iss grew warmer still.
"Oh, come," it sighed so sweetly;
"I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.

"Were we not friends from childhood?
Have I not loved thee long?
As long as thou, the solemn night,
Whose silence wakes my song.

"And when thy heart is resting
Beneath the church-aisle stone,
_I_ shall have time for mourning,
And _thou_ for being alone."

There are nine verses of "The Night-Wind", and the first eight are
negligible; but, as for the last and ninth, I do not know any poem in
any language that renders, in four short lines, and with such
incomparable magic and poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the human
by the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal wind.

And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of all metaphysical
knowledge or training, reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical of
creeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of four irregular verses
all the hunger and thirst after the "Absolute" that ever moved a human
soul, all the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unintelligible
spectacle of existence, the intolerable triumph of evil over good, and
did conceive an image and a vision of the transcendent reality that
holds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever worthy of the
name.

Here it is. There are once more two voices: one of the Man, the other of
the Seer:

THE PHILOSOPHER

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.
And never care how rain may steep,
Or snow may cover me!
No promised heaven, these wild desires
Could all, or half fulfil;
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
Subdue this restless will.

So said I, and still say the same;
Still, to my death, will say--
Three gods, within this little frame,
Are warring night and day;
Heaven could not hold them all, and yet
They all are held in me;
And must be mine till I forget
My present entity!
Oh, for the time, when in my breast
Their struggles will be o'er!
Oh, for the day, when I shall rest,
And never suffer more!

I saw a spirit, standing, man,
Where thou dost stand--an hour ago,
And round his feet three rivers ran,
Of equal depth, and equal flow--
A golden stream--and one like blood,
And one like sapphire seemed to be;
But where they joined their triple flood
It tumbled in an inky sea.
The spirit sent his dazzling gaze
Down through that ocea