k, be day's apostle
To mavis, merle, and throstle,
Bid them their betters jostle
From day and its delights! 90
But at night, brother owlet; over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats, 95
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
[_After she has began to undress herself._
Now, one thing I should like to really know:
How near I ever might approach all these 100
I only fancied being, this long day--
Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so
As to--in some way ... move them--if you please,
Do good or evil to them some slight way.
For instance, if I wind 105
Silk tomorrow, my silk may bind
[_Sitting on the bedside._
And border Ottima's cloak's hem.
Ah me, and my important part with them,
This morning's hymn half promised when I rose!
True in some sense or other, I suppose. 110
[_As she lies down._
God bless me! I can pray no more tonight.
No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right.
_All service ranks the same with God--_
_With God, whose puppets, best and worst,_
_Are we; there is no last nor first._ 115

[_She sleeps._

NOTES

SONGS FROM PARACELSUS

The poem _Paracelsus_ is divided into five parts, each of which
describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the
celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the
sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he
set out in his youth to compass all knowledge; he believed himself
commissioned of God to learn Truth and to give it to mankind. Books II
and III show him followed and idolized by multitudes to whom he imparts
the fragments of knowledge he has gained. But though these fragments
seem to his disciples the sum and substance of wisdom, his own mind is
preoccupied with a desolating certainty that he has hardly touched on
the outer confines of truth. In Book IV, after experiencing the
ingratitude of his fickle adherents, he is represented as