Classic Poem

The hymns and prayers were done, and the village church was still,
As I lay in a waking dream in the churchyard upon the hill.

The graves were all around, and the dark yews over my head,
And below me the winding stream and the exquisite valley were spread.

The sun was sloping down with a glory of dying rays,
And the hills were bathed in gold, and the woods were vocal with praise.

But from the deep set valley there rose a vapour of gray,
And the sweet day sank, and the glory waxed fainter and faded away.

Then there came, like a chilling wind, a cold, low whisper of doubt,
Which silenced the echo of hymns, and blotted the glories out.

And I wrestled with powers unseen, and strove with a Teacher divine,
Like Jacob who strove with the angel, and found with the dawn a sign.

*****

For I thought of the words they sang: “It is He that hath made us indeed”;
And my thought flew back to the Fathers of thought and their atheist creed—

How atom with atom at first fortuitously combined,
Formed all, from the worlds without to the innermost worlds of mind;

And I thought: What, if this be true, and no Maker there is indeed,
And God is the symbol alone of a feeble and worn-out creed;

And from uncreate atoms impelled by a blind chance driving on free,
Grew together the primal forms of all essences that be!

Then a voice: If they were, indeed, they were separate one from one
By a gulph as broad as yawns in space betwixt sun and sun—

Self-centred and self-contained, disenvironed and isolate;
Drawn together by a hidden love, torn apart by a hidden hate.

What power was this—chance, will you say? But chance, what else can it mean
Than the hidden Cause of things by human reason unseen?

Chance! Then Chance were a name for God, or each atom bearing a soul
Indivisible, like with like, part and whole of the Infinite Whole.

Were God, as the Pantheist taught, God in earth, and in sky, and in air,
God through every thought and thing, and made manifest everywhere;

The spring and movement of things—the stir, the breathing of breath,
Without which all things were quenched in the calm of an infinite death;

Or, if within each there lay some germ of an unborn power,
God planted it first, God quickened, God raised it from seed to flower.

Though beneath the weird cosmical force, which we wield and yet cannot name,
From the germ or the rock we draw out low gleams of life's faintest flame;

Though we lose the will that commands, and the muscles that wait and serve,
In some haze of a self-set spring of the molecules of nerve;

Though we sink all spirit in matter, and let the Theogonies die,
Life and death are; thinker and thought; outward, inward; I, and not I,
And the I is the Giver of life, and without it the matter must die.

*****

Then I ceased for a while from thought, as I lay on the long green grass,
Hearing echoes of hymns anew, and letting the moments pass.

The evening was mounting upward; the sunbeams had left the hill;
But the dying daylight lingered, and all the valley was still.

*****

Then I said: But if God there be, how shall man by his thinking find,
Who is only a finite creature, the depths of the Infinite Mind—

Who sounds with a tiny plummet, who scans with a purblind eye,
The depths of that fathomless ocean, the wastes of that limitless sky?

Shall we bow to a fetish, a symbol, which maybe nor sees nor hears;
Or, seeing and hearing indeed, takes no thought for our hopes or fears;

Who is dumb, though we long for a word; who is deaf, though his children cry;
Who is Master, yet bears with evil—Lord, and lets all precious things die?

Or if in despair we turn from the godless and meaningless plan,
What do we, but make for ourselves a God in the image of man—

A creature of love and hate, a creature who makes for good,
But barred by an evil master from working the things that he would?

If he be not a reflex image, we may not know him at all;
If he be, we are God ourselves—to ourselves we shall stand or fall.

Then the voice: But what folly is this! Cannot God indeed be known
If we know not the hidden essence that forms Him and builds His throne?

Is all our knowledge naught, of sea, and of sky, and of star,
Till we know them, not as they seem to our thinking, but as they are?

We who build the whole fabric of knowledge on vague abstractions sublime;
We who whirl through an infinite Space, and live in an infinite Time;

We who prate of Motion and Force, not knowing that on either side
Black gulphs unavoidable yawn, dark riddles our thought deride;

Shall we hold our science as naught in all things of earth, because
We know but the seemings and shows, the relations, and not the cause—

Not only as he who admires the rainbow and cloud of gold,
Knows that 'tis but a form of vapour his wondering eyes behold;

But as he who sees and knows, and knowing would fain ignore
What he knows since the essence of things is hid, and he knows not more—

Or who would not love his love, or walk hand in hand with his friend,
Though he sees not the roots of the tree from whose branches life's blossoms
depend?

