X.

PLEASURE AND PAIN.

WHO can determine the frontier of Pleasure?
Who can distinguish the limit of Pain?
Where is the moment the feeling to measure?
When is experience repeated again?

Ye who have felt the delirium of passion-
Say, can ye sever its joys and its pangs?
Is there a power in calm contemplation

To indicate each upon each as it hangs?

I would believe not ;-for spirit will languish
While sense is most blest and creation most bright;
And life will be dearer and clearer in anguish
Than ever was felt in the throbs of delight.

See the Fakeer as he swings on his iron,

See the thin Hermit that starves in the wild; Think ye no pleasures the penance environ, And hope the sole bliss by which pain is beguiled?

No! in the kingdoms those spirits are reaching,
Vain are our words the emotions to tell ;
Vain the distinctions our senses are teaching,

For Pain has its Heaven and Pleasure its Hell!

VOL. I.

P

XI.

THE PEACE OF GOD.

"The blessed shall hear no vain words, but only the word-Peace." KURAN, chap. xix. v. 63.

PEACE is God's direct assurance
To the souls that win release
From this world of hard endurance-
Peace he tells us-only Peace.

There is Peace in lifeless matter-
There is Peace in dreamless sleep-

Will then Death our being shatter
In annihilation's deep?

Ask

you this? O mortal trembler!
Hear the Peace that Death affords―

For your God is no dissembler,
Cheating you with double words :--

To this life's inquiring traveller,
Peace of knowledge of all good;
To the anxious truth-unraveller,
Peace of wisdom understood:-

To the loyal wife, affection

Towards her husband, free from fear,

To the faithful friend, selection

Of all memories kind and dear :

To the lover, full fruition

Of an unexhausted joy,—

To the warrior, crowned ambition,
With no envy's base alloy :-

To the ruler, sense of action,
Working out his great intent,

To the prophet, satisfaction

In the mission he was sent :

To the poet, conscious glory
Flowing from his Father's face :-

Such is Peace in holy story,
Such is Peace in heavenly grace.

XII.

CHRISTIAN ENDURANCE.

TO HARRIET MARTINEAU.

MORTAL! that standest on a point of time,
With an eternity on either hand,

Thou hast one duty above all sublime,

Where thou art placed serenely there to stand:

To stand undaunted by the threatening death,
Or harder circumstance of living doom,
Nor less untempted by the odorous breath
Of Hope, that rises even from the tomb.

For Hope will never dull the present pain,
And Time will never keep thee safe from fall,
Unless thou hast in thee a mind to reign

Over thyself, as God is over all.

'Tis well on deeds of good, though small, to thrive, 'Tis well some part of ill, though small, to cure, 'Tis well with onward, upward, hopes to strive, Yet better and diviner to endure.

What but this virtue's solitary power,

Through all the lusts and dreams of Greece and

Rome,

Bore the selected spirits of the hour

Safe to a distant, immaterial home?

What but this lesson, resolutely taught,
Of Resignation,* as God's claim and due,
Hallows the sensuous hopes of Eastern thought,
And makes Mohammed's mission almost true?

But in that patience was the seed of scorn—
Scorn of the world and brotherhood of man ;
Not patience such as in the manger born

Up to the cross endured its earthly span.

Thou must endure, yet loving all the while,
Above, yet never separate from, thy kind,-
Meet every frailty with the gentlest smile,

Though to no possible depth of evil blind.

This is the riddle thou hast life to solve;

But in the task thou shalt not work alone: For, while the worlds about the sun revolve, God's heart and mind are ever with his own!

* Vide page 161, and note.