光谱的电影,又难以捉摸way gave vent In some unreal words which meant; 'I think therefore I am.' That phantasm only thought it thought; A vain conception crudely wrought; An egotistic sham. Which brings us up against the fact By Chunder's attestation backed ? There is no Substance, Thought, nor Act Nothing exists but Brahm. This quaint contraption here below Is not a magic shadow show Where phantom figures come and go, As held by old Khayyam. A show has time and space enough, But here we only have such stuff As dreams are made of ? mental fluff And visionary flam, Throughout the universal scheme, Be sure things tare not what they seem, (To quote a well-known psalm) They're only whimsies of a dream A transient dream of Brahm. All through the cycles of the Past At which Notation stands aghast He has subsisted, first and last, Lone, functionless and calm. Nothing extraneous can obtrude Upon his Sabbath quietude, Or discompose his tranquil mood, For nothing is but Brahm. 'The Past and Present here unite Beneath Time's flowing tide' (to cite A Bard of Uncle Sam) For Time stretched out in aeons dim To Apprehension's very rim, Is insignificant to him A Bagetelle to Brahm. For once in his negation deep, He somehow chanced to drop asleep; And through that forty-wings there ran A flitting dream. So time began ? He dreamed this stellar lens of ours, Which mocks at telescopic powers Innumerable suns sublime, At furious speed yet keeping time! And so remote that to the eye, They look like fixtures in the sky, But that's a trifle. Round about A million light-years further out, The wisps of nebular portend. Sidereal schemes without an end And this is no poetic flight Nor idiotic blatherskite, Nor what is termed a cram. However vast these plans may seem, They're only figments of a dream A trifling dream of Brahm. He dreamed our System's fiery gas Condensing into solid mass; And during several billion years, Evolving planetary spheres. But take this globe, alone, to prove How things have moved ? or seemed to move. He dreamed some pulpy form of life: Mutation slow; and savage strife: With Nature's forces all in play, And Darwin's system under way; While bits of hide and tufts of hair For countless centuries fill'd the air; And only those were left alive Whose fitness caused them to survive. Monsters that lived in Gulfs of slime With names that balk and baffle rhyme Prodigious sloths, whose daily food Was half a ton of leaves and wood ? Grim saurians of terrific strength, A quarter of a mile in length, Unsightly bats, with twelve-foot wings, And endless tribes of fearsome things Cull'd down, in point of fact, so fit That they should thrive in Sheol's pit And breathe its exhalations thick, Holding their own with Ancient Nick. And so, while ocean bottoms rose To stand awhile as high plateaus And mountains sank beneath the main, To rise time after time again: And rocks were formed, and strata rent And Polar ice-caps came and went; And geological ages pass'd Each an improvement on the last; And on the wrinkled crust of earth More decent forms of life had birth; Man was evolved a product queer; A breed that it would pay to sheer; And which it might be safe to say, Has reached a higher stage to-day Since restless generations gone Have passed a few ideas on. But, bear in mind, this human race Diverse in colour, smell, and face; These off-shoots from the simian stem The Sons of Japheth and of Shem, The progeny of Ham. With mongrel races that infest The isles and mainlands, east and west, From Chili to Siam, Are less than ripples in a stream, They're only ripples on a dream Namely the dream of BRAHM. Even that race, divinely nursed, Which for its virtues has been cursed And booted into seven times seven By every nation under Heaven The seed of Abraham; And those brave lions in their den Each one a match for aliens ten, With fist or rifle, bat or pen I mean God's modest Englishmen, Whose very fog is balm; These are less tangible withal Than shadowy rabbits on the wall Nothing exists but BRAHM. Our swarming brethren of the North Whatever you may judge them worth Sling Muck and Soogoo Ram, Are fantoids like yourself and me, Though differing somewhat in degree Nothing exists but BRAHM. That Fatman, dining at his club, On costly wet and sumptuous grub; The pilgrims in the roadside pub; The washerwoman at her tub; And Jacky in his native sc