The Vision and the Faculty Divine.
When it will, it comes,
Like the rain or the bow
Or the nightingale’s lay
By the lake below:
As free from restraint as the seraph that roams
O’er the ebbing waves of the dying day,
When the reddening west, ’twixt the sun and the sea,
Seems to open the door of eternity.
When it will, it comes,
Like the stars that are driven
O’er the cloudwrack riven.
When it will—to the world it owes no debt,
No times, no seasons for it are set.
When it will—like all that belongs to heaven.
Not so the sea
That hath its laws and rules and door:
Whose ebb and whose flow
In the ears of men beat evermore,
Like time’s great pendulum to and fro.
And the time of whose visits is known long before
As it rolls to the moment from shore to shore.
Not so the sun,
Time’s fountain and head,
Whose shadows to hours and minutes creep,
As into their fold the gathering sheep.
The Alps, in their garb of eternal snow—
So far from the world they grow white with dread—
The moment know
When from the East’s ever darkening sea
He will rise—the image of Deity.
And the birds, the same moment awaking, blow
The world’s great trumpet that men may know
That night hath fled,
And day is risen again from the dead.
Like the rainbow it comes—
As the sign of the covenant made long ago
’Twixt Godhood and thought, when, abating its flow,
The sea of eternity brought into sight
Time’s far distant mountains, and safe on their height
There rested, by God to humanity brought,
The Ark of eternal, immutable Thought!