X—EPILOGUE
Up the Grand Canyon the full morning flowed.
I heard the voices moving through the abyss
With the deep sound of pine-woods, league on league
Of singing boughs, each separate, each a voice,
Yet all one music;
The Eternal Mind
Enfolds all changes, and can never change.
Man is not exiled from this Majesty,
The inscrutable Reality, which he shares
In his immortal essence. Man that doubts
All but the sensuous veils of colour and sound,
The appearances that he can measure and weigh,
Trusts, as the very fashioner of his doubt,
The imponderable thought that weighs the worlds,
The invisible thought that sees; thought that reveals
The miracle of the eternal paradox—
The pure unsearchable Being that cannot be
Yet Is, and still creates and governs all;
A Power that, being unknowable, is best known;
For this transcendent Being can reply
To every agony, “I am that which waits
Beyond the last horizon of your pain,
Beyond your wildest hope, your last despair,
Above your heaven, and deeper than your hell.
There is not room on earth for what ye seek.
Is there not room in Me?”
Time is a shadow
Of man’s own thought. Things past and things to come
Are closed in that full circle. He lives and reigns;
Dies with the dying bird; and, in its death
Receives it to His heart. No leaf can fall
Without Him; who, for ever pouring out
His passion into worlds that shall attain
Love in the highest at last, returns for ever
Along these roads of suffering and of death,
With all their lives upgathered to His heart
Into the heaven of heavens. How else could life
Lay hold on its infinitude, or win
The strength to walk with Love in complete light?
For, as a child that learns to walk on earth,
Life learns these little rhythms of earthly law,
Listens to simple seas that ebb and flow,
And spells the large bright order of the stars
Wherein the moving Reason is revealed
To mans up-struggling mind, or breathed like song
Into the quiet heart, as love to love.
So, step by step, the spirit of man ascends
Through joy and grief; and is withdrawn by death
From the sweet dust that might content it here
Into His kingdom, the one central goal
Of the universal agony. He lives.
He lives and reigns, throned above Space and Time;
And, in that realm, freedom and law are one;
Fore-knowledge and all-knowledge and free-will,
Make everlasting music.
Far away
Along the unfathomable abyss it flowed,
A harmony so consummate that it shared
The silence of the sky; a song so deep
That only the still soul could hear it now:
New every morning the creative Word
Moves upon chaos. Yea, our God grows young.
Here, now, the eternal miracle is renewed
Now, and for ever, God makes heaven and earth.