Was that the false that was so beautiful?Was it a rosy mist that wrapped it round?
Or was love to the eyes as opium,
Making all things more beauteous than they were?
And can that opium do more than God
To waken beauty in a human brain?
Is this the real, the cold, undraperied truth—
A skeleton admitted as a guest
At life's loud feast, wearing a life-like mask?
No, no; my heart would die if I believed it.
A blighting fog uprises with the days,
False, cold, dull, leaden, gray. It clings about
The present, far dragging like a robe; but ever
Forsakes the past, and lets its hues shine out:
On past and future pours the light of heaven.
The Commonplace is of the present mind.
The Lovely is the True. The Beautiful
Is what God made. Men from whose narrow bosoms
The great child-heart has withered, backward look
To their first-love, and laugh, and call it folly,
A mere delusion to which youth is subject,
As childhood to diseases. They know better!
And proud of their denying, tell the youth,
On whom the wonder of his being shines,
That will be over with him by and by:
"I was so when a boy—look at me now!"
Youth, be not one of them, but love thy love.
So with all worship of the high and good,
And pure and beautiful. These men are wiser!
Their god, Experience, but their own decay;
Their wisdom but the gray hairs gathered on them.
Yea, some will mourn and sing about their loss,
And for the sake of sweet sounds cherish it,
Nor yet believe that it was more than seeming.
But he in whom the child's heart hath not died,
But grown a man's heart, loveth yet the Past;
Believes in all its beauty; knows the hours
Will melt the mist; and that, although this day
Cast but a dull stone on Time's heaped-up cairn,
A morning light will break one morn and draw
The hidden glories of a thousand hues
Out from its diamond-depths and ruby-spots
And sapphire-veins, unseen, unknown, before.
Far in the future lies his refuge. Time
Is God's, and all its miracles are his;
And in the Future he overtakes the Past,
Which was a prophecy of times to come:
There lie great flashing stars, the same that shone In childhood's laughing heaven; there lies the wonder In which the sun went down and moon arose; The joy with which the meadows opened out Their daisies to the warming sun of spring; Yea, all the inward glory, ere cold fear Froze, or doubt shook the mirror of his soul: To reach it, he must climb the present slope Of this day's duty—here he would not rest. But all the time the glory is at hand, Urging and guiding—only o'er its face Hangs ever, pledge and screen, the bridal veil: He knows the beauty radiant underneath; He knows that God who is the living God, The God of living things, not of the dying, Would never give his child, for God-born love, A cloud-made phantom, fading in the sun. Faith vanishes in sight; the cloudy veil Will melt away, destroyed of inward light.
If thy young heart yet lived, my Lilia, thou
And I might, as two children, hand in hand,
Go home unto our Father.—I believe
It only sleeps, and may be wakened yet.
SCENE X.—Julian's room. Christmas Day; early morn. JULIAN.
Julian. The light comes feebly, slowly, to the world On this one day that blesses all the year, Just as it comes on any other day: A feeble child he came, yet not the less Brought godlike childhood to the aged earth, Where nothing now is common any more. All things had hitherto proclaimed God: The wide spread air; the luminous mist that hid The far horizon of the fading sea; The low persistent music evermore Flung down upon the sands, and at the base Of the great rocks that hold it as a cup; All things most common; the furze, now golden, now Opening dark pods in music to the heat Of the high summer-sun at afternoon; The lone black tarn upon the round hill-top, O'er which the gray clouds brood like rising smoke, Sending its many rills, o'erarched and hid, Singing like children down the rocky sides;— Where shall I find the most unnoticed thing, For that sang God with all its voice of song? But men heard not, they knew not God in these; To their strange speech unlistening ears were strange; For with a stammering tongue and broken words, With mingled falsehoods and denials loud, Man witnessed God unto his fellow man: How then himself the voice of Nature hear? Or how himself he heeded, when, the leader, He in the chorus sang a discord vile? When prophet lies, how shall the people preach? But when He came in poverty, and low, A real man to half-unreal men, A man whose human thoughts were all divine, The head and upturned face of human kind— Then God shone forth from all the lowly earth, And men began to read their maker there. Now the Divine descends, pervading all. Earth is no more a banishment from heaven; But a lone field among the distant hills, Well ploughed and sown, whence corn is gathered home. Now, now we feel the holy mystery That permeates all being: all is God's; And my poor life is terribly sublime. Where'er I look, I am alone in God, As this round world is wrapt in folding space; Behind, before, begin and end in him: So all beginnings and all ends are hid; And he is hid in me, and I in him.
Oh, what a unity, to mean them all!—
The peach-dyed morn; cold stars in colder blue
Gazing across upon the sun-dyed west,
While the dank wind is running o'er the graves;
Green buds, red flowers, brown leaves, and ghostly snow;
The grassy hills, breeze-haunted on the brow;
And sandy deserts hung with stinging stars!
Half-vanished hangs the moon, with daylight sick,
Wan-faced and lost and lonely: daylight fades—
Blooms out the pale