Or how should the sight we see, any mole than the sound we hear,
Be a thing which exists for our thought, apart from the eye or the ear;

Is not every atom of dust, which compacted we call the earth,
A miracle baffling our thought with insoluble wonders of birth?

And know we not, indeed, that the matter which men have taught,
Is itself an essence unseen and untouched—but by spirit and thought?

Tush! It is but a brain-sick dream. What was it that taught us the laws
Which stand as a bar between us and the thought of the Infinite Cause?

Is He infinite, out of relation, and absolute, past finding out?
Reach we not an antinomy here? feel we here no striving of doubt?

How, then, shall the finite define the bounds of the infinite plan,
This is finite, and infinite this: here is Deity, here is man?

If our judgment be relative only, how then shall our brain transcend
The limits of relative thought; grown too eager to comprehend?

For he passes the bounds of relation, if any there be who can
Distinguish the absolute God from the relative in man:

He has bridged the gulph; he has leaped o'er the bound; he has seen with his eyes
For a moment the land unseen, that beyond the mountain peaks lies.

Nay! we see but a part of God, since we gaze with a finite sight;
And yet not Darkness is He, but a blinding splendour of light.

Do we shrink from this light, and let our dazzled eyeballs fall?
Nay, a God fully known or utterly dark, were not God at all.

Though we hold not that in some sphere which our thoughts may never conceive,
There comes not a time when, to know may be all, and not, to believe;

Nor yet that the right which we love, and the wrong which we hate to-day,
May not show as reversed, or as one, when the finite has passed away;

God we know in our image indeed, since we are in the image of Him,
Of His splendour a faint low gleam, of His glory a reflex dim.

Bowing not to the all unknown, nor to that which is searched out quite;
But to That which is known, yet unknown—to the darkness that comes of light,
To the contact of God with man, to the struggle and triumph of right.

*****

Then I ceased for a while from thought, as I lay on the long green grass,
Hearing echoes of hymns grown nearer, and letting the moments pass

Exult, oh dust and ashes! the low voices seemed to say;
And then came a sudden hush, and the jubilance faded away.

The evening was dying now, and the moon-rise was on the hill,
And the soft light touched the river, and all the valley was still.

*****

Then I thought: But if God there be, and our thought may reach Him indeed,
How should this bare knowledge alone stand in lieu of a fuller creed?

If He be and is good, as they say, how yet can our judgment approve,
'Mid the rule of His iron laws, the place of His infinite love?

The rocks are built up of death, earth and sea teem with ravin and wrong;
The sole law in Nature we learn, is the law that strengthens the strong

Through countless ages of time, the Lord has withdrawn Him apart
From all the world He has made, save the world of the human heart

Without and within all is pain, from the cry of the child at birth,
To its parting sigh in age, when it looks for a happier earth.

Should you plead that God's order goes forth with a measured footstep sublime,
Know you not that you thrust Him back thus to the first beginnings of time,—

That a spark, a moment, a flash, and His work was over and done;
And the worlds were sent forth for ever, each circling around its sun.

Bearing with it all secrets of being, all potencies undefined,
All forms and changes of matter, all growths and achievements of mind.

What is there for our worship in this, and should not our reason say,
He is, and made us indeed, but hides Him too far away?

Though He lives, yet is He as one dead; and we, who would prostrate fall
Before the light of His Presence, we see not nor know Him at all

Then the voice: Oh folly of doubt! what is time that we deem so far,
What else but a multiple vast of the little lives that are?

He who lives for the fifty years, which scarce rear thought to its prime,
Already a measure has lived of a thousand years of time.

Twice this, and Christ spoke not yet, and from this what a span appears,
The space till our thought is lost in the mists of a million years!

A thousand millions of years—we have leapt with a thought, with a word;
To the time when no flutter of life 'neath the shield of the trilobite stirred

All time is too brief for our thought, and yet we would bring God nigh,
Till He worked in His creature's sight, man standing undazzled by.

Such a God were not God indeed; nor, if He should change at all,
Should we hold, as we hold Him now, the God of both great and small

How know we the great things from small? how mark we the adequate cause,
Which might make the Creator impede the march of His perfect laws,—

We, who know but a part, not the whole? Or were it a fitting thought
He should stoop in our sight to amend the errors His hand had wrought,

So His laws were not perfect at all? or should He amend them indeed,
How supply by a fitful caprice the want of a normal creed?

All life is a mode of force, and all force that is force must move;
'Tis a friction of Outward and Inward, a contrast of Hatred and Love.

