So strong is the spell of beauty that there are those who, contradicting their own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty.  They are called optimists, and they lie.  All is not beauty.  Ugliness and hate and ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic; they will always be here—­perhaps, God send, with lessened volume and force, but here and eternal, while beauty triumphs in its great completion—­Death.  We cannot conjure the end of all ugliness in eternal beauty, for beauty by its very being and definition has in each definition its ends and limits; but while beauty lies implicit and revealed in its end, ugliness writhes on in darkness forever.  So the ugliness of continual birth fulfils itself and conquers gloriously only in the beautiful end, Death.

* * * * *

At last to us all comes happiness, there in the Court of Peace, where the dead lie so still and calm and good.  If we were not dead we would lie and listen to the flowers grow.  We would hear the birds sing and see how the rain rises and blushes and burns and pales and dies in beauty.  We would see spring, summer, and the red riot of autumn, and then in winter, beneath the soft white snow, sleep and dream of dreams.  But we know that being dead, our Happiness is a fine and finished thing and that ten, a hundred, and a thousand years, we shall lie at rest, unhurt in the Court of Peace.

The Prayers of God

    Name of God’s Name! 
    Red murder reigns;
    All hell is loose;
    On gold autumnal air
    Walk grinning devils, barbed and hoofed;
    While high on hills of hate,
    Black-blossomed, crimson-sky’d,
    Thou sittest, dumb.

    Father Almighty! 
    This earth is mad! 
    Palsied, our cunning hands;
    Rotten, our gold;
    Our argosies reel and stagger
    Over empty seas;
    All the long aisles
    Of Thy Great Temples, God,
    Stink with the entrails
    Of our souls. 
    And Thou art dumb.

    Above the thunder of Thy Thunders, Lord,
    Lightening Thy Lightnings,
    Rings and roars
    The dark damnation
    Of this hell of war. 
    Red piles the pulp of hearts and heads
    And little children’s hands.

    Allah! 
    Elohim! 
    Very God of God!

    Death is here! 
    Dead are the living; deep—­dead the dead. 
    Dying are earth’s unborn—­
    The babes’ wide eyes of genius and of joy,
    Poems and prayers, sun-glows and earth-songs,
    Great-pictured dreams,
    Enmarbled phantasies,
    High hymning heavens—­all
    In this dread night
    Writhe and shriek and choke and die
    This long ghost-night—­
    While Thou art dumb.

    Have mercy! 
    Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners! 
    Stand forth, unveil Thy Face,
    Pour down the light
    That seethes above Thy Throne,
    And blaze this devil’s dance to darkness! 
    Hear! 
    Speak! 
    In Christ’s Great Name—­