Night.
Come, Night, with all thy train
Of witnesses. I love
The stars’ deep eloquence,
That with the morning hours
Grows mute again.
Thy stillness cries to human sense,
“There is a God above,
And worlds more fair than ours.”
The day is night which hides the stars from sight!
Our night for day is given
To make more plain the path to heaven.
It is the Sun
That at its rising makes the infidel,
And all day long the world alone
Its tale can tell.
Oh welcome, Night, that bid’st the world be still,
That through the stars eternity may speak.
Too early, Dawn, too early dost thou wake:
Too early climbest up the Eastern hill:
Too early! stay: so quiet is the Night,
And in her pensive breeze such sympathy,
She shows us suns that suffer no eclipse,
O’er which the grave’s dark shadow ne’er can lie.
Nay! come not yet, O Dawn: thy laughing lips,
Thy wanton glance, and frolic songs of glee,
The convocation of those holier spheres profane,
And when night vanishes, heaven is hid again.
Come, balmy Night! O peaceful hours,
When on its axis sleeps the untiring wheel,
And from this loud-voiced world of ours
No taint of earth can on the breezes steal.
The weary sailor, when time’s tempests rage,
Joys when he sees, on the far shores of heaven,
The fiery line of stars, as beacons given
To guide him to the eternal anchorage.