Phantasmagoria and Other Poems | Page 9

beach,
As though unconscious of his speech,

She said "Each gives to more than each."
He could not answer yea or nay:
He faltered "Gifts may pass away."

Yet knew not what he meant to say.
"If that be so," she straight replied,
"Each heart with each doth
coincide.
What boots it? For the world is wide."
"The world is but a Thought," said he:
"The vast unfathomable sea

Is but a Notion--unto me."
And darkly fell her answer dread
Upon his unresisting head,
Like
half a hundredweight of lead.
"The Good and Great must ever shun
That reckless and abandoned
one
Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.
"The man that smokes--that reads the Times -
That goes to Christmas
Pantomimes -
Is capable of ANY crimes!"
He felt it was his turn to speak,
And, with a shamed and crimson
cheek,
Moaned "This is harder than Bezique!"
But when she asked him "Wherefore so?"
He felt his very whiskers
glow,
And frankly owned "I do not know."
While, like broad waves of golden grain,
Or sunlit hues on cloistered
pane,
His colour came and went again.
Pitying his obvious distress,
Yet with a tinge of bitterness,
She said
"The More exceeds the Less."
"A truth of such undoubted weight,"
He urged, "and so extreme in

date,
It were superfluous to state."
Roused into sudden passion, she
In tone of cold malignity:
"To
others, yea: but not to thee."
But when she saw him quail and quake,
And when he urged "For
pity's sake!"
Once more in gentle tones she spake.
"Thought in the mind doth still abide
That is by Intellect supplied,

And within that Idea doth hide:
"And he, that yearns the truth to know,
Still further inwardly may go,

And find Idea from Notion flow:
"And thus the chain, that sages sought,
Is to a glorious circle wrought,

For Notion hath its source in Thought."
So passed they on with even pace:
Yet gradually one might trace
A
shadow growing on his face.
The Second Voice
They walked beside the wave-worn beach;
Her tongue was very apt
to teach,
And now and then he did beseech
She would abate her dulcet tone,
Because the talk was all her own,

And he was dull as any drone.
She urged "No cheese is made of chalk":
And ceaseless flowed her
dreary talk,
Tuned to the footfall of a walk.
Her voice was very full and rich,
And, when at length she asked him
"Which?"
It mounted to its highest pitch.
He a bewildered answer gave,
Drowned in the sullen moaning wave,

Lost in the echoes of the cave.

He answered her he knew not what:
Like shaft from bow at random
shot,
He spoke, but she regarded not.
She waited not for his reply,
But with a downward leaden eye
Went
on as if he were not by
Sound argument and grave defence,
Strange questions raised on
"Why?" and "Whence?"
And wildly tangled evidence.
When he, with racked and whirling brain,
Feebly implored her to
explain,
She simply said it all again.
Wrenched with an agony intense,
He spake, neglecting Sound and
Sense,
And careless of all consequence:
"Mind--I believe--is Essence--Ent -
Abstract--that is--an Accident -

Which we--that is to say--I meant--"
When, with quick breath and cheeks all flushed,
At length his speech
was somewhat hushed,
She looked at him, and he was crushed.
It needed not her calm reply:
She fixed him with a stony eye,
And
he could neither fight nor fly.
While she dissected, word by word,
His speech, half guessed at and
half heard,
As might a cat a little bird.
Then, having wholly overthrown
His views, and stripped them to the
bone,
Proceeded to unfold her own.
"Shall Man be Man? And shall he miss
Of other thoughts no thought
but this,
Harmonious dews of sober bliss?
"What boots it? Shall his fevered eye
Through towering nothingness
descry
The grisly phantom hurry by?

"And hear dumb shrieks that fill the air;
See mouths that gape, and
eyes that stare
And redden in the dusky glare?
"The meadows breathing amber light,
The darkness toppling from the
height,
The feathery train of granite Night?
"Shall he, grown gray among his peers,
Through the thick curtain of
his tears
Catch glimpses of his earlier years,
"And hear the sounds he knew of yore,
Old shufflings on the sanded
floor,
Old knuckles tapping at the door?
"Yet still before him as he flies
One pallid form shall ever rise,
And,
bodying forth in glassy eyes
"The vision of a vanished good,
Low peering through the tangled
wood,
Shall freeze the current of his blood."
Still from each fact, with skill uncouth
And savage rapture, like a
tooth
She wrenched some slow reluctant truth.
Till, like a silent water-mill,
When summer suns have dried the rill,

She reached a full stop, and was still.
Dead calm succeeded to the fuss,
As when the loaded omnibus
Has
reached the railway terminus:
When, for the tumult of the street,
Is heard the engine's stifled beat,

The velvet tread of porters' feet.
With glance that ever sought the ground,
She moved her lips without
a sound,
And every now and then she frowned.
He gazed upon the sleeping sea,
And joyed in its tranquillity,
And
in that silence dead, but she

To muse a little space did seem,
Then, like