Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail, Susceptible to nervous shock; While the True Church can never fail For it is based upon a rock. The hippo’s feeble steps may err In compassing material ends, While the True Church need never stir To gather in its dividends. The potamus can never reach The mango on the mango-tree; But fruits of pomegranate and peach Refresh the Church from over sea. At mating time the hippo’s voice Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd, But every week we hear rejoice The Church, at being one with God. The hippopotamus’s day Is past in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way— The Church can sleep and feed at once. I saw the potamus take wing Ascending from the damp savannas, And quiring angels round him sing The praise of God, in loud hosannas. Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean And him shall heavenly arms enfold, Among the saints he shall be seen Performing on a harp of gold. He shall be washed as white as snow, By all the martyr’d virgins kist, While the True Church remains below Wrapt in the old miasmal mist. Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden A. D. 1451 Ezra Pound They entered between two fir trees. A path of irregular flat pentagonal stones led along between shrubbery. Halting by the central court in a sort of narrow gallery, the large tank was below them, and in it some thirty or forty blond nereïds for the most part well-muscled, with smooth flaxen hair and smooth faces—a generic resemblance. A slender brown wench sat at one end listlessly dabbling her feet from the spring-board. Here the water was deeper. The rest of them, all being clothed in white linen shifts held up by one strap over the shoulder and reaching half way to the knees,—the rest of them waded waist- and breast-deep in the shallower end of the pool, their shifts bellied up by the air, spread out like huge bobbing cauliflowers. The whole tank was sunken beneath the level of the gardens, and paved and pannelled with marble, a rather cheap marble. To the left of the little gallery, where the strangers had halted, an ample dowager sat in a perfectly circular tub formed rather like the third of an hogshead, behind her a small hemicycle of yew trees kept off any chance draught from the North. She likewise wore a shift of white linen. On a plank before her, reaching from the left to the right side of her tank-hogshead, were a salver with a large piece of raw smoked ham, a few leeks, a tankard of darkish beer, a back-scratcher, the ham-knife. Before them, from some sheds, there arose a faint steam, the sound of grunts and squeals and an aroma of elderly bodies. From the opposite gallery a white-bearded town-councillor began to throw grapes to the nereïds.