A hoard of never-given gifts
I cherished,—priceless pelf;
’Twas two whole days ere I devour’d
That peppermint myself.
In Church I only prayed for her—
“O God bless Lucy Hill;”
Child, may His angels keep their arms
Ever around you still.
But when the hymn came round, with heart
That feared some heart’s surprising
Its secret sweet, I climb’d the seat
’Mid rustling and uprising;
And there against her mother’s arm
The sleeping child was leaning,
While far away the hymn went on,
The music and the meaning.
Oh I have loved with more of pain
Since then, with more of passion,
Loved with the aching in my love
After our grown-up fashion;
Yet could I almost be content
To lose here at your feet
A year or two, you murmuring elm,
To dream a dream so sweet.
THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE: AN ODE
(By a Western Spinning Dervish)
I spin, I spin, around, around,
And close my eyes,
And let the bile arise
From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;
Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again!
How the whole globe swells within my brain,
The stars inside my lids appear,
The murmur of the spheres I hear
Throbbing and beating in each ear;
Right in my navel I can feel
The centre of the world’s great wheel.
Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,
No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great Whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.