Part 6

Around the pillars and against the walls Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls. Perchance they were not a great multitude 10 Save in that city of so lonely streets Where one may count up every face he meets.

All patiently awaited the event Without a stir or sound, as if no less Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent. 15 And then we heard a voice of solemn stress From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:

Two steadfast and intolerable eyes Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow; 20 The head behind it of enormous size. And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow, Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed, By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:--

O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark! 25 O battling in black floods without an ark! O spectral wanderers of unholy Night! My soul hath bled for you these sunless years, With bitter blood-drops running down like tears: Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light! 30

My heart is sick with anguish for your bale; Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail And perish in your perishing unblest. And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope Of all our universe, with desperate hope 35 To find some solace for your wild unrest.

And now at last authentic word I bring, Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God; no Fiend with names divine 40 Made us and tortures us; if we must pine, It is to satiate no Being's gall.

It was the dark delusion of a dream, That living Person conscious and supreme, Whom we must curse for cursing us with life; 45 Whom we must curse because the life he gave Could not be buried in the quiet grave, Could not be killed by poison or the knife.

This little life is all we must endure, The grave's most holy peace is ever sure, 50 We fall asleep and never wake again; Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.

We finish thus; and all our wretched race 55 Shall finish with its cycle, and give place To other beings with their own time-doom: Infinite aeons ere our kind began; Infinite aeons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb. 60

We bow down to the universal laws, Which never had for man a special clause Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate: If toads and vultures are obscene to sight, If tigers burn with beauty and with might, 65 Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?

All substance lives and struggles evermore Through countless shapes continually at war, By countless interactions interknit: If one is born a certain day on earth, 70 All times and forces tended to that birth, Not all the world could change or hinder it.

I find no hint throughout the Universe Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse; I find alone Necessity Supreme; 75 With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark, Unlighted ever by the faintest spark For us the flitting shadows of a dream.

O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief; A few short years must bring us all relief: 80 Can we not bear these years of laboring breath? But if you would not this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are free to end it when you will, Without the fear of waking after death.--

The organ-like vibrations of his voice 85 Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away; The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice Was sad and tender as a requiem lay: Our shadowy congregation rested still As brooding on that "End it when you will." 90

Wherever men are gathered, all the air Is charged with human feeling, human thought; Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer, Are into its vibrations surely wrought; Unspoken passion, wordless meditation, 5 Are breathed into it with our respiration It is with our life fraught and overfraught.

So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath, As if alone on mountains or wide seas; But nourishes warm life or hastens death 10 With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease, Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours, Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors; He in his turn affecting all of these.

That City's atmosphere is dark and dense, 15 Although not many exiles wander there, With many a potent evil influence, Each adding poison to the poisoned air; Infections of unutterable sadness, Infections of incalculable madness, 20 Infections of incurable despair.

XVI

Our shadowy congregation rested still, As musing on that message we had heard And brooding on that "End it when you will;" Perchance awaiting yet some other word; When keen as lightning through a muffled sky 5 Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:--

The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth: We have no personal life beyond the grave; There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth: Can I find here the comfort which I crave? 10

In all eternity I had one chance, One few years' term of gracious human life: The splendours of the intellect's advance, The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;

The social pleasures with their genial wit: 15 The fascination of the worlds of art, The glories of the worlds of nature, lit By large imagination's glowing heart;

The rapture of mere being, full of health; The careless childhood and the ardent youth, 20 The strenuous manhood winning various wealth, The reverend age serene with life's long truth:

All the sublime prerogatives of Man; The storied memories of the times of old, The patient tracking of the world's great plan 25 Through sequences and changes myriadfold.

This chance was never offered me before; For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb: This chance recurreth never, nevermore; Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. 30

And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth, A mockery, a delusion; and my breath Of noble human life upon this earth So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.

My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, 35 My noonday passes in a nightmare dream, I worse than lose the years which are my all: What can console me for the loss supreme?

Speak not of comfort where no comfort is, Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? 40 Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss: Hush and be mute envisaging despair.--