In enlarging paradise,

Lives a life that never dies.

Farewell, friends! Yet not farewell; Where I am, ye, too, shall dwell.

I am gone

before your face,

A moment's time, a little space.

When ye come where I have stepped Ye will wonder why ye wept;

Ye will know, by wise love taught, That here is all, and there is naught.

Only not at death, — for death,

Now I know, is that first breath

Which our souls draw when we enter Life, which is of all life centre.

Be ye certain all seems love,

Viewed from Allah's throne above;

Be ye stout of heart, and come
Bravely onward to your home!
La Allah illa Allah! yea!

Thou love divine! Thou love alway!

He that died at Azan gave
This to those who made his grave.

6

JAMES THOMSON.

FROM THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT.'8

I.

THE City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold gray air;
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity;
The sun has never visited that city,

For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

Dissolveth like a dream of night away;

Though present in distempered gloom of thought And deadly weariness of heart all day.

But when a dream night after night is brought Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many Recur each year for several years, can any

Discern that dream from real life in aught?

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory's might.

A river girds the city west and south,

The main north channel of a broad lagoon,

Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;
Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon
For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;
Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,
Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.

Upon an easy slope it lies at large,

And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest Which swells out two leagues from the river marge. A trackless wilderness rolls north and west, Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains, Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains ; And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.

The city is not ruinous, although

Great ruins of an unremembered past,

With others of a few short years ago

More sad, are found within its precincts vast. The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement In house or palace front from roof to basement Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense

Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.

The silence which benumbs or strains the sense Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping: Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,

Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

Yet as in some necropolis you find

Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead, So there; worn faces that look deaf and blind

Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread, Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander, Or sit foredone and desolately ponder

Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,

A woman rarely, now and then a child:

A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth
To see a little one from birth defiled,

Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish
Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish
To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

They often murmur to themselves, they speak
To one another seldom, for their woe
Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow

To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamor,
Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep:

There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, Or which some moments' stupor but increases,

This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

They leave all hope behind who enter there:
One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
One anodyne for torture and despair;

The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave.

II.

BECAUSE he seemed to walk with an intent
I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,
Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:

Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet
He travelled many a long dim silent street.

At length he paused; a black mass in the gloom,
A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:
He murmured to himself with dull despair,
Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.

Then turning to the right went on once more,
And travelled weary roads without suspense;
And reached at last a low wall's open door,

Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.

Then turning to the right resumed his march,

And travelled streets and lanes with wondrous strength, Until on stooping through a narrow arch

We stood before a squalid house at length:

He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,

Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.

When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,
I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
Of desolation I had seen and heard

In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines :
When Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can Life still live? By what doth it proceed?

As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,

Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.