up the slope!

. . . . . .

I sing no governed firmament,
Cold, ordered, regular--
I sing the stinging discontent
That leaps from star to star!

THE PILTDOWN SKULL

WHAT was his life, back yonder
In the dusk where time began,
This beast uncouth with the jaw of an ape
And the eye and brain of a man?--
Work, and the wooing of woman,
Fight, and the lust of fight,
Play, and the blind beginnings
Of an Art that groped for light?--

In the wonder of redder mornings,
By the beauty of brighter seas,
Did he stand, the world's first thinker,
Scorning his clan's decrees?--
Seeking, with baffled eyes,
In the dumb, inscrutable skies,
A name for the greater glory
That only the dreamer sees?

One day, when the afterglows,
Like quick and sentient things,

With a rush of their vast, wild wings,
Rose out of the shaken ocean
As great birds rise from the sod,
Did the shock of their sudden splendor
Stir him and startle and thrill him,
Grip him and shake him and fill him
With a sense as of heights untrod?--
Did he tremble with hope and vision,
And grasp at a hint of God?

London stands where the mammoth
Caked shag flanks with slime--
And what are our lives that inherit
The treasures of all time?
Work, and the wooing of woman,
Fight, and the lust of fight,
A little play (and too much toil!)
With an Art that gropes for light;
And now and then a dreamer,
Rapt, from his lonely sod
Looks up and is thrilled and startled
With a fleeting sense of God!

THE SEEKER

THE creeds he wrought of dream and thought
Fall from him at the touch of life,
His old gods fail him in the strife--
Withdrawn, the heavens he sought!

Vanished, the miracles that led,
The cloud at noon, the flame at night;
The vision that he wing'd and sped
Falls backward, baffled, from the height;

Yet in the wreck of these he stands
Upheld by something grim and strong;
Some stubborn instinct lifts a song
And nerves him, heart and hands:

He does not dare to call it hope;--
It is not aught that seeks reward--

Nor faith, that up some sunward slope
Runs aureoled to meet its lord;

It touches something elder far
Than faith or creed or thought in man,
It was ere yet these lived and ran
Like light from star to star;

It touches that