“He measureth world’s pleasure, World’s ease as Saints might measure; For hire Just love entire “He asks, not grudging pain; And knows his asking vain, And cries— ‘Love! Love!’ and dies; “In guerdon of long duty, Unowned by Love or Beauty; And goes— Tell, tell, who knows! “Aliens from Heaven’s worth, Fine beasts who nose i’ the earth, Do there Reward prepare. “But are _his_ great desires Food but for nether fires? Ah me, A mystery! “Can it be his alone, To find when all is known, That what He solely sought “Is lost, and thereto lost All that its seeking cost? That he Must finally, “Through sacrificial tears, And anchoretic years, Tryst With the sensualist?” So ask; and if they tell The secret terrible, Good friend, I pray thee send Some high gold embassage To teach my unripe age. Tell! Lest my feet walk hell. A FALLEN YEW. IT seemed corrival of the world’s great prime, Made to un-edge the scythe of Time, And last with stateliest rhyme. No tender Dryad ever did indue That rigid chiton of rough yew, To fret her white flesh through: But some god like to those grim Asgard lords, Who walk the fables of the hordes From Scandinavian fjords, Upheaved its stubborn girth, and raised unriven, Against the whirl-blast and the levin, Defiant arms to Heaven. When doom puffed out the stars, we might have said, It would decline its heavy head, And see the world to bed. For this firm yew did from the vassal leas, And rain and air, its tributaries, Its revenues increase, And levy impost on the golden sun, Take the blind years as they might run, And no fate seek or shun. But now our yew is strook, is fallen—yea Hacked like dull wood of every day To this and that, men say. Never!—To Hades’ shadowy shipyards gone, Dim barge of Dis, down Acheron It drops, or Lethe wan. Stirred by its fall—poor destined bark of Dis!— Along my soul a bruit there is Of echoing images, Reverberations of mortality: Spelt backward from its death, to me Its life reads saddenedly. Its breast was hollowed as the tooth of eld; And boys, their creeping unbeheld, A laughing moment dwelled. Yet they, within its very heart so crept, Reached not the heart that courage kept With winds and years beswept. And in its boughs did close and kindly nest The birds, as they within its breast, By all its leaves caressed. But bird nor child might touch by any art Each other’s or the tree’s hid heart, A whole God’s breadth apart;