And we draw up in the shadow of thy stern form,
Grown gray in fronting the cruel battle and storm—
Draw up beside thee, weary, strange, and travelworn,
Half bewildered, o’erwhelmed, and anxiously torn
By conflicting emotions. So grim and forlorn
Are the desolate scenes of a weird, spectred form.
Here on the measureless verge of infinitude
We shrink from the indescribable solitude
That hath lain in those bottomless gulfs of dread doom—
The black annihilation of a cold phantom tomb.
Ah, how we shrink from dangers vague, undefined!
The unreal, more than the real, disturbs the finite mind.
O All-wise Father! give us faith to trust in Thee,
All fearless to sail over life’s troubled sea.
CHAPTER XVI.—THE CONSTELLATIONS.
Ho, comrade Time! Thy car!
Let’s toward the constellations glimmering afar!
Take Pegasus for thy guide; mount upward, away!
Through the glory of the spheres fairer than the day.
Ah! the thrilling ecstasy of this transcendent view,
Surpassing light and shading, we are passing through.
Upward and upward, higher, higher, we aspire
To reach the bright’ning stars, aglow with heavenly fire.
Ah! we leave those horrid, grinning chasms far behind,
And they shall no more affright our frail, trusting mind.
Let the soul, that is not clay, lead the vivid way,
Thrilled by the silent song the constellations play!
What a panoramic splendor unveils before us!
Cygnus, Perseus, Lyra, Orion, and Capricornus;
Taurus, Virgo, Andromeda, and Tarandus—
A few clusters named of glowing, brilliant gems
From creation’s vast wealth of priceless diadems.
Ha! what lurid light is this glaring from the left—
Up over the rim of creation? Strangely cleft
Is the gloom and shadow menacingly lurking there;
Startlingly it increaseth in volume everywhere.
Is’t the conflagration of a great world afar?
’Tis the lumination of a wandering star;
And it mounts toward the zenith with a bright train
Of curved, transparent light, gliding all amain,
Upward, passing Aldebaran and Pleiades,
Vanishing, perhaps fore’er, in unpenetrated seas.
Now we have won the spheres of the far starry realms,
And their gleaming glory and vastness overwhelms.
All transcendent are those huge flaming, central suns,
And through vast areas their intense splendor runs.
And these centres are surrounded by stately trains
Of worlds, thrown out on those purple, measureless plains,
And with attendant satellites escorted through the voids:
Interspersing lone spaces are untold asteroids.
And astonishment and awe falls upon our soul
As twice ten thousand mighty planets onward roll:
The lesser and the great—innumerable, untold—
The near and the remote, their glowing orbs unfold.
But beyond is more—the dim silence of a shore?
A myth? an eternal mystery? nothing more?
But beyond is surely something more. O God, where?
Our finite mind is stricken dumb with despair.
For those weird and nebulous systems so remote,
In unsearchable abysses they dimly float;
And their faint and tremulous light to us is blown
Like faint flickering wands, out from the dread unknown.
How they glimmer in the dense deepness far away,
Those scintillescent starlets in countless array!
Is Centauri, Cigni, beyond our upward flight?
Lyra, Sirius, and Arcturus intensely bright?
So far we may not venture in our magic car,
To mount those glitt’ring heights, deep, deadly, and afar.
Art in a reverie, Time?
Look up! view the transcendent glory of the scene!
Calmly I wait thee, soothed in spirit, and serene.
Look up! and view the wonders of infinitude,
Where only thou and I, perhaps, have dared intrude.
All in grand harmony these systems move along,
Singing to their Maker a praise of silent song;
And a burning thought comes to us, and reason sees
Unity controlling these systems, voids, and seas
To us unknown, vast, lonely, and undefined;
But still as one great whole in unity combined
They swing round an infinite, all-powerful centre,
And ecstasy of soul comes to us, and doth enter
Our being the thought (it may be divinely given)
That that vast centre, supreme and fair, is heaven—
The centre of Divine government, holy and great,
Keeping ceaseless guard o’er creation’s wide estate.
Oh, to reach that glowing centre of eternal life,
Blessed and liberated from sin, and death, and strife!
Never again to suffer loss and grievous pain,
Or mourn in loneliness the years that seem’d in vain.