Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/329

Rh Who thinks as they thought,

The tribes who then roamed on her breast,

Her vigorous, primitive sons?

What girl

Now reads in her bosom as clear

As Rebekah read, when she sate

At eve by the palm-shaded well?

Who guards in her breast

As deep, as pellucid a spring

Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?

What bard,

At the height of his vision, can deem

Of God, of the world, of the soul,

With a plainness as near,

As flashing, as Moses felt,

When he lay in the night by his flock

On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and obey

The beck of the Spirit like him?

This tract which the river of Time

Now flows through with us, is the plain.

Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.

Bordered by cities, and hoarse

With a thousand cries is its stream.

And we on its breast, our minds

Are confused as the cries which we hear,

Changing and short as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has fled

Forever the course of the river of Time.

That cities will crowd to its edge

In a blacker, incessanter line;

That the din will be more on its banks,