Sometimes Providence seems to have a bee in his bonnet. Else why should hell, the greatest risk, be the most improvable fact, and himself, the only light, be the most completely undiscoverable? If the angels are good company, why shut us out from them? I look for good boys for my children. Hide not your light under a bushel, is His own command: and yet He is completely obscured under the inexorable _quid pro quo_ of Nature and the hateful measure of Evil. [_Credo, and Other Poems_] The black-birds giving a shimmer of sound, { transparent tremors As midday hills give forth { luminous of heat and haze. FOR A FLOWER DECORATION OF SOLDIERS' GRAVES Unto your house, O sleepers, Unto these graves that house you since ye died, Unto these little rooms wherein ye sleep, A serenade of Love who sings in flowers, If sense more dim than thought May pierce through the deep dream of death wherein ye lie. In a silence embroidered with whispers of lovers, As the darkness is purfled with fire-flies. The feverish heaven with a stitch in the side, Of lightning. For Pray'r the Ocean is, where diversely Men steer their course, each to a several coast, Where all our interests so discordant be, Half begging God for winds that Would send the other half to hell. As many blades of grass as be In all thy horizontal round, So many dreams brood over thee. To stand with quietude in the midst of the prodigious Unknown which we call the World, also to look with tranquil eyes upon the unfathomable blackness which limits our view to the little space enclosed betwixt birth and death. So pray we to the God we dimly hope Against calamities we clearly know. It may be that the world can get along without God: but _I_ can not. The universe-finity is to me like the chord of the dominant seventh, always leading towards, always inviting onwards, a Chord of Progress; God is the tonic Triad, a chord of Repose. SONGS OF ALDHELM Songs from the Sun, Songs from the ground, Songs from the ... stars, Songs, { fine souls of the body of sound, { joined souls and bodies of sound, ... ghosts of songs that died, Songs of Birth and of Death, of ... Beat million-rhythmed in the heart of my hearing, The world is all sound and still signs of sound.