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Ranolf and Amohia

VIII

page 37

VIII.

How gladly then he roved from such chopped hay
To fields that seemed all clover, green and gay,
Though hedged with worse than Indian orange-thorns—
Sharp subtleties for Doubt's intrusive horns.
Did not those free-souled Germans point the way
To regions bathed in Truth's unclouded day?
Where Knowledge hampered by no faintest trace
Of Doubt might soar secure in pride of place,
And Faith fold Science in a fond embrace?
Did not great Kant in pedant's jargon show.
As mathematic truths from Reason—so
Do moral from the inborn Conscience flow '
By mere necessity?—those mightier facts
And fixed conditions in which Reason acts—
The Soul—the Universe—but pre-suppose
And force you to the grand Idea behind
Whence both must spring, wherein are both combined—
To God—the source of all that thinks or knows,
All Being's boundless origin and close?
Was not that cold, cloud-cleaving Aeronaut.
Potent, with swoln balloon of subtlest thought,
With Logic's self, triumphantly to lift
Man's deathless Hope into an atmosphere
Serene above the wayward dust and drift
Of Logic—from Sensation's vapours clear?
Did not poor Faith, doubt-prest from shift to shift.
Find a safe refuge in that "Reason pure?"
Trusting ensconced in Science so obscure—
A pachydermatous Philosophy
Of scarce pronounceable hard names, to be
Both scoff and sceptic proof: and might not she,
page 38 That lofty Hope, in such environment
Of prickly briars of Thought—a tangle rude—
Sit like the Beauty in the long-charmed wood,
Secure—supreme—inviolable? pent
In hard, repellent reasonings reasonings that defy
Assault—and there kept living
Like bright-eyed toad with rock encompassed round;
Buried in chaff of dialectics dry,
A chrysalis (like that with reeled off floss,
Bared of its dress, all amber gleam and gloss
The careful schoolboy hides in homely bran)
Whence a new Psyche should emergy for Man?
Like Psyche's sell—from blue Italy
Prepared to cross the rude rough-handling sea,
Laid up in wood and iron, sound a
In naked beauty from all chance of chafe—
So closely presses round her spiritual
And limbs of tender marble and white grace,
The hard-caked sawdust of her packing-case.

But, O conclusion lame and impotent!
O rage of vigorous reasoning vainly spent!
Those great ideas—-Time. Spacere and Cause—'tis plain.
Though notions connate with the nascent brain.
Have in essential fact no solid ground—
Only within the human soul are found;
Though necessary bases of our thought
Are from no prototypes beyond us brought:
That God is but a sort of ghost confined
To haunt the shadowy chambers of the min;
As if within a glass-roofed palace grew
Some strange grand Tree of mystic shape and
With various virtues wondrously arrayed—
page 39 With mighty fronds and majesty of shade.
And towering crest sufficiently sublime;
Within those vitreous walls compelled, no doubt.
By nature's laws luxuriantly to sprout,
But with no fellow—no resemblance known,
Or able to exist in any clime
Mid the green glories of the world without;
A most magnificent, yet monstrous cheat,
Proud overgrowth of artificial heat,
And that peculiar edifice alone.
"Why, if this God's a product of our own,
Which ends in us, though there perforce it breeds,
A doubtful light which but to darkness leads,"
Our student thought—" what waste of toil and time,
These more than acrobatic feats to climb
Such crags precipitous, such slippery heights,
Where no rewarding view our toil requites;
No vision of the City long-desired,
Though brief as that in Moslem myths—perchance
Seen standing—sudden—silent—sunrise-fired,
Before the desert-wanderer's awestruck glance,
Far stretching multitudinous array!
Of gilded domes and snowy minarets,
Ami tiers of long arcades, rich-roofed with frets
More delicate than frostwork! then, again,
Gone—vanished! and a hundred years in vain
Resought, but gladdening nevermore the day;
Not e'en such glimpse, O mighty Kant!—at most
when we have reached your height at so much cost,
In densest fog we see a finger-post,
You say directs us to that City fair;
But is no proof of any City there!
page 40 Some letters on its arms obscurely seen
Your spectacles discover; what they mean,
In worse than three-tongued wedge-rows sealed up last,
We have to take from you on trust at last.

"And, then, that 'Reason practical '—that creed
Of Action that its own high laws must breed;
Will must be free, whatever you may prove;
Run where it lists, yet always in a groove—'
Why, we are drifting back to Brown and Reid