He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. XXIX What though the earlier grooves Which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? XXX Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? XXXI But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men; And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I,--to the wheel of life With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily,--mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: XXXII So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! AN EPISTLE CONTAINING THE STRANGE MEDICAL EXPERIENCE OF KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, The not-incurious in God's handiwork (This man's-flesh He hath admirably made, Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, To coop up and keep down on earth a space That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul) --To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip Back and rejoin its source before the term,-- And aptest in contrivance, under God, To baffle it by deftly stopping such:-- The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace), Three samples of true snake-stone--rarer still, One of the other sort, the melon-shaped (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs), And writeth now the twenty-second time.