his faith, brings joy
into life; and, in this joy of love, we enter into the eternal temple of
the Life to come. Love opens Heaven while Earth closes us round. At last
limitations cease to trouble us. They are lost in the vision, they
bring no more sorrow, doubt or baffling. Therefore, in this confused
chaotic time on earth--

Earn the means first. God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.
Others mistrust, and say: "But time escapes;
Live now or never!"
He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever."

_A Grammarian's Funeral_.

This is a sketch of his explanation of life. The expression of it began
in _Pauline_. Had that poem been as imitative, as poor as the first
efforts of poets usually are, we might leave it aside. But though, as he
said, "good draughtsmanship and right handling were far beyond the
artist at that time," though "with repugnance and purely of necessity"
he republished it, he did republish it; and he was right. It was crude
and confused, but the stuff in it was original and poetic; wonderful
stuff for a young man.

The first design of it was huge. _Pauline_ is but a fragment of a poem
which was to represent, not one but various types of human life. It
became only the presentation of the type of the poet, the first sketch
of the youth of Sordello. The other types conceived were worked up into
other poems.

The hero in _Pauline_ hides in his love for Pauline from a past he
longed to forget. He had aspired to the absolute beauty and goodness,
and the end was vanity and vexation. The shame of this failure beset him
from the past, and the failure was caused because he had not been true
to the aspirations which took him beyond himself. When he returned to
self, the glory departed. And a fine simile of his soul as a young witch
whose blue eyes,

As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a God,

who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing of heaven, saw the
mockery in her eyes and vanished, tells of how the early ravishment
departed, slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship. But one
love and reverence remained--that for Shelley, the Sun-treader, and kept
him from being "wholly lost." To strengthen this one self-forgetful
element, the love of Pauline enters in, and the new impulse brings back
something of the ancient joy. "Let me take it," he cries, "and sing on
again

fast as fancies come