Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven’s Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep.  Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane.  Earth’s mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage:  can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive?  On the hardest adamant some foot-print of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van.  But whence?—­O Heaven, whither?  Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

            “We are such stuff
  As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
  Is rounded with a sleep!”

ALFRED TENNYSON.

THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE.

[From The Princess.]

  Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
  Tears from the depth of some divine despair
  Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
  In looking on the happy autumn fields,
  And thinking of the days that are no more....

  Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
  The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
  To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
  The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
  So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

  Dear as remembered kisses after death,
  And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
  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.

THE PASSING OF ARTHUR.

[From Morte D’Arthur.]

  And slowly answered Arthur from the barge: 
  “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
  And God fulfills himself in many ways,
  Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
  Comfort thyself:  what comfort is in me? 
  I have lived my life, and that which I have done
  May He within himself make pure! but thou,
  If thou shouldst never see my face again,
  Pray for my soul.  More things are wrought by prayer
  Than this world dreams of.  Wherefore, let thy voice
  Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
  For what are men better than sheep or goats
  That nourish a blind life within the brain,
  If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
  Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
  For so the whole round earth is every way
  Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 
  But now farewell:  I am going a long way
  With these thou seest—­if indeed I go—­
  (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)
  To the island-valley of Avilion;