For they mind you of their angels in high places,

With eyes turned on Deity. "How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart,

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?

Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path!
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath." 160

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan
To laugh, as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain
For the reed which grows never more again
As the reed with the reeds of the river. 42

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

CAVALIER TUNES

I. MARCHING ALONG

Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King,

Bidding the crop-headed1 Parliament swing: And, pressing a troop unable to stoop

And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop,

Marched them along, fifty-score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 6

God for King Charles! Pym2 and such carles To the Devil that prompts 'em their treasonous parles!

1 short-haired, Roundheads 2 Pym, Hampden, Hazelrig, Fiennes, and Sir Harry Vane the younger were prominent Parliamentarians.

Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!

42

48

ceived in my brain

And pronounced on the rest of his handwork

(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too)

The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete,

As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet.

Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known,

I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own.

There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink,

I am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think)

Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst

E'en the Giver in one gift.

-

- Behold, I could

130

love if I durst! But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake

God's own speed in the one way of love: I

abstain for love's sake.

-What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appall?

In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all?

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what Began?

Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,

And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?

140

Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power,

To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower

Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,

Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole?

And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest)