Artemis to Actaeon, and Other Verses Part 7

SURVIVAL

WHEN you and I, like all things kind or cruel, The garnered days and light evasive hours, Are gone again to be a part of flowers And tears and tides, in life's divine renewal,

If some grey eve to certain eyes should wear A deeper radiance than mere light can give, Some silent page abruptly flush and live, May it not be that you and I are there?

USES

AH, from the n.i.g.g.ard tree of Time How quickly fall the hours!

It needs no touch of wind or rime To loose such facile flowers.

Drift of the dead year's harvesting, They clog to-morrow's way, Yet serve to shelter growths of spring Beneath their warm decay,

Or, blent by pious hands with rare Sweet savours of content, Surprise the soul's December air With June's forgotten scent.

A MEETING

ON a sheer peak of joy we meet; Below us hums the abyss; Death either way allures our feet If we take one step amiss.

One moment let us drink the blue Transcendent air together-- Then down where the same old work's to do In the same dull daily weather.

We may not wait . . . yet look below!

How part? On this keen ridge But one may pa.s.s. They call you--go!

My life shall be your bridge.

Note.--Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris, and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human body, and his great work "The Structure of the Human Body" was an open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such violent opposition, not only in the Church but in the University, that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining ma.n.u.scripts and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and afterward of his son, Philip II, of Spain. This closed his life of free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research, and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius led for many years the life of the rich and successful court physician, but regrets for his past were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561 they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius, sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape from Spain.

Fallopius had meanwhile died, and the Venetian Senate is said to have offered Vesalius his old chair; but on the way home from Jerusalem he was seized with illness, and died at Zante in 1564.