards Democracy”

(_Reprinted from_ THE LABOUR PROPHET, _May, 1894_)

Having sometimes been asked questions about “Towards Democracy” which I

found it difficult to answer, I will try and shape a few thoughts about

it here.

Quite a long time ago (say when I was about 25, and living at Cambridge)

I wanted to write some sort of a book which should address itself very

personally and closely to any one who cared to read it—establish so to

speak an intimate personal relation between myself and the reader; and

during succeeding years I made several attempts to realise this idea—of

which beginnings one or two in verse may be found in a little volume

entitled “Narcissus and other Poems,” now well out of print, which I

published in 1873. None of these attempts satisfied me however, and

after a time I began to think the quest was an unreasonable

one—unreasonable because while it might not be difficult for any one

with a pliant and sympathetic disposition to touch certain chords in any

given individual that he might meet, it seemed impossible to hope that a

_book_—which cannot in any way adapt itself to the idiosyncrasies of its

reader—could find the key of the personalities into whose hands it

should happen to come. For this it would be necessary to suppose, and to

find, an absolutely common ground to all individuals (all at any rate

who might have reached a certain stage of thought and experience)—and to

write the book on and from that common ground: but this seemed at that

time quite impracticable.

Years followed, more or less eventful, with flight from Cambridge, and

university lectures carried on in the Provincial Towns, and so forth;

but of much dumbness as regards writing; and inwardly full of tension,

and suffering. At last early in 1881, no doubt as the culmination and

result of struggles and experiences that had been going on, I became

conscious that a mass of material was forming within me, imperatively

demanding expression—though what exactly its expression would be I could

not then have told. I became for the time overwhelmingly conscious of

the disclosure within of a region transcending in some sense the

ordinary bounds of personality, in the light of which region my own

idiosyncrasies of character—defects, accomplishments, limitations, or

what not—appeared of no importance whatever—an absolute Freedom from

mortality, accompanied by an indescribable calm and joy.

I also immediately saw, or rather _felt_, that this region of Self

existing in me existed equally (though not always equally _consciously_)

in others. In regard to it the mere diversities of temperament which

ordinarily distinguish and divide people dropped away and became

indifferent, and a field was opened in which all might meet, in which

all were truly Equal. Thus I found the common ground which I wanted; and

the two words, Freedom and Equality came for the time being to control

all my thought and expression.

The necessity for space and time to work this out grew so strong that in

April of that year I threw up my lecturing employment. Moreover another

necessity had come upon me which demanded the latter step—the necessity

namely for an open air life and manual work. I could not finally argue

with this any more than with the other, I had to give in and obey. As it

happened at the time I mention I was already living in a little cottage

on a farm (at Bradway, near Sheffield) with a friend and his family, and

doing farm-work in the intervals of my lectures. When I threw up the

lecturing I had everything clear before me. I knocked together a sort of

wooden sentinel-box, in the garden, and there, or in the fields and the

woods, all that spring and summer, and on through the winter, by day and

sometimes by night, in sunlight or in rain, by frost and snow and all

sorts of grey and dull weather, I wrote “Towards Democracy”—or at any

rate the first and longer poem that goes by that name.

By the end of 1881 this was finished—though it was worked over and

patched a little in the early part of 1882; and I remember feeling then

that, defective and halting and incoherent in expression as it was,

still if it succeeded in rendering even a half the splendour which

inspired it, it would be good, and _I need not trouble to write anything

more_ (which, with due allowance for the said “if,” I even now feel was

a true and friendly intimation)!

The writing of this and its publication (in 1883) got a load off my mind

which had been weighing on it for years—a sense of oppression and

anxiety which I had constantly suffered from before—and which I believe,

in its different forms, is a common experience in the early part of

life.