Joy and Grief, Right and Wrong, Life and Death, Finite, Infinite, Matter and Will,
These are the twin wheels of the Chariot of Life, which without them stood still.

Would you seek in an order reversed and amended a Hand divine?
Nay the Wonder of wonders lies in unchangeable design.

Should God break His law as He might; should He stoop from His infinite skies
To redress that which seems to us wrong, to raise up the life that dies;

Should He save from His wolf His lamb, from His tiger His innocent child;
Should He quench the fierce flames, or still the great waves clamouring wild,

I think a great cry would go up from an orderless Universe,
And all the fair fabric of things would wither, as under a curse.

'Tis the God of the savage, is this. What do we who rise by degrees
To the gift of the mind that perceives, and the gift of the eye that sees?

Does not all our nature tend to a law of unbending rule,
Till equity comes but to mend the law that was made by the fool?

Who shows highest?—the child of the savage, whose smiles change to rage or to tears?
Or the statesman moving, unmoved, through a nation's desires and fears?

Or the pilgrim whose eyes look onward, as if to a distant home,
Never turning aside from his path, whatever allurements may come?

All Higher is more Unmoved; and the more unbroken the law,
The more sure does the Giver show to the eyes of a wondering awe.

Nor is it with all of truth that they make their voices complain,
Who weary our thought with tales of a constant ruin and pain

It is but a brain-sick dream that would gloat o'er the hopeless bed,
Or the wreck, or the crash, or the fight, with their tales of the dying or dead.

Pain comes; hopeless pain, God knows and we know, again and again;
But even pain has its intervals blest, when 'tis heaven to be free from pain.

And I think that the wretch who lies pressed by a load of incurable ill,
With a grave pity pities himself, but would choose to have lived to it still;

And, as he whom the tiger bears in his jaws to his bloodstained den
Feels no pain nor fear, but a wonder, what comes in the wonderful “Then,”

He pities himself and yet knows, as he casts up life's chequered sum,
It were best on the whole to have lived, whatever calamity come.

And the earth is full of joy. Every blade of grass that springs;
Every cool worm that crawls content as the eagle on soaring wings;

Every summer day instinct with life; every dawn when from waking bird
And morning hum of the bee, a chorus of praise is heard;

Every gnat that sports in the sun for his little life of a day;
Every flower that opens its cup to the dews of a perfumed May;

Every child that wakes with a smile, and sings to the ceiling at dawn;
Every bosom which knows a new hope stir beneath its virginal lawn;

Every young soul, ardent and high, rushing forth into life's hot fight;
Every home of happy content, lit by love's own mystical light;

Every worker who works till the evening, and earns before night his wage,
Be his work a furrow straight-drawn, or the joy of a bettered age;

Every thinker who, standing aloof from the throng, finds a high delight
In striking with tongue or with pen a stroke for the triumph of right;—

All these know that life is sweet; all these, with a consonant voice,
Read the legend of Time with a smile, and that which they read is, “Rejoice!”

*****

Then again I ceased from thought, as I lay on the long green grass,
Hearing hymns which grew fuller and fuller, and letting the moments pass

Exult, oh dust and ashes! exult and rejoice! they said,
For blesséd are they who live, and blesséd are they who are dead

Then again they ceased and were still, and my thought began once more,
But touched with a silvery gleam of hopes that were hidden before;

The moon had climbed up the clear sky, far above the black pines on the hill,
And the river ran molten silver, and all the valley was still.

*****

Then I said: But if God there be, who made us indeed and is good,
What guide has He left for our feet to walk in the ways that He would?

For though He should speak indeed, yet, as soon as His voice grew dumb,
It were only through human speech that the message it bore might come,

Sunk to levels of human thought, and always marred and confined
By the chain of a halting tongue, and the curse of a finite mind;

So that he who would learn, indeed, what precepts His will has taught,
Must dim with a secular learning the brightness his soul has sought.

Who can tell how those scattered leaves through gradual ages grew,
Adding chaff and dust from the world to the accents simple and true?

If one might from the seer's wild visions, or stories of fraud and blood,
Or lore of the world-worn Sultan, discern the sure voice of good,

Such a mind were a God to itself; or if you should answer, For each
God has set a sure mentor within, with power to convince and teach;

Yet it speaks with a changeful voice, which alters with race and clime,
Nay, even in the self-same lands is changed with the changes of time;

So that 'twixt the old Europe of story and that which we know to-day,
Yawns a gulph, as wide almost as parts us from far Cathay;

What power has such voice to help us? Or if we should turn instead
To the precious dissonant pages, which keep what the Teacher said;

How reduce them to one indeed, or how seek in vain to ignore
The forgotten teachers who taught His counsels of mercy before?

