“Critias, long since, I know,
      (For fate decreed it so),
  Long since the world hath set its heart to live. 
      Long since, with credulous zeal,
      It turns life’s mighty wheel: 
      Still doth for laborers send;
      Who still their labor give. 
      And still expects an end.”—­p. 109.

This principle is brought a step futher into the relations of life in “The Sick King in Bokhara,” the following passage from which claims to be quoted, not less for its vividness as description, than in illustration of this thought:—­

    “In vain, therefore, with wistful eyes
      Gazing up hither, the poor man
    Who loiters by the high-heaped booths
      Below there in the Registan

    “Says:  ’Happy he who lodges there! 
      With silken raiment, store of rice,
    And, for this drought, all kinds of fruits,
      Grape-syrup, squares of colored ice,

    “‘With cherries served in drifts of snow.’ 
      In vain hath a king power to build
    Houses, arcades, enamelled mosques,
      And to make orchard-closes filled

    “With curious fruit trees brought from far,
      With cisterns for the winter rain;
    And, in the desert, spacious inns
      In divers places;—­if that pain

    “Is not more lightened which he feels,
      If his will be not satisfied: 
    And that it be not from all time
      The law is planted, to abide.”—­pp. 47-8.

The author applies this basis of fixity in nature generally to the rules of man’s nature, and avow himself a Quietist.  Yet he would not despond, but contents himself, and waits.  In no poem of the volume is this character more clearly defined and developed than in the sonnets “To a Republican Friend,” the first of which expresses concurrence in certain broad progressive principles of humanity:  to the second we would call the reader’s attention, as to an example of the author’s more firm and serious writing:—­

    “Yet when I muse on what life is, I seem
      Rather to patience prompted than that proud
      Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud;
    France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme:—­
    Seeing this vale, this earth whereon we dream,
      Is on all sides o’ershadowed by the high
      Uno’erleaped mountains of necessity,
    Sparing us narrower margin than we deem. 
    Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,
      When, bursting thro’ the net-work superposed
      By selfish occupation—­plot and plan,
      Lust, avarice, envy,—­liberated man,
    All difference with his fellow-man composed,
    Shall be left standing face to face with God.”—­p. 57.

In the adjuration entitled “Stagyrus,” already mentioned, he prays to be set free

  “From doubt, where all is double,
  Where Faiths are built on dust;”