Driving and driving, The ship drives amain: While swift from mast to mast Shapes flit again, Flit silent as the silence Where men lie slain; Their shadow cast upon the sails Is like a stain. 80 No voice to call the sleepers, No hand to raise: They sleep to death in dreaming, Of length of days. Vanity of vanities, The Preacher says: Vanity is the end Of all their ways. FROM HOUSE TO HOME The first was like a dream through summer heat, The second like a tedious numbing swoon, While the half-frozen pulses lagged to beat Beneath a winter moon. 'But,' says my friend, 'what was this thing and where?' It was a pleasure-place within my soul; An earthly paradise supremely fair That lured me from the goal. The first part was a tissue of hugged lies; The second was its ruin fraught with pain: 10 Why raise the fair delusion to the skies But to be dashed again? My castle stood of white transparent glass Glittering and frail with many a fretted spire, But when the summer sunset came to pass It kindled into fire. My pleasaunce was an undulating green, Stately with trees whose shadows slept below, With glimpses of smooth garden-beds between Like flame or sky or snow. 20 Swift squirrels on the pastures took their ease, With leaping lambs safe from the unfeared knife; All singing-birds rejoicing in those trees Fulfilled their careless life. Woodpigeons cooed there, stockdoves nestled there; My trees were full of songs and flowers and fruit, Their branches spread a city to the air And mice lodged in their root. My heath lay farther off, where lizards lived In strange metallic mail, just spied and gone; 30 Like darted lightnings here and there perceived But nowhere dwelt upon. Frogs and fat toads were there to hop or plod And propagate in peace, an uncouth crew, Where velvet-headed rushes rustling nod And spill the morning dew. All caterpillars throve beneath my rule, With snails and slugs in corners out of sight; I never marred the curious sudden stool That perfects in a night. 40 Safe in his excavated gallery The burrowing mole groped on from year to year; No harmless hedgehog curled because of me His prickly back for fear. Oft times one like an angel walked with me, With spirit-discerning eyes like flames of fire, But deep as the unfathomed endless sea, Fulfilling my desire: And sometimes like a snowdrift he was fair, And sometimes like a sunset glorious red, 50 And sometimes he had wings to scale the air With aureole round his head. We sang our songs together by the way, Calls and recalls and echoes of delight; So communed we together all the day, And so in dreams by night.