Dawn and the day: the night behind me: that And nothing more; believe and nothing less. Translated by Prof. Edward Dowden. DOUBT HELEN HUNT JACKSON They bade me cast the thing away, The thing I meant I could not say; I grasped it firm, and bore the pain; O, had I cast that thing away, THE BEGINNINGS OF FAITH SIR LEWIS MORRIS All travail of high thought, All secrets vainly sought, All struggles for right, heroic, perpetually fought; Faint gleams of purer fire, Conquests of gross desire, Whereby the fettered soul ascends continually higher; Pure cares for love or friend Which ever upward tend, Too deep and heavenward and true to have on earth their end; Vile hearts malign and fell, Lives which no tongue may tell, So dark and dread and shameful that they breathe a present hell; What mountain, deep-set lake, Sea wastes which surge and break, Fierce storms which, roaring from the north, the midnight forests shake; Fair morns of summer days, Rich harvest eves that raise The soul and heart o'erburdened to an ecstasy of praise; Low whispers, vague and strange, Breathing perpetual presage of some mighty coming change: These in the soul do breed Thoughts which, at last, shall lead To some clear, firm assurance of a satisfying creed. FAITH ALEXANDER POPE For modes of faith let graceless Zealots fight; All must be false that thwart this one great end; IF THIS WERE FAITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff That I ask not hope nor hire, Not in the husk, Nor dawn beyond the dusk, Nor life beyond death: God, if this were faith? Having felt thy wind in my face In Golgotha and Khartoum, And the brutes, the work of thine hands, Fill with injustice lands And stain with blood the sea: If still in my veins the glee Of the black night and the sun And the lost battle, run: If, an adept, The iniquitous lists I still accept With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood, And still to battle and perish for a dream of good: If to feel, in the ink of the slough, And the sink of the mire, Veins of glory and fire Run through and transpierce and transpire, And a secret purpose of glory in every part, And the answering glory of battle fill my heart; To thrill with the joy of girded men To go on forever and fail and go on again, And be mauled to the earth and arise, And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen Iwith the eyes; With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night That somehow the right is the right And the smooth shall bloom from the rough: Lord, if that were enough? FAITH JOHN B. TABB In every seed to breathe the flower, In every drop of dew To reverence a cloistered star Within the distant blue; To wait the promise of the bow Is Faith-the fervid evidence From IN MEMORIAM ALFRED TENNYSON Proem Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just. Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou; Our wills are ours, we know not how: Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell: That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster. We are fools and slight; Forgive what seemed my sin in me, Forgive my grief for one removed, |