swayOf thy life in them, their own living part,
Whether in centuried pulses of the rock
By slow disintegration
Ascending to its higher,
Or the quick fluttering of the Storm-god's heart,—
An instant's palpitation
Through all its arteries of fire!
One common blood runs down life's myriad veins,
From Archangelic Hierarchs who float
Broad-winged in the God-glory, to the mote
That trembles with a braided dance
In the warm sunset's vivid glance;
And one great Heart that boundless flow sustains!
In all the creatures of thy hand divine
Thy love-light is a living guest,
Whether a petal's palm confine
Its glitter to a lily's breast,
Or in unbounded space a starry line
Stretches, till flagging Thought must droop her wing to rest.
Oh, let me not die young,
A powerless child among
The ancient grandeurs of thy awful world!
I catch some fragment of the mighty song
Which, ere to darkness hurled,
My elder brothers in the eternal throng
Have caught before,—
Faint murmurs of the surge,
The deep, surrounding, everlasting roar
Of a life-ocean without port or shore,—
Ere I depart, compelled to urge
My fragile bark with trembling from the verge
Of this Earth-island, into that Unknown,
Where worlds, like souls forlorn, go wandering alone!
Oh, let me not die young,
With all that song unsung,
A swift and voiceless fugitive,
From darkness coming and in darkness lost,
Before thy solemn Pentecost,
Dawning within the soul, shall give
The burning utterance of its flaming tongue,—
The boon whereby to other souls we live!
Thy worlds are flashing with immortal splendor,
For human speech on heights of human song
Faintly to render,
And pour back along
Its mountain grandeur, the accumulate rain
Of star-light, dream-light, thoughts of joy and pain,
Of love, hate, right and wrong,
In floods of utterance sublime and strong,
In dewy effluence beautiful and tender.
The kindred darknesses
Of caverned earth and fathomless thought,
Of Life and Death, and their twin mysteries,
Before and After, on my spirit press
Tempting and awful, with high promise fraught,
And guardian terrors, whose out-flashing swords
Beleaguer Paradise and the holy Tree
Sciential. Step by step the way is fought
That leads from Darkness, through her miscreant hordes,
Back to the heavens of wise, and true, and free:
Minerva's Gorgon, Ammon's cyclic Asp,
And the fierce flame-sword of the Cherubim,
That flashed like hate across the pallid gasp
Of exiled Eve and Adam, flare, and glare,
And hiss venenate, round the steps of him
Who thirsts for heavenly Wisdom, if he dare
Climb to her bosom, or with artless grasp
Pluck the sweet fruits that hang around him, ripe and fair.
Oh! glorious Youth
Is the true age of prophecy, when Truth
Stands bared in beauty, and the young blood boils
To hurl us in her arms, before the blur
Of time makes dim her rounded form,
Or the cold blood recoils
From the polluted swarm
Of armed Chimeras that environ her.
But worthy Age to ripened fruit shall bring
The glorious blooming of its hopeful spring,
And pile the garners of immortal Truth
With sheaves of golden grain,
To sow the world again,
And fill the eager wants of the New Age's youth.
A thousand flashes of uncertain light
Cleave the thick darkness, driving far athwart
The up-piled glooms, as lightnings plough their bright
Fire-furrows through the barren cloud
They sow with thunders. Thought on burning thought
Shatters the doubts and terrors which have bowed
Weak hearts on weaker leaning in a crowd
Self-crushing and self-fettering; gleams are caught
From some far centre set by God to keep
His brave world spinning, or some drifting isle
Of swift wildfire shot out by the wide sweep
Of wings demoniac,
Far winnowing and black,
Our cheated souls to 'wilder and beguile.
Only the years, the imperturbable,
Impassionate years, can sheave the scattered rays
Into one sun, these mingled arrows tell
Each to its quiver, the divine and fell,
And life's lone meteors to their centre trace.
O Father, let me not die young!
Earth's beauty asks a heart and tongue
To give true love and praises to her worth;
Her sins and judgment-sufferings call
For fearless martyrs to redeem thy Earth
From her disastrous fall.
For though her summer hills and vales might seem
The fair creation of a poet's dream,—
Ay, of the Highest Poet,
Whose wordless rhythms are chanted by the gyres
Of constellate star-choirs,
That with deep melody flow and overflow it,—
The
