t--save to have died--
One spray of the sacred oak, they coveted most of all.

III

I watch thy nested brambles growing green:
O strange, across that misty waste of years,
To glimpse the shadowy thrush that thou hast seen,
To touch, across the ages, touch with tears
The ferns that hide thee with their fairy screen,
Or only hear them rustling in the dawn;
And--as a dreamer waking--in thy words,
For all the golden clouds that drowse between,
To feel the veil of centuries withdrawn,
To feel thy sun re-risen
Unbuild our shadowy prison
And hear on thy fresh boughs the carol of waking birds.

IV

O, happy voice, born in that far, clear time,
Over thy single harp thy simple strain
Attuned all life for Britain to the chime
Of viking oars and the sea's dark refrain,
And thine own beating heart, and the sublime
Measure to which the moons and stars revolve
Untroubled by the storms that, year by year,
In ever-swelling symphonies still climb
To embrace our growing world and to resolve
Discords unknown to thee,
In the infinite harmony
Which still transcends our strife and leaves us darkling here.

* * * * *

V

For, now, one sings of heaven and one of hell,
One soars with hope, one plunges to despair!
This, trembling, doubts if aught be ill or well;
And that cries, "Fair is foul and foul is fair;"
And this cries, "Forward, though I cannot tell
Whither, and all too surely all things die;"
And that sighs, "Rest, then, sleep and take thine ease."
One sings his country and one rings its knell,
One hymns mankind, one dwarfs them with the sky.
O, Britain, let thy soul
Once more command the whole,
Once more command the strings of the world-wide harmony.

VI

For hark! One sings, _The gods, the gods are dead!_
_Man triumphs!_ And hark--_Blind Space his funeral urn._
And hark, one whispers with reverted head
To the old dead gods--_Bring back our heaven, return!_
And hark, one moans--_The ancient order is fled,
We are children of blind chance and vacant dreams.
Heed not mine utterance--that was chance-born, too._
And hark, the answer of Science--_All they said,
Your fathers, in that old time, lit by gleams
Of what their hearts