Page:Captain Craig; a book of poems.djvu/47

Anent the vanities. No doubt I should,
If mine were the one life that I have lived;
But with a few good glimpses I have had
Of heaven through the little holes in hell,
I do not any longer feel myself
To be ordained or even qualified
For criticising God to my advantage.
If you doubt the true humility of this,
You doubt the spectrum; and if you doubt that,
You cannot understand what price it was
The poet paid, at one time and another,
For those indemnifying sonnet-songs
That are to be the kernel in what lives
To shrine him when the new-born men come singing.

"Nor can you understand what I have read
From even the squeezed items of account
Which I have to my credit in that book
Whereof the leaves are ages and the text
Eternity. What do I care to-day
For the pages that have nothing? I have lived,
And I have died, and I have lived again;
And I am very comfortable. Yes,
Though I look back through barren years enough
To make me seem—as I transmute myself
In a downward retrospect from what I am—