Or suns, to govern lesser restless minds,
While they stand still and burn with life; to keep
Them in their places, and to light and heat them.
If I desire immortal life for aught,
It is to learn the mystery of mind
And somewhat more of God. Let others rule
Systems or succour saints, if such things please;
To live like light or die in light like dew,
Either! I should be blest.
It may not be.
For as we do not see the sun himself,
It is but the light about him, like a ring
Of glory round the forehead of a saint, so
God thou wilt never see. His unveiled love
Were terrible, too mud for man to meet.
Men have a claim on God; and none who hath
A heart of kindness, reverence and love,
But dare look God in the face and ask His smile.
He dwells in no fierce light—no cloud of flame;
And if it were, Faith’s eye can look through Hell,
And through the solid world. We must all think
On God. Yon water must reflect the sky.
Midnight! Day hath too much light for us,
To see things spiritually. Mind and Night
Will meet, though in silence, like forbidden lovers,
With whom to see each other’s sacred form
Must satisfy. The stillness of deep bliss,
Sound as the silence of the high hill-top
Where thunder finds no echo—like God’s voice
Upon the worldling’s proud, cold, rocky heart—
Fills full the sky; and the eye shares with Heaven
That look, so like to feeling, which the bright
And glorious things of Nature ever wear.
There is much to think and feel of things beyond
This earth; which lie, as we deem, upwards—far
From the day’s glare and riot—they are Night’s!
Oh! could we lift the future’s sable shroud!
Behind a shroud what shouldst thou see but death?
Spirit is like the thread whereon are strung
The beads or worlds of life. It may be here,
It may be there that I shall live again;
In yon strange world whose long nights know no star,
But seven fair maidlike moons attending him
Perfect his sky—perchance in one of those—
But live again I shall wherever it be.
We long to learn the future—love to guess.
The science of the future is to man,
But what the shadow of the wind might be.
Such thoughts are vain and useless.
Forced oh us.
All things are of necessity.
Then best.
But the good are never fatalists. The bad
Alone act by necessity, they say.
It matters not what men assume to be;
Or good, or bad, they are but what they are.
What is necessity? Are we, and thou,
And all the worlds, and the whole infinite
We cannot see, but working out God’s thoughts?
And have we no self-action? Are all God?
Then hath He sin and all absurdity.
Yet, if created Being have free-will,
Is it not wrong to judge it may traverse
God’s own high will, and yet impossible
To think on’t otherwise?
It may be so.
All creature wills, and all their ends and powers
Must come within the boundless scope of God’s.
And all our powers are but weaknesses
To what we shall have, and to that God hath.
Doth not the wish, too, point the likelihood
Of life to come?
Boys wish that they were kings.
And so with thee. A deathless spirit’s state,
Freed from gross form and bodily weightiness,
Seems kingly by the side of souk like thine.
And boys and men will likely both be balked.
What if it be, that spirit, after death,
Is loosed like flesh into its elements?
The worlds which man hath constellated, hold
No fellowship in nature; nor perchance
As he hath systematised life, mind and soul.
But sooth to say, I know not aught of this.
I have no kind. No nature like to me
Exists. And human spirits must at least
Sleep till the day of doom, if it ever be.
Hast never known one free from body?
None.
Why seek then to destroy them?
It is my part.
Let ruin bury ruin. Let it be
Woe here, woe there, woe, woe, be everywhere!
It is not for me to know, nor thee, the end
Of evil. I inflict and thou must bear.
The arrow knoweth not its end and aim.
And I keep rushing, ruining along
Like a great river rich with dead men’s souls.
For if I knew, I might rejoice; and that
To me by Nature is forbidden. I know
Nor joy nor sorrow; but a changeless tone
Of sadness like the nightwind’s is the strain
Of what I have of feeling. I am not
As other spirits—but a solitude
Even to myself; I the sole spirit sole.
Can none of thine immortals answer me?
None, mortal!
Where then is thy vaunted power?
It is better seen as thus I stand apart
From all. Mortality is mine—the green
Unripened universe. But as the fruit
Matures, and world by world drops mellowed off
The wrinkling stalk of Time, as thine own race
Hath seen of stars now vanished—all is hid
From me. My part is done. What after comes
I know not more than thou.
Raise me a spirit!
Awake ye dead! out with the secret, death!
The grave hath no pride nor the rise-again.
Let each one bring the bane whereof he died.
Bring the man his, the maiden hers! Oh! half
Mankind are murderers of themselves or souls.
Yea, what is life but lingering suicide?
Wake, dead! Ye know the truth; yet there ye lie
All mingling, mouldering, perishing together
Like, run sand in the hour-glass of old Time.
Death is the mad world’s asylum. There is peace;
Destruction’s quiet and equality.
Night brings out stars as sorrow shows as truths:
Though many, yet they help not; bright, they light not.
They are too late to serve us: and sad things
Are aye too true. We never see the stars
Till we can see nought but them. So with truth.
And yet if one would look down a deep well,
Even at noon, we might see those same stars
Far fairer than the blinding blue—the truth;
Probe the profound of thine own nature, man!
And thou may’st see reflected, e’en in life,
The worlds, the Heavens, the ages; by and by,
The coming come. Then welcome, world-eyed Truth!
But there are other eyes men better love
Than Truth’s: for when we have her she is so cold,
And
