And one can hold in thought that nightly here His phantom may draw down to the water’s brim, And hers come up to meet it, as a dim Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere, And mariners wonder as they traverse near, Unknowing of her and him. VIII One dreams him sighing to her spectral form: “O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line; Where are those songs, O poetess divine Whose very arts are love incarnadine?” And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm, Sufficient now are thine.” . . . IX So here, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, And their dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains— Him once their peer in sad improvisations, And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes— I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines Upon the capes and chines. BONCHURCH, 1910. A PLAINT TO MAN WHEN you slowly emerged from the den of Time, And gained percipience as you grew, And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime, Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you The unhappy need of creating me— A form like your own—for praying to? My virtue, power, utility, Within my maker must all abide, Since none in myself can ever be, One thin as a shape on a lantern-slide Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet, And by none but its showman vivified. “Such a forced device,” you may say, “is meet For easing a loaded heart at whiles: Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat Somewhere above the gloomy aisles Of this wailful world, or he could not bear The irk no local hope beguiles.” —But since I was framed in your first despair The doing without me has had no play In the minds of men when shadows scare; And now that I dwindle day by day Beneath the deicide eyes of seers In a light that will not let me stay, And to-morrow the whole of me disappears, The truth should be told, and the fact be faced That had best been faced in earlier years: The fact of life with dependence placed On the human heart’s resource alone, In brotherhood bonded close and graced With loving-kindness fully blown, And visioned help unsought, unknown. 1909–10. GOD’S FUNERAL I I saw a slowly-stepping train— Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar— Following in files across a twilit plain A strange and mystic form the foremost bore. II And by contagious throbs of thought Or latent knowledge that within me lay And had already stirred me, I was wrought To consciousness of sorrow even as they. III