THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE:
AN ODE.

(By a Western Spinning Dervish.)

I spin, I spin, around, around,

And close my eyes,

And let the bile arise

From the sacred region of the soul's Profound;

Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!

The earth and heaven are one,

The horizon-line is gone,

The sky how green! the land how fair and blue! Perplexing items fade from my large view,

And thought which vexed me with its false and

true

Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,

This is the sole true mode

Of reaching God,

And gaining the universal synthesis

Which makes All-One; while fools with peering

eyes

Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.

So round, and round, and round again!

How the whole globe swells within my brain,

The stars inside my lids appear,

The murmur of the spheres I hear

Throbbing and beating in each ear;
Right in my navel I can feel

The centre of the world's great wheel.
Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,

No stay, no stop,

Like any top

Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming;

No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing

Here shall ye find,

But inarticulate burr of man's unsundered being.

Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man

Might hold himself ever in harmony

With the great Whole, and spin perpetually,

As all things spin

Without, within,

As Time spins off into Eternity,

And Space into the inane Immensity,

And the Finite into God's Infinity,

Spin, spin, spin, spin.

K

BEAU RIVAGE HOTEL.

SATURDAY EVENING.

Below there's a brumming and strumming,
And twiddling and fiddling amain,

And sweeping of muslins and laughter,
And pattering of luminous rain.

Fair England, resplendent Columbia,

Gaul, Teuton,-how precious a smother!

But the happiest is brisk little Polly
To galop with only her brother.

And up to the fourth étage landing
Come the violins' passionate cries,
Where the pale femme-de-chambre is sitting
With sleep in her beautiful eyes.

IN A JUNE NIGHT.

(A Study in the manner of Robert Browning.)

I.

See, the door opens of this alcove,
Here we are now in the cool night air
Out of the heat and smother; above
The stars are a wonder, alive and fair,

It is a perfect night, your hand,—

Down these steps and we reach the garden,

An odorous, dim, enchanted land,

With the dusk stone-god for only warden.

II.

Was I not right to bring you here?

We might have seen slip the hours within Till God's new day in the East were clear, And His silence abashed the dancers' din,