In this first poem were embodied with considerable alterations and

adaptations a good number of casual pieces, which I had written (merely

under stress of feeling and without any particular sense of proportion)

during several preceding years. They now found their interpretation

under the steady and clear light of a new mood or state of feeling which

previously had only visited me fitfully and with clouded beams. The

whole of “Towards Democracy”—I may say, speaking broadly and including

the later pieces—has been written under the domination of this mood. I

have tested and measured everything by it; it has been the sun to which

all the images and conceptions and thoughts used have been as material

objects reflecting its light. And perhaps this connects itself with the

fact that it has been so necessary to write in the open air. The more

universal feeling which I sought to convey refused itself from me within

doors; nor could I at any time or by any means persuade the rhythm or

style of expression to render itself up within a room—tending there

always to break back into distinct metrical forms; which, however much I

admire them in certain authors, and think them myself suitable for

certain kinds of work, were not what I wanted, and did _not_ express for

me the feeling which I sought to express. This fact (of the necessity of

the open air) is very curious, and I cannot really explain it. I only

know that it is so, quite indubitable and insurmountable. I can feel it

at once, the difference, in merely passing through a doorway—but I

cannot explain it. Always especially the _sky_ seemed to contain for me

the key, the inspiration; the sight of it more than anything gave what I

wanted (sometimes like a veritable lightning-flash coming down from it

onto my paper—I a mere witness, but agitated with strange transports).

But if I should be asked—as I have sometimes been asked—What is the

exact nature of this mood, of this illuminant splendour, of which you

speak? I should have to reply that I can give no very concise and

clearcut answer. The whole of “Towards Democracy” is an endeavour to

give it utterance; any mere single sentence, or direct definition, would

be of no use—rather indeed would tend to obscure by limiting. All I can

say is that there seems to be a vision possible to man, as from some

more universal stand-point, free from the obscurity and localism which

especially connect themselves with the passing clouds of desire, fear,

and all ordinary thought and emotion; in that sense another and separate

faculty; and as vision always means a sense of light, so here is a sense

of inward light, unconnected of course with the mortal eye, but bringing

to the eye of the mind the impression that it _sees_, and by means of a

medium which washes as it were the _interior_ surfaces of all objects

and things and persons—how can I express it?—and yet this is most

defective, for the sense is a sense that one _is_ those objects and

things and persons that one perceives, (and even that one is the whole

universe,)—a sense in which sight and touch and hearing are all fused in

identity. Nor can the matter be understood without realising that the

whole faculty is deeply and intimately rooted on the far side of the

moral and emotional nature, and beyond the thought-region of the

brain.[1]

Footnote 1:

I do not know any description in its way better that one attributed to

Tennyson:—“All at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the

consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to

dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused

state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest,

utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable

impossibility, the loss of personality—if so it were—seeming no

extinction but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble

description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?”

Compare also his poem, “The Ancient Sage.”

And now with regard to the “I” which occurs so freely in this book. In

this and in other such cases the author is naturally liable to a charge

of egotism—and I personally do not feel disposed to combat any such

charge that may be made. That there are mere egotisms and vanities

embodied in these pages I do not for a moment doubt; and that so far as

they exist they mar the expression and purpose of the book I also do not

doubt. But the existence of these things does not affect the real

question: What or Who in the main is the “I” spoken of?

To this question I must also frankly own that I can give no answer. I do

not know. That the word is not used in the dramatic sense is all I can

say. The “I” is myself—as well as I could find words to express myself:

but what that Self is, and what its limits may be; and therefore what

the self of any other person is and what _its_ limits may be—I cannot

tell. I have sometimes thought that perhaps the best work one could

do—if one felt at any time enlargements and extensions of one’s

_ego_—was to simply record these, as faithfully as might be; leaving

others, the science-man and the philosopher, to explain—and feeling

confident that what really existed in oneself would be found to exist

either consciously or in a latent form in other people. And I will say

that I have in these records above all endeavored to be genuine. If I

have said “I, Nature” it was because at the time, at any rate, I felt

“I, Nature”; if I have said “I am equal with the lowest,” it was because

I could not express what I felt more directly than by those words. The

value of such statements can only appear by time; if they are

corroborated by others then they help to form a body of record which may

well be worth investigation, analysis and explanation. If they are not

so corroborated, then they naturally and properly fall away as mere

vagaries of self-deception. I have not the least doubt that anything

which is really genuine will be corroborated.

