34
Or the aurora perchance, racing home for the eight o'clock mutton.
So they bathed, and read, and roamed in heathery Highland;
There in the joy of their life and glory of shooting jackets,
Bathed and read and roamed, and looked no more for Philip.
List to a letter that came from Philip at Balloch to Adam.
I am here, O my friend—idle, but learning wisdom.
Doing penance, you think; content, if so, in my penance.
You have conjectured a change must have come to my mind: I believe it!
You will believe it too; if I tell you the thoughts that haunt me!
Often I find myself saying, while watching in dance or on horseback
One that is here, in her freedom, and grace, and imperial sweetness,
Often I find myself saying, old faith and doctrine abjuring,
Into the crucible casting philosophies, facts, convictions,—
Were it not well that the stem should be naked of leaf and of tendril,
Poverty-stricken, the barest, the dismallest stick of the garden;
Flowerless, leafless, unlovely, for ninety-and-nine long summers,
So in the hundredth, at last, were bloom for one day at the summit,
So but that fleeting flower were lovely as Lady Maria.
Often I find myself saying, and know not myself as I say it,
What of the poor and the weary? their labour and pain is needed.
Perish the poor and the weary what can they better than perish,
Perish in labour for her, who is worth the destruction of empires?
What! for a mite, or a mote, an impalpable odour of honour,
Armies shall bleed; cities burn; and the soldier red from the storming
Carry hot rancour and lust into chambers of mothers and daughters:
What! would ourselves for the cause of an hour encounter the battle,
Slay and be slain; lie rotting in hospital, hulk, and prison;
Die as a dog dies; die secure that to uttermost ages
Not one ray shall illumine our midnight of shame and dishonour,
Yea, till in silence the fingers stand still on the world's great dial
Fathers and mothers, the gentle and good of unborn generations,
Shall to their little ones point out our names for their loathing and horror?
Yea?—and shall hodmen in beer-shops complain of a glory denied them,
Which could not ever be theirs more than now it is theirs as spectators?
Which could not be, in all earth, if it were not for labour of hodmen?
And I find myself saying and what I am saying, discern not,
Dig in thy deep dark prison, O miner! and finding be thankful;
Though unpolished by thee, unto thee unseen in perfection,
While thou art eating black bread in the poisonous air of thy cavern,
