Revealed and perfected at length
In whole and dire transfigurement,
With miracle of growing strength
We win upon a keen warm scent.
Before us each cloud fastness breaks;
And o’er slant inward wastes of light,
And past the moving mirage lakes,
And on within the Lord’s own sight—
We hunt the chosen of the Lord;
And cease not, in wild course elate,
Until we see the flaming sword
And Gabriel before His gate!
O many a fair and noble prey
Falls bitterly beneath our chase;
And no man till the judgment day,
Hath power to give these burial place;
But down in many a stricken home
About the world, for these they mourn;
And seek them yet through Christendom
In all the lands where they were born.
And oft, when Hell’s dread prevalence
Is past, and once more to the earth
In chains of narrowed human sense
We turn,—around our place of birth,
We hear the new and piercing wail;
And, through the haunted day’s long glare,
In fearful lassitudes turn pale
With thought of all the curse we bear.
But, for long seasons of the moon,
When the whole giant earth, stretched low,
Seems straightening in a silent swoon
Beneath the close grip of the snow,
We well nigh cheat the hideous spells
That force our souls resistless back,
With languorous torments worse than hell’s
To the frail body’s fleshly rack:
And with our brotherhood the storms,
Whose mighty revelry unchains
The avalanches, and deforms
The ancient mountains and the plains,—