Because my life was hollow with a pain As old as death: because my eyes were dry As the fierce tropics after months of rain, Because my restless voice said, "Why?" and "Why?"
Wounded and worn, I knelt within the night As blind as darkness--Praying? And to Whom?-- When yond' _cold crescent cut my folded sight_, And showed a phantom Altar in my room.
It was the Altar Paul at Athens saw. The Greek bowed there, but not the Greek alone! The ghosts of nations gathered, wan with awe, And laid their offerings on that shadowy stone.
The Egyptian worshipped there the crocodile; There they of Nineveh the bull with wings; The Persian there with swart, sun-lifted smile Felt in his soul the writhing fire's bright stings.
There the weird Druid held his mistletoe; There, for the scorched son of the sand, coiled bright, The torrid snake was hissing sharp and low; And there the Western savage paid his rite.
"Allah," the Moslem darkly muttered there; "Brahma," the jewelled Indies of the East Sighed through their spices with a languid prayer; "Christ?" faintly questioned many a paler priest.
And still the Athenian Altar's glimmering Doubt On all religions--evermore the same. What tears shall wash its sad inscription out? What hand shall write thereon His other name?
The last five lines of Mrs. Piatt's poem express finely the feeling as to God and religion which now fills countless numbers of the truest hearts and brightest minds.
--"As You Like It" has just been published in the "Clarendon Press Series of Shakespeare's Select Plays." Mr. Grant White, in his article "On Reading Shakespeare," in the present number of "The Galaxy," has said so much in regard to this series and its present editor,[29] William Aldis Wright, that it is only necessary for us to record here the appearance of this edition of Shakespeare's most charming comedy, and to say that Shakespeare's lovers and students will find in it some new views which are interesting, and appear to be sound, and a copious and careful body of annotation.
--Of poetry, or rather of verse, as we before remarked, our table is full this month, and with it we have a dictionary to teach us to rhyme withal.[30] "Walker's Rhyming Dictionary" has had complete possession of this field for three quarters of a century, and we are not sure that it will be supplanted by Mr. Barnum's. His new plan is very systematic. He classifies his words in groups--single rhymes, double rhymes, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple rhymes; and then he divides and subdivides and parcels off his words under separate headings. He does not give definitions. The book will be valuable to the student of the English language, more so, we are inclined to think, than to the mere rhyme-hunter, who will prefer to run his finger and his eye down a column of words arranged merely according to their final letters.