ty that there are those who, contradicting
their own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty. They
are called optimists, and they lie. All is not beauty. Ugliness and hate
and ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic; they will
always be here--perhaps, God send, with lessened volume and force, but
here and eternal, while beauty triumphs in its great completion--Death.
We cannot conjure the end of all ugliness in eternal beauty, for beauty
by its very being and definition has in each definition its ends and
limits; but while beauty lies implicit and revealed in its end, ugliness
writhes on in darkness forever. So the ugliness of continual birth
fulfils itself and conquers gloriously only in the beautiful end, Death.

* * * * *

At last to us all comes happiness, there in the Court of Peace, where
the dead lie so still and calm and good. If we were not dead we would
lie and listen to the flowers grow. We would hear the birds sing and see
how the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty.
We would see spring, summer, and the red riot of autumn, and then in
winter, beneath the soft white snow, sleep and dream of dreams. But we
know that being dead, our Happiness is a fine and finished thing and
that ten, a hundred, and a thousand years, we shall lie at rest, unhurt
in the Court of Peace.

_The Prayers of God_

Name of God's Name!
Red murder reigns;
All hell is loose;
On gold autumnal air
Walk grinning devils, barbed and hoofed;
While high on hills of hate,
Black-blossomed, crimson-sky'd,
Thou sittest, dumb.

Father Almighty!
This earth is mad!
Palsied, our cunning hands;
Rotten, our gold;
Our argosies reel and stagger
Over empty seas;
All the long aisles
Of Thy Great Temples, God,
Stink with the entrails
Of our souls.
And Thou art dumb.

Above the thunder of Thy Thunders, Lord,
Lightening Thy Lightnings,
Rings and roars
The dark damnation
Of this hell of war.
Red piles the pulp of hearts and heads
And little children's hands.

Allah!
Elohim!
Very God of God!

Death is here!
Dead are the living; deep--dead the dead.
Dying are earth's unborn--
The babes' wide eyes of genius and of joy,
Poems and prayers, sun-glows and earth-songs,
Great-pictured dreams,
Enmarbled phantas