And with blind brain

Daily to treasure up a deadly doubt,

And live a life from which the light has fled, And faith's pure fire gone out.

Until at last,

For some blest souls, but never here for all,

Burns out a sudden light,

And breaks the thrall,

And doubt has fled,

And the soul rises, with a clearer sight

For this its pain, its sorrow, its despair,
To God and truth and right.

Plead we for those

Gently and humbly, as befitteth men

On whom the same chill shade

Broods now as then.

So shall they learn

How an eternal wisdom rules above,

And all the cords of Being are gathered up

In an unfailing love.

ST. DAVID'S HEAD.

SALT sprays deluge it, wild waves buffet it, hurricanes

rave;

Summer and winter, the depths of the ocean girdle it

round;

In leaden dawns, in golden noon-tides, in silvery moon

light

Never it ceases to hear the old sea's mystical sound.
Surges vex it evermore

By gray cave and sounding shore.

Think of the numberless far-away centuries, long before

man,

When the hot earth with monsters teemed, and with monsters the deep,

And the red sun loomed faint, and the moon was caught

fast in the motionless air,

And the warm waves seethed through the haze in a secular

sleep.

Rock was here and headland then,

Ere the little lives of men.

Over it long the mastodons crashed through the tropical

forest,

And the great bats swooped overhead through the halfdefined blue;

Then they passed, and the hideous ape-man, speechless and half-erect,

Through weary ages of time tore and gibbered and slew. Grayer skies and chiller air,

But the self-same rock was there.

Then the savage came and went, and Briton and Roman and Saxon,

Till our England grew rich and great, and her white sails covered the sea;

Thus through all this long story of ours, civil progress

and vanquished foeman,

From Crecy to Trafalgar, from the bondsman down to

the free,

Still those dark rocks, and beneath

Keeps the sea its face of death.

So it shall be when the tide of our greatness has ebbed

to the shallows;

So when there floats not a ship on this storm-tossed westerly main,

Hard by, the minster crumbles, the city has shrunk to a

village;

Thus shall we shrink one day, and our forests be path

less again;

And the headland stern shall stand,

Guarding an undiscovered land.

Vex it, O changeless ocean; rave round it, tempests unceasing;

Sink it, great earthquakes, deep in the depths of the fathomless sea;

Burn them, fierce fires of the centre, burn rock and

ocean together,

Till the red globe flare throughout space, through the ages to be.

Cease, make an end, dull world, begone;
How shall I cease while you roll on?

Time, oh, horrible! Space, oh, terrible! infinite void!
Dreadful abysses of being! blighting a finite brain;
How shall the creatures of thought subsist, when the
thinker ceases?

Begone, dull figments, be done! not alone shall you dare

to remain.

Without me you yourselves must fall;

I hold the measure of you all.

IN VOLHYNIA.

IN Volhynia the peasant mothers,

When spring-time brings back the leaves,
And the first swallows dart and twitter
Under the cottage eaves,—

Sit mute at their windows, and listen,
With eyes brimming over with tears,
To the broken sounds which are wafted
To their eager watching ears.

And throw out bread and honey

To the birds as they scintillate by ;
And hearts full of yearning and longing,
Borne out on the wings of a sigh.