o say 'I did it.' Now
you shall see the shepherdess' baby dressed in my cap and bells.
[Sings.]

When I was a greenhorn and young,
And wanted to be and to do,
I puzzled my brains about choosing my line,
Till I found out the way that things go.

The same piece of clay makes a tile,
A pitcher, a taw, or a brick:
Dan Horace knew life; you may cut out a saint,
Or a bench, from the self-same stick.

The urchin who squalls in a gaol,
By circumstance turns out a rogue;
While the castle-bred brat is a senator born,
Or a saint, if religion's in vogue.

We fall on our legs in this world,
Blind kittens, tossed in neck and heels:
'Tis Dame Circumstance licks Nature's cubs into shape,
She's the mill-head, if we are the wheels.

Then why puzzle and fret, plot and dream?
He that's wise will just follow his nose;
Contentedly fish, while he swims with the stream;
'Tis no business of his where it goes.

Eliz. Far too well sung for such a saucy song.
So go.

Fool. Ay, I'll go. Whip the dog out of church, and then rate him
for being no Christian. [Exit Fool.]

Eliz. Guta, there is sense in that knave's ribaldry:
We must not thus baptize our idleness,
And call it resignation: Which is love?
To do God's will, or merely suffer it?
I do not love that contemplative life:
No! I must headlong into seas of toil,
Leap forth from self, and spend my soul on others.
Oh! contemplation palls upon the spirit,
Like the chill silence of an autumn sun:
While action, like the roaring south-west wind,
Sweeps laden with elixirs, with rich draughts
Quickening the wombed earth.

Guta. And yet what bliss,
When dying in the darkness of God's light,
The soul can pierce these blinding webs of nature,
And float up to The Nothing, which is all things--
The ground of being, where self-forgetful silence
Is emptiness,--emptiness fulness,--fulness God,--
Till we touch Him, and like a snow-flake, melt
Upon His light-sphere's keen circumference!

Eliz. Hast thou felt this?

Guta. In part.

Eliz. Oh, happy Guta!
Mine eyes are dim--and what if I mistook
For God's own self, the phantoms of my brain?
And who am I, that my own will's intent
Should put me face to face with the living God?
I, thus thrust down from the still lakes of thought
Upon a boiling crater-field of labour.
No! He must come to me, not I to Him;
If I see God, beloved, I must see Him
In mine own self:--

Guta. Thyself?

Eliz. Why start, my sister?
God is reve