XIII

In the twilight of age all things seem strange and phantasmal,
  As between daylight and dark ghost-like the landscape appears.

XIV

Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;
  Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.

THE CITY AND THE SEA

The panting City cried to the Sea,
“I am faint with heat,—­O breathe on me!”

And the Sea said, “Lo, I breathe! but my breath
To some will be life, to others death!”

As to Prometheus, bringing ease
In pain, come the Oceanides,

So to the City, hot with the flame
Of the pitiless sun, the east wind came.

It came from the heaving breast of the deep,
Silent as dreams are, and sudden as sleep.

Life-giving, death-giving, which will it be;
O breath of the merciful, merciless Sea?

MEMORIES

Oft I remember those whom I have known
  In other days, to whom my heart was led
  As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
  But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,
  As graves with grasses are, and at their head
  The stone with moss and lichens so o’erspread,
  Nothing is legible but the name alone. 
And is it so with them?  After long years,
  Do they remember me in the same way,
  And is the memory pleasant as to me? 
I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears? 
  Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay,
  And yet the root perennial may be.

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

As Seleucus narrates, Hermes describes the principles that rank as wholes in two myriads of books; or, as we are informed by Manetho, he perfectly unfolded these principles in three myriads six thousand five hundred and twenty-five volumes. . . . . . .  Our ancestors dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes.—­IAMBLICUS.

Still through Egypt’s desert places
    Flows the lordly Nile,
From its banks the great stone faces
    Gaze with patient smile. 
Still the pyramids imperious
    Pierce the cloudless skies,
And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,
    Solemn, stony eyes.

But where are the old Egyptian
    Demi-gods and kings? 
Nothing left but an inscription
    Graven on stones and rings. 
Where are Helios and Hephaestus,
    Gods of eldest eld? 
Where is Hermes Trismegistus,
    Who their secrets held?

Where are now the many hundred
    Thousand books he wrote? 
By the Thaumaturgists plundered,
    Lost in lands remote;
In oblivion sunk forever,
    As when o’er the land
Blows a storm-wind, in the river
   Sinks the scattered sand.