MERIDIAN
That children's children have a share of love.
Through them she proffers us a second chance;
With their young eyes we see her hands advance
To crown the sports once banished from her sight;
With them we see old wrong become the right,
Tread pleasant halls, a healthy life behold
Less stinted than the cloister-range of old—
When the last hour of morning sleep was lost
And prayer was sanctified by dusk and frost,
And hungry tutors taught a class unfed
That a full stomach meant an empty head.
For them a tenth Muse, Beauty, here and there
Has touched the landmarks, making all more fair;—
We knew her not, save in our stolen dreams
Or stumbling song, but now her likeness gleams
Through chapel aisles, and in the house where Art
Has builded for her praise its shrines apart.
Now the new Knowledge, risen like a sun,
Makes bright for them the hidden ways that none
Revealed to us; or haply would dethrone
The gods of old, and rule these hearts alone
From yonder stronghold. By unnumbered strings
She draws our sons to her discoverings,—
Traces the secret paths of force, the heat
That makes the stout heart give its patient beat,
Follows the stars through æons far and free,
And shows what forms have been and are to be.
Such things are plain to these we hither brought,
More strange and varied than ourselves were taught;
But has the iris of the murmuring shell
A charm the less because we know full well
Sweet Nature's trick? Is Music's dying fall
Less finely blent with strains antiphonal
Because within a harp's quick vibratings
We count the tremor of the spirit's wings?
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