The Vision went, and went the living King;110
Then strange and hard to human hear to tell
By language moulded but by thoughts that bring
Material images, what there befel!
The mortal enter'd Eld's dumb burial place,
And at the threshold, vanish'd Time and Space.
Yea, the hard sense of time was from the mind111
Rased and annihilate;—yea, space to eye
And soul was presenceless? What rest behind?
Thought and the Infinite! the eternal I,
And its true realm the Limitless, whose brink
Thought ever nears: What bounds us when we think?
Yea, as the dupe in tales Arabian,112
Dipp'd but his brow beneath the beaker's brim,
And in that instant all the life of man
From youth to age roll'd its slow years on him,
And while the foot stood motionless—the soul
Swept with deliberate wing from pole to pole,
So when the man the Grave's still portals pass'd,113
Closed on the substances or cheats of earth,
The Immaterial, for the things it glass'd,
Shaped a new vision from the matter's dearth:
Before the sight that saw not through the clay,
The undefined Immeasurable lay.
A realm not land, nor sea, nor earth, nor sky,114
Like air impalpable, and yet not air;—
"Where am I led?" ask'd Life with hollow sigh.
"To Death, that dim phantasmal Every where,"
The Ghost replied. "Nature's circumfluent robe,
Girding all life—the globule or the globe."
"Yet," said the Mortal, "if indeed this breath115
Profane the world that lies beyond the tomb;
Where is the Spirit-race that peoples death?
My soul surveys but unsubstantial gloom,
A void—a blank—where none preside or dwell,
Nor woe nor bliss is here, nor heaven nor hell."
"And what is death?—a name for nothingness,"[8]116
Replied the Dead; "the shadow of a shade;
Death can retain no spirit!—woe and bliss,
And heaven and hell, are for the living made;
An instant flits between life's latest sigh
And life's renewal;—that it is to die!
"From the brief Here to the eternal There117
We can but see the swift flash of the goal;
Less than the space between two waves of air,
The void between existence and a soul;
Wherefore, look forth; and with calm sight endure
The vague, impalpable, inane Obscure:
"Lo, by the Iron Gate a giant cloud118
From which emerge (the form itself unseen)
Vast adamantine brows sublimely bow'd
Over the dark,—relentlessly serene;
Thou canst not view the hand beneath the fold,
The work it weaveth none but God behold.
"Yet ever from this Nothingness of Death,119
That hand shapes out the myriad pomps of life;
Receives the matter when resign'd the breath,
Calms into Law the elemental strife;
On each still'd atom forms afresh bestows
(No atom lost since first Creation rose).