poppies that once were a-swing together in the gardens of his youth, the
lives of those old lost poppies shall return, living again in his dream.
*So there may dream the gods.* And through the dreams of some divinity
reclining in tinted fields above the morning we may haply pass again,
although our bodies have long swirled up and down the world with other
dust. In these strange dreams our lives may be again, all in the centre
of our hopes, rejoicings and laments, until above the morning the gods
wake to go about their work, haply to remember still Their idle dreams,
haply to dream them all again in the stillness when shines the starlight
of the gods."


_VIII_

Then said the King: "I like not these strange journeys nor this faint
wandering through the dreams of gods like the shadow of a weary camel
that may not rest when the sun is low. The gods that have made me to
love the earth's cool woods and dancing streams do ill to send me into
the starry spaces that I love not, with my soul still peering earthward
through the eternal years, as a beggar who once was noble staring from
the street at lighted halls. For wherever the gods may send me I shall
be as the gods have made me, a creature loving the green fields of
earth.

"Now if there stand one prophet here that hath the ear of those too
splendid gods that stride above the glories of the orient sky, tell
them that there is on earth one King in the land called Zarkandhu to
the south of the opal mountains, who would fain tarry among the many
gardens of earth, and would leave to other men the splendours that the
gods shall give the dead above the twilight that surrounds the stars."