Work is the sole and sovereign balm that brings
Peace to the torpid soul when doubts assail,
And sickening pleasures are of no avail
To lull the torture of affliction's stings.
Give me the work I love, the work I feel
God in His Heaven has willed that I should do,
And you may offer the whole commonweal,
Lands, mansions, jewels, gold, and temples too,
Vainly to me. By strenuous work alone
Man mounts on Jacob's ladder to God's throne.

XIII.

SHELLEY.[36]

'Twas but a passing visit that he paid
To the gross air of earth, this mystic seer,
The tyrannies of sense were too severe
For one of clay more fine than Adam's made.
The inhumanity of man, the trade
Of coining gold from the serf's groan and tear,
The galling fetters of religious fear,
And vain ecclesiastic masquerade
Tortured his gentle soul, and made his life
One bitter struggle with the powers that be:
Yet not in vain he lived; his manful strife
With all the deadening despotisms we see
Will ring along the centuries, until
Good has her final triumph over ill.

[36] Suggested by a copy of his poems in a West Highland
bookcase.

XIV.

PICTURE IN AN INN.

A wood of pines through which the setting sun
Pours from the western sky a parting flame,
Beside the shore, a church called by the name
Of some old saint whose pious race was run
Long ere schismatic Luther had begun
To work the Pope and his disciples shame.
In earnest-seeming talk, a knight and dame
Sit in a painted galley, rowed by one
Whose back is to the setting orb of day.
The soldier and his mate, their faces lit
With all love's animation and the ray
Of the down-lapsing globe of crimson, sit
Together in the gilded vessel's prow,
And there will sit for evermore, as now.

XV.

RAIN-STORM AT LOCH AWE.

The topmost mountain-snows are melting fast,
See, how the swollen waters hurry down
In perpendicular runnels from the crown
Of every wreathed hill. The train has past
Beside a dark stream into which are cast
A hundred huddling rills whose foam is brown
With pilfered soil. No dweller in a town
Ever beheld such manifold and vast
Torrents of roaring water. Each small isle
Spaced on the loch, glooms through the hanging haze
Like a dream-picture, and for many a mile
Beneath those clo