Rabbi Ben Ezra

397

Not on the vulgar mass

Called "work," must sentence pass,

Things done, that took the eye and had the price;

O'er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

But all, the world's coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

Ay, note that Potter's wheel,

That metaphor! and feel

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—

Thou, to whom fools propound,

When the wine makes its round,

"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!"

Fool! All that is, at all,

Lasts ever, past recall;

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

What entered into thee,

That was, is, and shall be:

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

He fixed thee 'mid this dance

Of plastic circumstance,

This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest:

Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

What though the earlier grooves

Which ran the laughing loves

Around thy base, no longer pause and press?

What though, about thy rim,

Scull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

Look not thou down but up!

To uses of a cup,

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,

The Master's lips a-glow!

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needest thou with earth's wheel?

But I need, now as then,

Thee, God, who mouldest men;

And since, not even while the whirl was worst,

Did I, to the wheel of life

With shapes and colors rife,

Bound dizzily, mistake my end, to slake thy thirst:

So, take and use thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

Robert Browning [1812-1889]

HUMAN LIFE

SAD is our youth, for it is ever going,
Crumbling away beneath our very feet;
Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing,
In current unperceived because so fleet;
Sad are our hopes for they were sweet in sowing,
But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat;
Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing;
And still, O still, their dying breath is sweet:

The Isle of the Long Ago

And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us
Of that which made our childhood sweeter still;
And sweet our life's decline, for it hath left us

A nearer Good to cure an older Ill:

399

And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them
Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them.
Aubrey Thomas de Vere [1814-1902]

YOUNG AND OLD

From "The Water Babies"

WHEN all the world is young, lad,

And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,

And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,

And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,

And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,

And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,

And all the wheels run down:
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:

God grant you find one face there
You loved when all was young.

Charles Kingsley [1819-1875]

THE ISLE OF THE LONG AGO

O! A wonderful stream is the River Time,
As it runs through the realm of tears,
With a faultless rhythm and a musical rhyme,
And a broader sweep and a surge sublime,
As it blends with the Ocean of Years.

How the winters are drifting, like flakes of snow,

And the summers, like buds between,

And the year in the sheaf-so they come and they go, On the river's breast, with its ebb and its flow,

As it glides in the shadow and sheen.

There's a magical isle up the River Time,
Where the softest of airs are playing;
There's a cloudless sky and a tropical clime,
And a song as sweet as a vesper chime,

And the Junes with the roses are straying.

And the name of the isle is the Long Ago,

And we bury our treasures there;

There are brows of beauty, and bosoms of snow;
There are heaps of dust-but we loved them so!
There are trinkets, and tresses of hair.

There are fragments of song that nobody sings,
And a part of an infant's prayer;

There's a lute unswept, and a harp without strings;
There are broken vows, and pieces of rings,

And the garments that She used to wear;

There are hands that are waved, when the fairy shore By the mirage is lifted in air;

And we sometimes hear, through the turbulent roar,
Sweet voices we heard in the days gone before,
When the wind down the river is fair.

O! remembered for aye be the blessed isle,
All the day of our life till night;

When the evening comes with its beautiful smile,
And our eyes are closing to slumber awhile,

May that "Greenwood" of Soul be in sight!

Benjamin Franklin Taylor [1819-1887]

GROWING OLD

WHAT is it to grow old?

Is it to lose the glory of the form,

The lustre of the eye?

Growing Old

Is it for beauty to forego her wealth?
-Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength

Not our bloom only, but our strength-decay?

Is it to feel each limb

Grow stiffer, every function less exact,

Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not—

Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be! 'Tis not to have our life

Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,

A golden day's decline.

'Tis not to see the world

As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;

And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,

The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days

And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add,

immured

In the hot prison of the present, month

To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,

And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart

Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

But no emotion-none.

It is!-last stage of all—

When we are frozen up within, and quite

The phantom of ourselves,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

Which blessed the living man.

401

Matthew Arnold [1822-1888]