Classic Poem

When first my infant eyes took in the glory
Of this fair earth,
Ere on them fell the shadow of the story
Of mortal birth,
The blessed light above seemed but one fusion
Of many a sun,
And closing, they imprisoned the illusion
That Heaven was won.

When I looked forth again, God's bright creation
Revealed its forms
Beneath the orb which every constellation
Illumes and warms
I then discovered 'mid the heavenly spaces
Vast depths of blue,
And on the earth the landscape's myriad graces,
Of varied hue;

Unconscious that, as cleared the golden vision,
It darker grew,
I revelled in green fields and groves Elysian
With joys all new;
The sun seemed sent to me alone for reading
Nature's great book,
O'er which I pored wherever fancy, leading,
My footsteps took.

Oh, then, Aladdin-like, I gathered treasures
On golden stems;
First fruits and flowers, then clutched at empty pleasures,
As precious gems.
But soon these luresome objects lost their shimmer,
As in a ball,
When wax-lights wane, the waltzer's eyes flit dimmer
Around the hall.

To childhood's lively joys succeeded sorrows
Poignant and stern,
As he who from a miser silver borrows,
Gold must return;
For manhood hath no sportive recreations
Like schoolboy plays,
No anguish keener than when in vacations
Come rainy days.

And soon my soul began its second training
With new-born zest;
I thought to spend one half of life explaining
What meant the rest;
And found the problem solved and the equation
Like some tall peak
Attained, which reaches but the adumbration
Of what you seek.

And when with every sense alive to Nature,
By day and night,
Familiarly I knew her every feature
Shaded and bright;
With adolescence came an empty craving
For the unknown;
As thinks the spendthrift butterfly of saving
When summer's gone.

And then, the sad reflection realising,
How brief is life,
Behold the soul against the senses rising
In bitter strife
Existence, like the fleeting year, had seasons,
And in the end —
I could not through its gloom divine the reasons —
Must graveward tend.

Through misty tears, a God-like face and lowly
In rainbows beamed,
Around whose bleeding brow a radiance holy,
Upshooting, gleamed.
But though toward earth big drops of blood still rolling,
Did lingering fall,
He said with tender voice, His pain controlling,
" I died for all. "

Since from His bow-shaped lips, like golden arrows
Those words did speed,
No more my heart an endless craving harrows
With hunger's need;
Already, when I lift my eyes to heaven,
I see but light,
And scenes once fair below, from morn to even
Are dark as night.