Not “an eye for an eye” alone, was the rule which they loved to teach,
But Mercy, and Pity, and Love, though they spoke with a halting speech,

And He spake with the tongue of those who had spoken and then were dumb,
And clothed in the words of the Law, which He loved, would His precepts come;

Other teachers have drawn more millions, who follow more faithful than we;
Other teachers have taught a rule as stern and unselfish as He.

If we shrink from the Caliph fierce, who carved out a faith with his sword,
What say we of the pilgrim who sways the old East with his gentle word?

Or what of the sage whose vague thoughts, over populous wastes of earth,
Have led millions of fettered feet to the grave from the day of birth?

Or how can we part indeed, the show, the portent, the sign,
From the simple words which glow with the light of a teaching Divine?

And if careless of these, as of growths which spring up and bear fruit and fall,
Yet how shall our thought accept the crowning wonder of all?

Yet if this we reject, wherein, doth our faith and assurance lie?
What is it to us that God lives, we who live for a little and die;

Or why were it not more wise to live as the beasts of to-day,
Taking life, while it lasts, as a gift, and secure of the future as they?

Then the voice: Oh, disease of doubt! now I seem to hold you indeed,
Keeping fast in my grasp at length the sum of your dreary creed.

How else should man prove God's will, than through methods of human thought?
How else than through human words should he gather the things that he ought?

If the Lord should speak day by day from Sinai, in clouds and in fire,
Should we hear 'mid those thunders loud the still voices which now inspire?

Would not either that awful sound, like that vivid and scorching blaze,
Confuse our struggling thought, and our tottering footsteps amaze?

Or, if it should peal so clear that to hear were to obey indeed,
'Twere a thing of dry knowledge alone, not one of a faithful creed;

No lantern for erring feet, but a glare on a white, straight road,
Where life struggled its weary day, to sink before night with its load;

Where the blinded soul might long for the shade of a cloud of doubt,
And yearn for dead silence, to blot that terrible utterance out.

Yet God is not silent indeed; not seldom from every page—
From the lisping story of eld to the seer with his noble rage;

From the simple life divine, with its accents gentle and true,
To the thinker who formed by his learning and watered the faith as it grew;

All are fired by the Spirit of God. Nor true is the doubt you teach,
That God speaks not to all men the same, but differs 'twixt each and each.

Each differs from each a little, with difference of race and of clime;
Each is changed, but not transformed, with the onward process of time;

Each nation, each age, has its laws, whereto it shall stand or fall,
But built on a wider Law, which is under and over them all.

Nor doubt we that from Western wilds to the long-sealed isles of Japan,
There runs the unbroken realm of a Law that is common to man.

Not as ours shows the law they obey, and yet it is one and the same,
Though it comes in a varying shape, and is named by another name.

Not so shall your doubt prevail: nor if any should dream to-day,
By praise of Jew or of Greek, to dissolve His glory away,

Can they hold that God left His world with no gleam of glory from Him,
No light clouds edged with splendour, no radiance of Godhead dim.

Others were before Christ had come. Oh! dear dead Teacher, whose word,
Long before the sweet voice on the Hill, young hearts had quickened and stirred;

Who spak'st of the soul and the life; with limbs chilled by the rising death,
Yielding up to thy faith, with a smile, the last gasp of thy earthly breath;—

And thou, oh golden-mouthed sage, who with brilliance of thought as of tongue,
Didst sing of thy Commonwealth fair, the noblest of epics unsung;

In whose pages thy Master's words shine forth, sublimed and refined
In the music of perfect language, inspired by a faithful mind;—

And ye seers of Israel and doctors, whose breath was breathed forth to move
The dry dead bones of the Law with the life of a larger love;—

And thou, great Saint of the East, in whose footsteps the millions have trod
Till from life, like an innocent dream, they pass'd and were lost in God;—

And thou, quaint teacher of old, whose dead words, though all life be gone,
Through the peaceful Atheist realms keep the millions labouring on;—

Shall I hold that ye, as the rest, spake no echo of accents divine,
That no gleam of a clouded sun through the mists of your teaching may shine?

Nay; such thoughts were to doubt of God Yet, strange it is and yet sure,
No teacher of old was full of mercy as ours, or pure.

