“In thy grandeur, oh sea! we acknowledge, in thy fairness, oh earth! we confess, hidden truths that are taught in no college, hidden songs that no parchment express.”
And, as for the pedants of the Old World, why! (as we know)
“They are slow, very slow, in discerning that book-lore and wisdom are twain.”
Here, then, is the first charm in Gordon, and his work; they are modern, they represent the main-current of the age, not some side-water or back-water, that are perhaps nice enough in their way, but still—side-waters or back-waters, and _only_ side-waters or back-waters.
Gordon and his work are modern, but not wholly modern; he belongs, as I have said, to a period of transition. Like Mary Magdalene, he feels that “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” He has lost the Old, and he has not won the New Faith. He is a poet of the twilight and the dawn. “On this earth so rough,” he says,
“on this earth so rough, we know quite enough, _and, I sometimes fancy, a little too much_,”
and so, we have to suffer! Burns, Byron, Leopardi, Heine, Musset, Baudelaire, Clough, Thomson—greater and lesser, this is true of them all! Their early life is embittered by it, their later life made desperate. “Years back,” says Gordon,
“Years back I believed a little, and as I believed I spoke.”
Years back he could utter prayer, years back when he was a child. He cannot utter it now: “For prayer must die since hope is dead.” _Now_ he can only wonder
“Is there nothing real but confusion? is nothing certain but death? is nothing fair, save illusion? is nothing good that has breath?...”
“I can hardly vouch for the truth of what little I see.... On earth there’s little worth a sigh, and nothing worth a tear.”
“the restless throbbings and burnings that hope unsatisfied brings, the weary longings and yearnings for the mystical better things.... There are others toiling and straining ’neath burdens graver than mine— They are weary, yet uncomplaining— I know it, yet I repine. I know it, how time will ravage, how time will level, and yet I long with a longing savage, I regret with a fierce regret....”
We are sorely tired, “we, with our bodies thus weakly, with hearts hard and dangerous.”