God.”
Progress
The Master stood upon the mount, and taught.
He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes;
“The old law,” they cried, “is wholly come to naught!
Behold the new world rise!”
“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw
The old law observed by Scribes and Pharisees?
I say unto you, see ye keep that law
More faithfully than these!
“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!
Think not that I to annul the law have will’d;
No jot, no tittle from the law shall pass,
Till all hath been fulfill’d.”
So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.
And what then shall be said to those to-day,
Who cry aloud to lay the old world low
To clear the new world’s way?
“Religious fervours! ardour misapplied!
Hence, hence,” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind!
But keep him self-immersed, preoccupied,
And lame the active mind.”
Ah! from the old world let some one answer give:
“Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?
I say unto you, see that your souls live
A deeper life than theirs.
“Say ye: The spirit of man has found new roads,
And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein?—
Leave then the Cross as ye have left carved gods,
But guard the fire within!
“Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll,
And no man may the other’s hurt behold;
Yet each will have one anguish—his own soul
Which perishes of cold.”
Here let that voice make end! then let a strain
From a far lonelier distance, like the wind
Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again
These men’s profoundest mind:
“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
For ever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look’d on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.
“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can,
Which has not fall’n on the dry heart like rain,
Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man:
Thou must be born again!
“Children of men! not that your age excel
In pride of life the ages of your sires,
But that you think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,
The Friend of man desires.”
The Future
A wanderer is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship
On the breast of the River of Time;
Brimming with wonder and joy
He spreads out his arms to the light,
Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.
As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.
Whether he wakes,
Where the snowy mountainous pass
Echoing the screams of the eagles
Hems in its gorges the bed
Of the new-born clear-flowing stream:
Whether he first sees light
Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain:
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea:—
As is the world on the banks
So is the mind of the man.
Vainly does each as he glides
Fable and dream
Of the lands which the River of Time
Had left ere he woke on its breast,
Or shall reach when his eyes have been clos’d.
Only the tract where he sails
He wots of: only the thoughts,
Rais’d by the objects he passes, are his.
Who can see the green Earth any more
As she was by the sources of Time?
Who imagines her fields as they lay
In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought,
The tribes who then roam’d on her breast,
Her vigorous primitive sons?
What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
What Bard,
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt
When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?
Can rise and obey
The beck of the Spirit like him?
This tract which the River of Time
Now flows through with us, is the Plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Border’d by cities and hoarse
With a thousand cries is its stream.
And we on its breast, our minds
Are confus’d as the cries which we hear,
Changing and shot as the sights which we see.
And we say that repose has fled
For ever the course of the River of Time.
That cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker, incessanter line;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream,
Flatter the plain where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead.
That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,
Drink of the feeling of quiet again.
But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.
Haply, the River of Time,
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider statelier stream—
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.
And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast:
As the pale Waste widens around him—
As the banks fade dimmer away—
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea.
A Summer Night
In the deserted moon-blanch’d street
How lonely rings the echo of my feet!
Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,
Silent and white, unopening down,
Repellent as the world:—but see!
A break between the housetops shows
The moon, and, lost behind her, fading dim
Into the dewy dark obscurity
Down at the far horizon’s rim,
Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose.
And to my mind the thought
Is on a sudden brought
Of a past night, and a far different scene.
Headlands stood out into the moonlit deep
As clearly as at noon;
The spring-tide’s brimming flow
Heav’d dazzlingly between;
Houses with long white sweep
Girdled the glistening bay:
Behind, through the soft air,
The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.
That night was far more fair;
But the same restless pacings to and fro,
And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,
And the same bright calm moon.
And the calm moonlight seems to say—
Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast
That neither deadens into rest
Nor ever feels the fiery glow
That whirls the spirit from itself away,
But fluctuates