'Twixt the love that He taught, and the Greek's with its foul abysses of shame,
Lies the gulph between Heaven's calm light and the fumes of sulphurous flame;

'Twixt His rule of a Higher Mercy and that which the Rabbi taught,
Lies the gulph between glowing Act and barren ashes of Thought.

For the pure thought smirched and fouled, or buried in pedant lore,
He brought a sweet Reason of Force, such as man knew never before.

What to us are the men of the East, though they preach their own Gospel indeed?
We are men of the West, and shall stand or fall by a Western creed.

Though we see in those Scriptures antique, faint flames of Diviner fire,
Who would change to Buddha from Christ, as a change from lower to higher?

Nay! He is our Teacher indeed. Little boots it to-day to seek
To arraign, with a laboured learning, the words that men heard Him speak;

To cavil, to carp, to strive, through the mists of an age long haze,
To dim to a common light the star which could once amaze;

To fix by some pigmy canon, too short for the tale of to-day,
The facts of a brief life, fled eighteen centuries away;

To mark by a guess, and to spurn, as born of a later age,
The proofs which, whenever writ, bear God's finger on every page;

Or to sneer at the wonders they saw Him work, or believed they saw;
We who know that unbending sequence is only a phase of law,

No wonder which God might do if it rested on witness of men,
Would turn to it our thought of to-day as it turned the multitude then.

Nor proved would avail a whit if the teaching itself were not pure;
Nor if it were pure as His would make it one whit more sure.

And for the great Wonder of all. If any there be who fears
That the spark of God in his breast may be quenched in a few short years;

Who feels his faith's fire blaze aloft more clear than it burnt before,
By the thought of the empty tomb and the stone rolled back from the door:

For him was the miracle done. If no proof makes clearer to me
Than His word to my inner sense, the Higher life that shall be;

If no Force that has once leapt forth can ever decline and fall,
From the dead forces stirring the worlds, to the Life-force which dominates all;

But the sum of life is the same, and shall be when the world is done,
As it was when its first faint spark was stirred by the kiss of the sun;—

If I feel a sure knowledge within, which shall never be blotted out,
A Longing, a Faith, a Conviction, too strong for a Whisper of Doubt.

That my life shall be hid with a Lord, who shall do the thing that is best—
To be purged, it may be, long time, or taken at once to rest,—

To live, it may be, myself; from all else, individual, sole,
Or blended with other lives, or sunk in the Infinite whole—

Though I doubt not that that which is I may endure in the ages to be,
Since I know not what bars hold apart the Not-Me and the mystical Me;—

How else than thro' Him do I grasp the faith that for Greek and Jew
Was hidden, or but dimly seen, which nor Moses nor Sokrates knew?

Ay! He is our Teacher indeed. He is risen, and we shall rise;
But if only as we He rose, not the less he lives in the skies.

And if those who proclaim Him to-day in the dim gray lands of the East,
Prove him not by portent or sign, not by trick or secret of priest;

But for old cosmogonies dead, and faint precepts too weak for our need,
Offer God brought nearer to man in a living and glowing creed.

The pure teaching, the passionate love, taking thought for the humble and weak,
The pitiful scorn of wrong, which His Scriptures everywhere speak,

Not writ for the sage in his cell, but preached 'mid the turmoil and strife,
And touched with a living brand from the fire of the Altar of Life.

So, of all the wonders they tell, no wonder our hearts has stirred
Like the Wonder which lives with us still in a living and breathing Word.

More than portents, more than all splendours of rank loyal hearts devise,
More than visions of heavenly forms caught up and lost in the skies,

This the crowning miracle shows, before which we must prostrate fall;
For this is the living voice of the Lord and Giver of all.

*****

Then I ceased again from thought, as I lay on the long grave-grass,
Thrilled through by a music of hymns, and letting the moments pass.

“Exult and rejoice!” they sang in high unison, now combined
Which were warring voices before, the voices of heart and mind.

The earth was flooded with light, over valley and river and hill,
And this is the hymn which I heard them sing, while the world lay still:

“Exult, oh dust and ashes! Rejoice, all ye that are dead!
For ye live too who lie beneath, as we live who walk overhead.

As God lives, so ye are living; ye are living and moving to-day,
Not as they live who breathe and move, yet living and conscious as they.

And ye too, oh living, exult. Young and old, exult and rejoice;
For the Lord of the quick and the dead lives for ever: we hear His voice.

We have heard His voice, and we hear it sound wider and more increased,
To the sunset plains of the West from the peaks of the furthest East.

