109. THE CELESTIAL SURGEON
Reading edition
If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:— Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake; Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, Choose thou, before that spirit die, A piercing pain, a killing sin, And to my dead heart run them in!
Robert Louis Stevenson.
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110. THE KINGDOM OF GOD
'In no Strange Land'
O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air— That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars!— The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;— Turn but a stone, and start a wing! 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
Francis Thompson.
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111. THE LADY POVERTY
The Lady Poverty was fair: But she has lost her looks of late, With change of times and change of air. Ah slattern! she neglects her hair, Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state As once when her pure feet were bare.
Or—almost worse, if worse can be— She scolds in parlours, dusts and trims, Watches and counts. Oh, is this she Whom Francis met, whose step was free, Who with Obedience carolled hymns, In Umbria walked with Chastity?
Where is her ladyhood? Not here, Not among modern kinds of men; But in the stony fields, where clear Through the thin trees the skies appear, In delicate spare soil and fen, And slender landscape and austere.
Alice Meynell.