It seems to me more and more clear that the word “I” has a practically

infinite range of meaning—that the _ego_ covers far more ground than we

usually suppose. At some points we are intensely individual, at others

intensely sympathetic; some of our impressions (as the tickling of a

hair) are of the most local and momentary character, others (as the

sense of identity) involve long periods of time. Sometimes we are aware

of almost a fusion between our own identity and that of another person.

What does all this mean? Are we really separate individuals, or is

individuality an illusion, or again is it only a part of the _ego_ or

soul that is individual, and not the whole? Is the _ego_ absolutely one

with the body, or is it only a small part of the body, or again is the

body but a part of the self—one of its organs so to speak, and not the

whole man? Or lastly is it perhaps not possible to express the truth by

any direct use of these or other terms of ordinary language? Anyhow,

what am I?

These are questions which come all down Time, demanding solution—which

humanity is constantly endeavoring to find an answer to. I do not

pretend to answer them. On the contrary I am sure that _not one_ of the

pieces in “Towards Democracy” has been written with the deliberate view

of providing an answer. They have simply been written to express

feelings which insisted on being expressed. Nevertheless it is possible

that some of them—by giving the experiences and affirmations even of one

person—may contribute material towards that answer to these and the like

questions which in some region must assuredly be given.

That there is a region of consciousness removed beyond what we usually

call mortality, into which we humans can yet pass, I practically do not

doubt; but granting that this is a fact, its explanation still remains

for investigation.

I have said in this brief note on “Towards Democracy” nothing about the

influence of Whitman—for the same reason that I have said nothing about

the influence of the sun or the winds. These influences lie too far back

and ramify too complexly to be traced. I met with William Rossetti’s

little selection from “Leaves of Grass” in 1868 or 1869, and read that

and the original editions continuously for ten years. I never met with

any other book (with the exception perhaps of Beethoven’s sonatas) which

I could read and re-read as I could this one. I find it difficult to

imagine what my life would have been without it. “Leaves of Grass”

“filtered and fibred” my blood: but I do not think I ever tried to

imitate it or its style. Against the inevitable drift out of the more

classic forms of verse into a looser and freer rhythm I fairly fought,

contesting the ground (“kicking against the pricks”) inch by inch during

a period of seven years in numerous abortive and mongrel creations—till

in 1881 I was finally compelled into the form (if such it can be called)

of “Towards Democracy.” I did not adopt it _because_ it was an

approximation to the form of “Leaves of Grass.” Whatever resemblance

there may be between the rhythm, style, thoughts, constructions, etc.,

of the two books, must I think be set down to a deeper similarity of

emotional atmosphere and intension in the two authors—even though that

similarity may have sprung and no doubt largely did spring out of the

personal influence of one upon the other. Anyhow our temperaments,

standpoints, antecedents, etc., are so entirely diverse and opposite

that, except for a few points, I can hardly imagine that there is much

real resemblance to be traced. Whitman’s full-blooded, copious, rank,

masculine style must always make him one of the world’s great

originals—a perennial fountain of health and strength, moral as well as

physical. He has the amplitude of the Earth itself, and can no more be

_thought away_ than a mountain can. He often indeed reminds one of a

great quarry on a mountain side—the great shafts of sunlight and the

shadows, the primitive face of the rock itself, the power and the daring

of the men at work upon it, the tumbled blocks and masses, materials for

endless buildings, and the beautiful tufts of weed or flower on

inaccessible ledges—a picture most artistic in its very incoherence and

formlessness.

“Towards Democracy” has a milder radiance, as of the moon compared with

the sun—allowing you to glimpse the stars behind. Tender and meditative,

less resolute and altogether less massive, it has the quality of the

fluid and yielding air rather than of the solid and uncompromising

earth.

_Printed by_ S. CLARKE LIMITED

_41, Granby Row, Manchester_.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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CHANTS OF LABOUR: a Song-book for the People, edited by EDWARD

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page Changed from Changed to

340 How long will you build you How long will you build your

houses to hide yourselves houses to hide yourselves

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.