We meet to part; yet asks my sprite, Part we to meet? Ah! is it so? Man’s fancy-made Omniscience knows, who made Omniscience nought can know. Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of MUST, Without our leave or askt or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust? That Eve so gay, so bright, so glad, this Morn so dim, and sad, and grey; Strange that life’s Registrar should write this day a day, that day a day! Mine eyes, my brain, my heart, are sad,— sad is the very core of me; All wearies, changes, passes, ends; alas! the Birthday’s injury! Friends of my youth, a last adieu! haply some day we meet again; Yet ne’er the self-same men shall meet; the years shall make us other men: The light of morn has grown to noon, has paled with eve, and now farewell! Go, vanish from my Life as dies the tinkling of the Camel’s bell. II In these drear wastes of sea-born land, these wilds where none may dwell but He, What visionary Pasts revive, what process of the Years we see: Gazing beyond the thin blue line that rims the far horizon-ring, Our sadden’d sight why haunt these ghosts, whence do these spectral shadows spring? What endless questions vex the thought, of Whence and Whither, When and How? What fond and foolish strife to read the Scripture writ on human brow; As stand we percht on point of Time, betwixt the two Eternities, Whose awful secrets gathering round with black profound oppress our eyes. “This gloomy night, these grisly waves, these winds and whirlpools loud and dread: What reck they of our wretched plight who Safety’s shore so lightly tread?” Thus quoth the Bard of Love and Wine,* whose dream of Heaven ne’er could rise Beyond the brimming Kausar-cup and Houris with the white-black eyes; * Hâfiz of Shirâz. Ah me! my race of threescore years is short, but long enough to pall My sense with joyless joys as these, with Love and Houris, Wine and all. Another boasts he would divorce old barren Reason from his bed, And wed the Vine-maid in her stead;— fools who believe a word he said!* * Omar-i-Kayyâm, the tent-maker poet of Persia. And “‘Dust thou art to dust returning.’ ne’er was spoke of human soul” The Soofi cries, ’tis well for him that hath such gift to ask its goal. “And this is all, for this we’re born to weep a little and to die!” So sings the shallow bard whose life still labours at the letter “I.” “Ear never heard, Eye never saw the bliss of those who enter in My heavenly kingdom,” Isâ said, who wailed our sorrows and our sin: Too much of words or yet too few! What to thy Godhead easier than One little glimpse of Paradise to ope the eyes and ears of man? “I am the Truth! I am the Truth!” we hear the God-drunk gnostic cry “The microcosm abides in ME; Eternal Allah’s nought but I!”