From old and young.  I hear it yet,
Swelled by bass-viol and clarinet,
While the gray minister, with face
Radiant, let loose his noble bass. 
If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll
Waked all the echoes of the soul, 200
And in it many a life found wings
To soar away from sordid things. 
Church gone and singers too, the song
Sings to me voiceless all night long,
Till my soul beckons me afar,
Glowing and trembling like a star. 
Will any scientific touch
With my worn strings achieve as much?

I don’t object, not I, to know
My sires were monkeys, if ’twas so; 210
I touch my ear’s collusive tip
And own the poor-relationship. 
That apes of various shapes and sizes
Contained their germs that all the prizes
Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win
May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin. 
Who knows but from our loins may spring
(Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing
As much superior to us
As we to Cynocephalus? 220

This is consoling, but, alas,
It wipes no dimness from the glass
Where I am flattening my poor nose,
In hope to see beyond my toes,
Though I accept my pedigree,
Yet where, pray tell me, is the key
That should unlock a private door
To the Great Mystery, such no more? 
Each offers his, but one nor all
Are much persuasive with the wall 230
That rises now as long ago,
Between I wonder and I know,
Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep
At the veiled Isis in its keep. 
Where is no door, I but produce
My key to find it of no use. 
Yet better keep it, after all,
Since Nature’s economical,
And who can tell but some fine day
(If it occur to her) she may, 240
In her good-will to you and me,
Make door and lock to match the key?

TEMPORA MUTANTUR

The world turns mild; democracy, they say,
Rounds the sharp knobs of character away,
And no great harm, unless at grave expense
Of what needs edge of proof, the moral sense;
For man or race is on the downward path
Whose fibre grows too soft for honest wrath,
And there’s a subtle influence that springs
From words to modify our sense of things. 
A plain distinction grows obscure of late: 
Man, if he will, may pardon; but the State 10
Forgets its function if not fixed as Fate. 
So thought our sires:  a hundred years ago,
If men were knaves, why, people called them so,
And crime could see the prison-portal bend
Its brow severe at no long vista’s end. 
In those days for plain things plain words would serve;
Men had not learned to admire the graceful swerve
Wherewith the AEsthetic Nature’s genial mood
Makes public duty slope to private good;
No muddled conscience raised the saving doubt;