The merchants reckon up their gold; Their letters come, their ships arrive, their freights are glories; The profits of their treasures sold They tell and sum; Their foremen drive The servants starved to half-alive, Whose labours do but make the earth a hive Of stinking stories: a tale, a dream. The priests are singing in their stalls; Their singing lifts, their incense burns, their praying clamours; Yet God is as the sparrow falls; The ivy drifts, The votive urns Are all left void when Fortune turns; The god is but a marble for the kerns To break with hammers: a tale, a dream. O Beauty, let me know again The green earth cold, the April rain, the quiet waters figuring sky, The one star risen. So shall I pass into the feast Not touched by King, merchant, or priest; Know the red spirit of the beast, Be the green grain; Escape from prison. IX. What is this life which uses living cells It knows not how nor why, for no known end, This soul of man upon whose fragile shells Of blood and brain his very powers depend? Pour out its little blood or touch its brain, The thing is helpless, gone, no longer known; The carrion cells are never man again, No hand relights the little candle blown. It comes not from Without, but from the sperm Fed in the womb; it is a man-made thing That takes from man its power to live a term, Served by live cells of which it is the King. Can it be blood and brain? It is most great. Through blood and brain alone it wrestles Fate. X. Can it be blood and brain, this transient force Which, by an impulse, seizes flesh and grows To man, the thing less splendid than the horse, More blind than owls, less lovely than the rose? O, by a power unknown it works the cells Of blood and brain; it has the power to see Beyond the apparent thing the something else Which it inspires dust to bring to be. Both blood and brain are its imperfect tools, Easily wrecked, soon worn, slow to attain; Only by years of toil the master rules To lovely ends those servants, blood and brain. And Death, a touch, a germ, has still the force To make him ev'n as the rose, the owl, the horse. XI. Not only blood and brain its servants are; There is a finer power that needs no slaves, Whose lovely service distance cannot bar, Nor the green sea with all her hell of waves; Nor snowy mountains, nor the desert sand, Nor heat, nor storm, it bends to no control; It is a stretching of the spirit's hand To touch the brother's or the sister's soul; So that from darkness in the narrow room I can step forth and be about her heart, Needing no star, no lantern in the gloom, No word from her, no pointing on the chart, Only red knowledge of a window flung Wide to the night, and calling without tongue. XII.