Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.
(B)
HANDEL
There doth great Handel live, imperious still,
Invisible and impalpable as air,
But forcing flesh and blood to work his will
Effectually as though his flesh were there;
He who gave eyes to ears and showed in sound
All thoughts and things in earth or heaven above.
From fire and hailstones running along the ground
To Galatea grieving for her love;
He who could show to all unseeing eyes
Glad shepherds watching o'er their flocks by night,
Or Iphis angel-wafted to the skies,
Or Jordan standing as an heap upright -
He'll meet both Jones and me and clap or hiss us
Vicariously for having writ Narcissus.
(C)
HANDEL
Father of my poor music--if such small
Offspring as mine, so born out of due time,
So scorn'd, can be called fatherful at all,
Or dare to thy high sonship's rank to climb -
Best lov'd of all the dead whom I love best,
Though I love many another dearly too,
You in my heart take rank above the rest;
King of those kings that most control me, you,
You were about my path, about my bed
In boyhood always and, where'er I be,
Whate'er I think or do, you, in my head,
Ground-bass to all my thoughts, are still with me;
Methinks the very worms will find some strain
Of yours still lingering in my wasted brain.
Footnotes
{16} "The doctrine preached by Weismann was that to start with the
body and inquire how its characters got into the germ was to view the
sequence from the wrong end; the proper starting point was the germ,
and the real question was not 'How do the characters of the organism
get into the germ-cell WHICH IT produces?' but 'How are the
characters of an organism represented in the germ WHICH PRODUCES IT?'
Or, as Samuel Butler has it, the proper statement of the relation
between successive generations is not to say that a hen produces
another hen through the medium of an egg, but to say that a hen is
merely an egg's way of producing another egg.
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