Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. | Page 5

surely as they are, for God is truth,
And as they are not, for we
saw them die,
So surely from the heaven drops light for youth,
If youth will walk thereby.
And can I see this light? It may be so;
"But see it thus and thus," my
fathers said.
The living do not rule this world; ah no!
It is the dead, the dead.

Shall I be slave to every noble soul,
Study the dead, and to their
spirits bend;
Or learn to read my own heart's folded scroll,
And make self-rule my end?
Thought from without--O shall I take on trust,
And life from others
modelled steal or win;
Or shall I heave to light, and clear of rust
My true life from within?
O, let me be myself! But where, O where,
Under this heap of
precedent, this mound
Of customs, modes, and maxims, cumbrance
rare,
Shall the Myself be found?
O thou Myself, thy fathers thee debarred
None of their wisdom, but
their folly came
Therewith; they smoothed thy path, but made it hard
For thee to quit the same.
With glosses they obscured God's natural truth,
And with tradition
tarnished His revealed;
With vain protections they endangered youth,
With layings bare they sealed.
What aileth thee, myself? Alas! thy hands
Are tied with old
opinions--heir and son,
Thou hast inherited thy father's lands
And all his debts thereon.
O that some power would give me Adam's eyes!
O for the straight
simplicity of Eve!
For I see nought, or grow, poor fool, too wise
With seeing to believe.
Exemplars may be heaped until they hide
The rules that they were

made to render plain;
Love may be watched, her nature to decide,
Until love's self doth wane.
Ah me! and when forgotten and foregone
We leave the learning of
departed days,
And cease the generations past to con,
Their wisdom and their ways,--
When fain to learn we lean into the dark,
And grope to feel the floor
of the abyss,
Or find the secret boundary lines which mark
Where soul and matter kiss--
Fair world! these puzzled souls of ours grow weak
With beating their
bruised wings against the rim
That bounds their utmost flying, when
they seek
The distant and the dim.
We pant, we strain like birds against their wires;
Are sick to reach the
vast and the beyond;--
And what avails, if still to our desires
Those far-off gulfs respond?
Contentment comes not therefore; still there lies
An outer distance
when the first is hailed,
And still forever yawns before our eyes
An UTMOST--that is veiled.
Searching those edges of the universe,
We leave the central fields a
fallow part;
To feed the eye more precious things amerce,
And starve the darkened heart.
Then all goes wrong: the old foundations rock;
One scorns at him of
old who gazed unshod;
One striking with a pickaxe thinks the shock

Shall move the seat of God.
A little way, a very little way
(Life is so short), they dig into the rind,

And they are very sorry, so they say,--
Sorry for what they find.
But truth is sacred--ay, and must be told:
There is a story long
beloved of man;
We must forego it, for it will not hold--
Nature had no such plan.
And then, if "God hath said it," some should cry,
We have the story
from the fountain-head:
Why, then, what better than the old reply,
The first "Yea, HATH God said?"
The garden, O the garden, must it go,
Source of our hope and our
most dear regret?
The ancient story, must it no more show
How man may win it yet?
And all upon the Titan child's decree,
The baby science, born but
yesterday,
That in its rash unlearned infancy
With shells and stones at play,
And delving in the outworks of this world,
And little crevices that it
could reach,
Discovered certain bones laid up, and furled
Under an ancient beach,
And other waifs that lay to its young mind
Some fathoms lower than
they ought to lie,
By gain whereof it could not fail to find
Much proof of ancientry,

Hints at a Pedigree withdrawn and vast,
Terrible deeps, and old
obscurities,
Or soulless origin, and twilight passed
In the primeval seas,
Whereof it tells, as thinking it hath been
Of truth not meant for man
inheritor;
As if this knowledge Heaven had ne'er foreseen
And not provided for!
Knowledge ordained to live! although the fate
Of much that went
before it was--to die,
And be called ignorance by such as wait
Till the next drift comes by.
O marvellous credulity of man!
If God indeed kept secret, couldst
thou know
Or follow up the mighty Artisan
Unless He willed it so?
And canst thou of the Maker think in sooth
That of the Made He shall
be found at fault,
And dream of wresting from Him hidden truth
By force or by assault?
But if He keeps not secret--if thine eyes
He openeth to His wondrous
work of late--
Think how in soberness thy wisdom lies,
And have the grace to wait.
Wait, nor against the half-learned