Life and Existence

O iron nerve to true occasion true, O fall’n at length, that tower of strength Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew.

 

The last great Englishman is low.

 

Bury the Great Duke With an empire’s lamentation.

 

One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.

 

One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.

 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

 

So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be.

 

The great world’s altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

 

So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.

 

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

 

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side?

 

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side?

 

And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

 

And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

 

How fares it with the happy dead?

 

I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.

 

And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.

 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before.

 

Believing where we cannot prove.

 

Our little systems have their day.

 

Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

 

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

 

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

 

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.