Page:Captain Craig; a book of poems.djvu/23

Rh When we have earned our spiritual ears, And art's commiseration of the truth No longer glorifies the singing beast, Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,— Then shall at last come ringing through the sun, Through time, through flesh, God's music of the soul. For wisdom is that music, and all joy That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think, The burden of it in a thousand ways; But as the bitterness that loads your tears Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom, The penance, and the woeful pride you keep, Make bitterness your buoyance of the world. And at the fairest and the frenziedest Alike of your God-fearing festivals, You so compound the truth to pamper fear That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith You clamor for the food that shadows eat. You call it rapture or deliverance,— Passion or exaltation, or what most The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch For something larger, something unfulfilled, Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have Never, until you learn to laugh with God."