The Freeman And Other Poems

en Death's demand. Dust chills desire, and laurel lieth low, But art's eternal hills triumphant stand ? Whose summits feel in one long afterglow The master hand. TO A STRANGE GOD IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, AUGUST, 1896 All day within the clanging town There sounds the press of weary feet; All night do men and beasts go down Into the struggle of the street. From sun to sun, from round to round, The reek of sweat pollutes the ground. The clamour of discordant days Reaches the desecrated room Where faces wan from alien ways Shine through the daylight to the gloom, Where, thick with dust and shadows sown, A heathen god lies overthrown. His altar is a case of glass; Strange laughter flies into his face; From side to side before him pass Rude voices of a younger race. Around him, stripped of gold and flowers, Lie gods of other creeds than ours. He looks before him and he harks The heathen scoffing at his shame; Like arrows in the air he marks The lips that trifle with his name; And he whose worship they disown, He smiles on them?a God of stone. He smiles upon them, on his face No graven majesty beguiles. They mock his Godhead?from his place He bends unto them and he smiles. His favours as a garnered sheaf Know not belief from unbelief. He sits in silence, he who saw The hoary homage of the East? Before whose sovereignty of Law There bowed, adoring, man and beast. He sits in silence, and a God...