THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS

My memory holds a tragic hour to prove,

Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought

That will to sorrow move all minds forever —

All that love to know. It was the hour

When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight,

And the hurriers go home to rest;

And we whose task was meditation rose

And wound a murmuring way among the books

And effigies, the fading fragrance, of

A vaulted library — a place to me

Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds

All the world hath of musty memory

In sombre convolutions that are dying.

There at our faithful table every day,

In the great shadow of this dissolution,

We would speak of things eternal, things

Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one

Who was a leader of the way to them;

A man born regal to the realms of thought.

High, pale, and sculptural his brow,

And high his concourse with the kings of old,

Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew —

The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber

Fell in love with God. It was of him,

And that unhungering love of his, he told us;

And with soft and stately melody,

The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us

Sublime above the very motions of

Our mortal being, and we walked with him

The heights of meditation like the gods.

I have no memory surpassing this.

And yet — strange pity of our natures or

Of his — there ran a rumor poisonous.

Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.

And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer,

We whispered things not all philosophy

When he was gone. We knew but little where

He went, or whence he came, but this we knew,

That there was other love in him than what

He taught us — love that makes more quickly pale!

Ay, even he was tortured with the lure

Of mortal motion in the eyes — and lips

And limbs that were not warm to him alone

Were warm to him. He drank mortality.

Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat

In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper

In the shadow of our meditations.

Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour

Advancing — livid painting of a thought!

He spoke of Substance,— strangely — on that day —

Eternal, self-existent, infinite —

He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.

And as he spoke there came on me that trance

Of inattention, when the words would seem

To drop their magic of containing things,

And, by a shift, become but things themselves —

Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.

I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till

I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and

I heard him saying, “Things, and moving things,

Are merely modes of but one attribute,

Of what is infinite in attributes,

And may be called ——” He spoke to there, and then —

His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped — A crack

Behind us — A quick step among the books —

His hand, his head, his body all collapsed

And fell, or settled utterly, before

The fact came on us — he was shot and killed.

But little I remember after that.

What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed

Was done, and all his speculations vanished

Like a sound.