Tires at the last, as day would, if all day
And no night. So despair of heart increases.
The last lure—power—is proffered, taken. All
Hangs on the last desire, whatever it be.
A scene of prescient solitude and soul
Commune with heaven, repentance, prayer, faith,
Which are all things inspired alone of God,
Who signifies salvation, follows this.
In the next scene, we feel the end draw nigh.
A change is wrought on earth as great as that
In its first ages, when the elements
Less gross and palpable than air, were changed
To mountainous and adamantine mass,
Now ’neath the feet of nations;—figuring forth
The fateful mind which is to govern all,
Controlling the great evil; for it is mind
Which shall rule and be ruled, and not the body,
In the last age of human sway on earth;—
Ambition ruined by its own success;
Aims lost, power useless: love, pure love, the last
Of mortal things that nestles in the heart.
There is a love which acts to death, and through death,
And may come white, and bright and pure, like paper,
From refuse, or from clearest things at first;
It is beyond the accidents of life.
For things we make no compt of, have in them
The seeds of life, use, beauty, like the cores
Of apples that we fling away;—nought now
Is left but trust in God, who tries the heart
And saves it, at the last, from its own ruin—
The parting spirit fluttering like a flag,
Half from its earthy staff. The death-change comes.
Death is another life. We bow our heads
At going out, we think, and enter straight
Another golden chamber of the king’s,
Larger than this we leave, and lovelier.
And then in shadowy glimpses, disconnect,
The story, flower like, closes thus its leaves.
The will of God is all in all. He makes,
Destroys, remakes, for His own pleasure, all.
After inferior nature is subdued,
The evil is confined. All elements
Conglobe themselves from chaos, purified.
The rebegotten world is born again.
The body and the soul cease; spirit lives:
And gloriously falsified are all
Earth’s caverned prophecies of bodyhood.
Spirits rise up and rule and link with Heaven;—
The soul state is searched into; dormant Death,
Evil, and all the dark gods of the heart,
And the idolatrous passions, ruined, chained,
And worshipless, are seen; and there, the Word,
Heard and obeyed;—next comes the truth divine,
Redintergrative; Evil’s last and worst,
Endeavour, vanquished—by Almighty good.
The last scene shows the final doom of earth,
Soul’s judgment, and salvation of the youth,
As was fore-fixed on from and in the first:
The universe expurgated of evil,
And hell for aye abolished; all create,
Redeemed, their God all love, themselves all bliss.
We may say that the sun is dead and gone
For ever; and may swear he will rise no more;
The skies may put on mourning for their God,
And earth heap ashes on her head: but who
Shall keep the sun back, when he thinks to rise?
Where is the chain shall bind him? Where the cell
Shall hold him? Hell, he would burn down to embers;
And would lift up the world with a lever of light
Out of his way: yet, know ye, ’twere thrice less
To do thrice this, than keep the soul from God.
O’er earth, and cloud, and sky, and star, and Heaven,
It dwells with God uprisen as a prayer.
The spirit speaks of God in Heaven’s own tongue,
No mystery to those who love, but learned,
As is our mother tongue, om Him, the parent;
By whom created, fashioned, flesh and spirit,
All forms and feelings of all kinds of beauty
Are burned into our heart-clay, pattern like.
Much too is writ, elsewhere and here, not yet,
Made clear, nor can be till earth come of age;
Like the unfinished rudiments of light
Which gather time by time into a star.
Thus have I shown the meaning of the book,
And the most truthful likeness of a mind,
Which hath as yet been limned; the mind of youth
In strengths and failings, in its overcomings,
And in its short comings; the kingly ends,
The universalizing heart of youth;
Its love of power, heed not how had, although
With surety of self-ruin at the end.
Every thing urged against it proves its truth
And faithfulness to nature. Some cried out
’Twas inconsistent; so ’twas meant to be.
Such is the very stamp of youth and nature;
And the continual losing sight of its aims,
And the desertion of its most expressed
And dearest rules and objects, this is youth.
I look on life as keeping me from God,
Stars, Heaven, and angels’ bosoms. I lay ill;
And the dark hot blood, throbbing through and through me;
They bled me and I swooned; and as I died,
Or seemed to die, a soft, sweet sadness fell
With a voluptuous weakness, on my soul,
That made me feel all happy. But my heart
Would live, and rose, and wrestled with the soul,
Which stretched its wings and strained its strength in vain,
Twining around it as a snake an eagle.
My eyes unclosed again, and I looked up,
And saw the sweet blue twilight, and one star,
One only star, in Heaven; and then I wished
That I had died and gone to it; and straight
Was glad I lived again, lo love once more.
And so our souls turn round upon themselves
Like orbs upon their axles: what was night
Is day; what day, night. God will guide us on,
Body and soul, through life and death, to judgment.
Earth hath her deserts mixed with fruitful plains;
The word of God is barren in some parts;
A rose is not all flower, but hath much
Which is of lower beauty, yet like needful;
And he who in great makings doth like these,
Doth only that which is most natural.
Like life too it is boundlessly unequal,
Now soaring, and now grovelling: at one time
All harmony, and then again all harshness,
With an ever-changing style of thought and speech.
The work is still consistent with itself:
As one part often bears upon another,
Lifting it to the light, where most it needs.
The thoughts we have of men are bold as men;
Our thoughts of God are thin and fleet as ghosts;
But it was not his meaning to draw men,
Such as he heard they were in the old world
And sometimes mixed with; he blessed God he knew
But little of the world, that little good;
While some sighed out that little was its all.
So for the persons and the scenes he drew,
Oft in a dim
