y games of
the metaphysicians.

To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of mystery, which is yet
as indisputably real as the realm of reason and sense, we naturally
turn to the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it through the eyes
of Francis Thompson, that creature of transcendent vision who made a
strange pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman Catholic Church.
Thus he writes in his "Anthem of Earth":--

Ay, Mother! Mother!
What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,
Thou lustingly engender'st,
To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,
Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?
From nightly towers
He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,
And yet is he successive unto nothing
But patrimony of a little mould,
And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things;--even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
Confess--"It is enough." The world left empty
What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded
For pride, for potency, infinity,
All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
Arras'd with purple like the house of kings,--
To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm
Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!
Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,
Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark
As we ourselves, thy darkest!

Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hieroglyph to which reason
supplies no key--nay, reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And
does not this lend a strange fascination to the adventure of life?

Another singer, in a very much simpler strain, puts something of the
same idea:--

Marooned on an isle of mystery,
From a stupor of sleep we woke,
And gazed at each other wistfully,
A wondering, wildered folk.

There were flowery valleys and mountains blue,
And pastures, and herds galore,
And fruits that were luscious to bite into,
Though bitter at the core.

So we plucked up heart, and we dree'd our weird
Through flickering gleam and gloom,
And still for rescue we hoped--or feared--
From our island home and tomb.

But never over the sailless sea
Came messenger bark or schooner
With news from the far-off realm whence we