o act to-morrow what he learns to-day: ere, work enough to watch he Master work, and catch ints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. s it was better, youth hould strive, through acts uncouth, oward making, than repose on aught found made: ›, better, age, exempt rom strife, should know, than tempt urther. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! nough now, if the Right nd Good and Infinite e named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own,1 With knowledge absolute, bject to no dispute rom fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. e there, for once and all, evered great minds from small, nnounced to each his station in the Past! as I, the world arraigned, 'ere they, my soul disdained, ight? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! ow, who shall arbitrate? en men love what I hate, un what I follow, slight what I receive; en, who in ears and eyes atch me: we all surmise, hey this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? That is, with certainty. 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, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 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 escaped; 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,1 That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— 1 The potter's wheel is "a revolving horizontal disk [made of wood] o which the lump of clay [out of which the pot is to be made] is thrown, and this lump is shaped by revolution. The disk is revolved by a treadle which the workman operates with his foot, and which is turned through a few de grees of the circle, or more rapidly through the whole circle, as conditions require. Into the lump of clay the potter thrusts his thumbs, and by draw ing them upward and outward he rapidly reduces the whirling mass to the form of a vessel. The inside is smoothed by pressing a wet sponge against the surface, and the outside by a strip of leather, while the vessel is re volving. It is now released from the disk by means of a piece of wire which cuts the clay from the wood, and is then put on a board to dry (From the article on pottery in The New International Encyclopædia. Re printed through special arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.) 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; 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. He fixed thee 'mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 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? 1 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? 1 The image implied is probably that of the clay vessel, now molded into shape, still revolving on the wheel, and receiving, for decorative purposes, the impression produced by pointed objects held firmly against its surface. Grooves, in the first line of the stanza, may be inadvertently used to name the instruments which make the grooves. But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who moldest men; 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: 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! 258 GROWING OLD HAT is it to grow old? Robert Browning Is it to lose the glory of the form, The luster of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? -Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength Not our bloom only, but our strength-decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this, and more! but not, Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be! 'Tis not to have our life Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow, A golden day's decline. 'Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are no more. It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Festers the dull remembrance of a change, -none. It is—last stage of all— When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man. 9 TERMINUS1 IT is time to be old, To take in sail: The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: "No more! Terminus was the Roman "god of bounds." Matthew Arnold |