NO use hoping, or feeling vext, Tugged by a force above or under Like some fantocine, much I wonder What I shall find me doing next! Shall I be rushing where bright eyes be? Shall I be suffering sorrows seven? Shall I be watching the stars of heaven, Thinking one of them looks like thee? Part is mine of the general Will, Cannot my share in the sum of sources Bend a digit the poise of forces, And a fair desire fulfil? _Nov._ 1893. JUBILATE “THE very last time I ever was here,” he said, “I saw much less of the quick than I saw of the dead.” —He was a man I had met with somewhere before, But how or when I now could recall no more. “The hazy mazy moonlight at one in the morning Spread out as a sea across the frozen snow, Glazed to live sparkles like the great breastplate adorning The priest of the Temple, with Urim and Thummim aglow. “The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff stark air, Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes When I came by the churchyard wall, and halted there At a shut-in sound of fiddles and tambourines. “And as I stood hearkening, dulcimers, haut-boys, and shawms, And violoncellos, and a three-stringed double-bass, Joined in, and were intermixed with a singing of psalms; And I looked over at the dead men’s dwelling-place. “Through the shine of the slippery snow I now could see, As it were through a crystal roof, a great company Of the dead minueting in stately step underground To the tune of the instruments I had before heard sound. “It was ‘Eden New,’ and dancing they sang in a chore, ‘We are out of it all!—yea, in Little-Ease cramped no more!’ And their shrouded figures pacing with joy I could see As you see the stage from the gallery. And they had no heed of me. “And I lifted my head quite dazed from the churchyard wall And I doubted not that it warned I should soon have my call. But—” . . . Then in the ashes he emptied the dregs of his cup, And onward he went, and the darkness swallowed him up. HE REVISITS HIS FIRST SCHOOL I SHOULD not have shown in the flesh, I ought to have gone as a ghost; It was awkward, unseemly almost, Standing solidly there as when fresh, Pink, tiny, crisp-curled, My pinions yet furled From the winds of the world. After waiting so many a year To wait longer, and go as a sprite From the tomb at the mid of some night Was the right, radiant way to appear; Not as one wanzing weak From life’s roar and reek, His rest still to seek: Yea, beglimpsed through the quaint quarried glass Of green moonlight, by me greener made, When they’d cry, perhaps, “There sits his shade In his olden haunt—just as he was When in Walkingame he Conned the grand Rule-of-Three With the bent of a bee.”