For the quick and the dead, it was given; for them it is sounding still,
And no pause of silence arrests the clear voice of the Infinite Will.

Not only through Christ long since, and the teachers of ages gone,
But to-day He speaks, day by day, to those who are toiling on;

More clear perhaps then, to the ear, and with nigher voice and more plain,
But still the same Teacher Divine, speaking to us again and again.

For I like not his creed, if any there be, who shall dare to hold
That God comes to us only at times far away in the centuries old.

Not so; but He dwells with us still; and maybe, though I know not indeed,
He will send us a Christ again, with a fuller and perfecter creed—

A Christ who shall speak to all men, East and West, and North and South,
Till the whole world shall hear and believe the gracious words of His mouth.

When knowledge has pierced through the wastes, chaining earth together and sea,
And the bars of to-day are lost in the union of all that shall be;

And the brotherhood that He loved is more than a saintly thought,
And the wars and the strifes which we mourn are lost in the peace He taught;

Then Christ coming shall make all things new. Or it may be that ages of pain
Shall quench the dim light of to-day, bringing back the thick darkness again.

And then, slow as the tide which flows on though each wave may seem to recede,
Man advances again and again to the Rock of a higher creed.

Or it may be no teacher shall come down again with God in his face,
But the light which before was reflected from One shall shine on the Race.

And as this wide earth grows smaller, and men to men nearer draw,
There may spring from the root of the race the flower of a nobler law,

Growing fairer, and still more fair; or maybe, through long ages of time,
Man shall rise up from type to type, to the strength of an essence sublime,

Removed as far in knowledge, in length of life, and in good
From us, as we from the mollusc which gasped in the first warm flood,—

A creature so wise and so high that he scorns all allurement of ill,
Marching on through an ordered life in the strength of a steadfast will.

Who knows? But, however it be, we live, and shall live indeed,
In ourselves or in others to come. What more doth our longing need?

Hid with God, or on earth, we shall see, burning brighter and yet more bright,
The sphere of humanity move throughout time on its pathway of light;

Circling round with a narrower orbit, as age upon age fleets away,
The Centre of Force and of Being, the Fountain of Light and of Day,

Till, nearer drawn, and more near, at last it shall merge and fall
In its source; man is swallowed in God, the Part is lost in the All;

One more world is recalled to rest, one more star adds its fire to the sun,
One light less wanders thro' space, and the story of man is done!”

*****

Then slowly I rose to go from my place on the long grave-grass,
Where so long I had lain in deep musings, letting the moments pass:

A great light was flooding the plains of the earth and the uttermost sky,
The low church and the deep sunk vale, and the place where one day I shall lie,

The fresh graves of those we have lost, the dark yews with their reverend gloom,
And the green wave which only marks the place of the nameless tomb;

And thro' all the spaces above—oh wonder! oh glory of Light!—
Came forth myriads on myriads of worlds, the shining host of the night,—

The vast forces and fires that know the same sun and centre as we;
The faint planets which roll in vast orbits round suns we shall never see;

The rays which had sped from the first, with the awful swiftness of light,
To reach only then, it might be, the confines of mortal sight:

Oh, wonder of Cosmical Order! oh, Maker and Ruler of all,
Before whose Infinite greatness in silence we worship and fall!

Could I doubt that the Will which keeps this great Universe steadfast and sure
Might be less than His creatures thought, full of goodness, pitiful, pure?

Could I dream that the Power which keeps those great suns circling around,
Took no thought for the humblest life which flutters and falls to the ground?

“Oh, Faith! thou art higher than all.” Then I turned from the glories above,
And from every casement new-lit there shone a soft radiance of love:

Young mothers were teaching their children to fold little hands in prayer;
Strong fathers were resting from toil, 'mid the hush of the Sabbath air;

Peasant lovers strolled thro' the lanes, shy and diffident, each with each,
Yet knit by some subtle union too fine for their halting speech:

Humble lives, to low thought, and low; but linked, to the thinker's eye,
By a bond that is stronger than death, with the lights of the ultimate sky:

Here as there, the great drama of life rolled on, and a jubilant voice
Thrilled through me ineffable, vast, and bade me exult and rejoice;

Exult and rejoice, oh soul! sang my being to a mystical hymn
As I passed by the cool bright wolds, as I threaded my pinewoods dim;

Rejoice and be sure! as I passed to my fair home under the hill,
Wrapt round with a happy content,—and the world and my soul were still!