A CAPTAIN OF SONG.

Look on him. This is he whose works ye know;

Ye have adored, thanked, loved him,— no, not him!

But that of him which proud portentous woe

To its own grim

Presentment was not potent to subdue,

Nor all the reek of Erebus to dim.

This, and not him, ye knew.

Look on him now. Love, worship if ye can,

The very man.

Ye may not. He has trod the ways afar,

The fatal ways of parting and farewell,

Where all the paths of pain-ed greatness are;

Where round and always round

The abhorr-ed words resound,

The words accursed of comfortable men,—

‘ For ever’; and infinite glooms intolerable

With spacious replication give again,

And hollow jar,

The words abhorred of comfortable men.

You the stern pities of the gods debar

To drink where he has drunk

The moonless mere of sighs,

And pace the places infamous to tell,

Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes,

Where-through the ways of dreadful greatness are

He knows the perilous rout

That all those ways about

Sink into doom, and sinking, still are sunk.

And if his sole and solemn term thereout

He has attained, to love ye shall not dare

One who has journeyed there;

Ye shall mark well

The mighty cruelties which arm and mar

That countenance of control,

With minatory warnings of a soul

That hath to its own selfhood been most fell,

And is not weak to spare:

And lo, that hair

Is blanch-ed with the travel-heats of hell.

If any be

That shall with rites of reverent piety

Approach this strong

Sad soul of sovereign Song,

Nor fail and falter with the intimidate throng;

If such there be,

These, these are only they

Have trod the self-same way;

The never-twice-revolving portals heard

Behind them clang infernal, and that word

Abhorr-ed sighed of kind mortality,

As he —

Ah, even as he!