Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine

own,

With knowledge absolute,

Subject to no dispute

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee

feel alone.

Be there, for once and all,

Severed great minds from small,

Announced to each his station in the Past!
Was I, the world arraigned,

Were they, my soul disdained,

Right? Let age speak the truth and give us

peace at last!

Now, who shall arbitrate?

Ten men love what I hate,

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
Ten, who in ears and eyes

Match me; we all surmise,

They this thing, and I that: whom shall my

soul believe?

Not on the vulgar mass

Called "work," must sentence pass,

Things done, that took the eye and had the

price;

O'er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

120

126

132

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a

trice :

138

But all, the world's coarse thumb,
And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the

man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and es

caped;

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the

pitcher shaped.

Ay, note that Potter's wheel,

That metaphor! and feel

144

150

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— Thou, to whom fools propound,

When the wine makes its round,

"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone,

seize to-day!"

Fool! All that is, at all,

Lasts ever, past recall;

156

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

What entered into thee,

That was, is, and shall be:

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and

clay endure.

162

He fixed thee 'mid this dance

Of plastic circumstance,

This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently im

pressed.

What though the earlier grooves,

Which ran the laughing loves

Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,

Skull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

Look not thou down but up!

To uses of a cup,

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,

The new wine's foaming flow,

The Master's lips aglow!

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst

thou with earth's wheel?

But I need, now as then,

Thee, God, who mouldest men;

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174

180

And since, not even while the whirl was worst,

Did I-to the wheel of life

With shapes and colors rife,

Bound dizzily-mistake my end, to slake thy

thirst:

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So, take and use thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the

aim!

My times be in thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete

the same!

1864.

192

Robert Browning.

SAUL

SAID Abner, "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak,

Kiss my cheek, wish me well!" Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.

And he: "Since the King, O my friend, for thy

countenance sent,

Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent

Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet,

Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet.

For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days,

Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of

prayer nor of praise,

To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended

their strife,

And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch

sinks back upon life.

ΙΟ

"Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his dew

On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue

Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat

Were now raging to torture the desert!"

Then I, as was meet,

Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose

on my feet,

And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was unlooped;

I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped;

Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch,

all withered and gone,

That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on

Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then

once more I prayed,

20

And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid

But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied.

At the first I saw naught but the blackness: but soon I descried

A something more black than the blackness-the vast, the upright

Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and

slow into sight