THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE.

SAID a poet to a woodlouse-Thou art certainly my

brother;

I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the

Whole ;

And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut and

smother,

In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a

soul.

́ ́Yea,' the poet said, 'I smell thee by some passive

divination,

I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine

house;

What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and

rhythmic passion,

Had the æons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.

'The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and

digestion,

Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize

and test;

Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of

question,

And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am

best.

'Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain kind of

awe stick

To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympho

leptic weight:

Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch

of solar caustic,

On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a

Fate.'

'Notwithstanding which, O poet,' spake the woodlouse,

very blandly,

'I am likewise the created,-I the equipoise of

thee;

I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand

lie

The inane of measured ages that were embryos

of me.

'I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with conse

quences,

And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic

blush:

Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic

stenches,

And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.

'I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic

surgings,

Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious

kind of blee :

And earth's soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic

organs,

Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.