II

Teach me the secret of thy innocence,
  That in simplicity I may grow wise;
Asking from Art no other recompense
  Than the approval of her own just eyes;
So may I rise to some fair eminence,
  Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies.

III

Teach me these things; through whose high knowledge, I,—­
  When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,
And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie
  In that vast house, common to serfs and Thanes,—­
I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
  For beauty born of beauty—­that remains.

Microcosm

The memory of what we’ve lost
Is with us more than what we’ve won;
Perhaps because we count the cost
By what we could, yet have not done.

’Twixt act and purpose fate hath drawn
Invisible threads we can not break,
And puppet-like these move us on
The stage of life, and break or make.

Less than the dust from which we’re wrought,
We come and go, and still are hurled
From change to change, from naught to naught,
Heirs of oblivion and the world.

Fortune

Within the hollowed hand of God,
Blood-red they lie, the dice of fate,
That have no time nor period,
And know no early and no late.

Postpone you can not, nor advance
Success or failure that’s to be;
All fortune, being born of chance,
Is bastard-child to destiny.

Bow down your head, or hold it high,
Consent, defy—­no smallest part
Of this you change, although the die
Was fashioned from your living heart.

Death

Through some strange sense of sight or touch
I find what all have found before,
The presence I have feared so much,
The unknown’s immaterial door.

I seek not and it comes to me: 
I do not know the thing I find: 
The fillet of fatality
Drops from my brows that made me blind.

Point forward now or backward, light! 
The way I take I may not choose: 
Out of the night into the night,
And in the night no certain clews.

But on the future, dim and vast,
And dark with dust and sacrifice,
Death’s towering ruin from the past
Makes black the land that round me lies.

The Soul

An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.

A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in.

Conscience

Within the soul are throned two powers,
One, Love; one, Hate.  Begot of these,
And veiled between, a presence towers,
The shadowy keeper of the keys.

With wild command or calm persuasion
This one may argue, that compel;
Vain are concealment and evasion—­
For each he opens heaven and hell.