hy hills. I shall not fear
So thou wilt make me pure, and beat back sin
With the terrors of thine eye.

Lord hast thou sent
Thy moons to mock us with perpetual hope?
Lighted within our breasts the love of love,
To make us ripen for despair, my God?

Oh, dost thou hold each individual soul
Strung clear upon thy flaming rods of purpose?
Or does thine inextinguishable will
Stand on the steeps of night with lifted hand,
Filling the yawning wells of monstrous space
With mixing thought--drinking up single life
As in a cup? and from the rending folds
Of glimmering purpose, the gloom do all thy navied stars
Slide through the gloom with mystic melody,
Like wishes on a brow? Oh, is my soul,
Hung like a dew-drop in thy grassy ways,
Drawn up again into the rack of change,
Even through the lustre which created it?
O mighty one, thou wilt not smite me through
With scorching wrath, because my spirit stands
Bewildered in thy circling mysteries.

Here came the passage Robert had heard him repeat, and then the
following paragraph:

Lord, thy strange mysteries come thickening down
Upon my head like snow-flakes, shutting out
The happy upper fields with chilly vapour.
Shall I content my soul with a weak sense
Of safety? or feed my ravenous hunger with
Sore-purged hopes, that are not hopes, but fears
Clad in white raiment?
I know not but some thin and vaporous fog,
Fed with the rank excesses of the soul,
Mocks the devouring hunger of my life
With satisfaction: lo! the noxious gas
Feeds the lank ribs of gaunt and ghastly death
With double emptiness, like a balloon,
Borne by its lightness o'er the shining lands,
A wonder and a laughter.
The creeds lie in the hollow of men's hearts
Like festering pools glassing their own corruption:
The slimy eyes stare up with dull approval,
And answer not when thy bright starry feet
Move on the watery floors.

O wilt thou hear me when I cry to thee?
I am a child lost in a mighty forest;
The air is thick with voices, and strange hands
Reach through the dusk and pluck me by the skirts.
There is a voice which sounds like words from home,
But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems
To leap from rock to rock. Oh! if it is
Willing obliquity