Down deep, the elements, like gnomes,
Beside their flaming forges wrought,
To fashion shapes, and future homes
For the embodiment of Thought.
The wild winds roared—the raging floods
Tossed their defiant waves on high,
While from the old, primeval woods,
The chorus thundered to the sky.
The broadcast, wondrous Encrinites
Opened their breathing lily bells,
While Ammonites and Trilobites
Paved pathless spaces with their shells.
The coral Polyp, ’neath the wave,
Wrought in the great progressive plan,
By which the lesser creature’s grave
Built up the future home of man.
The slumbering Iguanodon[4]
Lay reeking in mephitic damp—
The Mylodon and Mastodon
Startled the forests with their tramp.
Gigantic ferns, like feathery palms,
Nodded in silence to the trees,
Whose royal crests and stalwart arms
Tossed like the waves of stormy seas.
Thus on, still on the current rolled—
The light of countless mornings shone;
And radiant sunsets robed in gold,
Swept down the gulfs of years unknown.
At length, with beasts, and birds, and flowers,
Creation seemed a perfect whole;
Then God and Nature joined their powers,
And man became a living soul.
O Mother Nature! Father God!
How wondrous is the work we trace!
Man fashioned from the senseless clod,
Yet filled with life’s divinest grace.
Nor is that form of earthly mold
The limit of his life to be;
Forth from the mortal will unfold
The germ of immortality.
For even as through countless throes,
And travail pains, the mighty plan
Of God in Nature slowly rose,
To consummate its aims in man,
Thus onward still the current rolls,
The spirit with the flesh at strife,
Until, at length, all living souls
Are quickened from the inmost life.
Across the broad, unfathomed sea,
That breaks upon the shores of time,
The promise of the yet to be
Comes like a prophecy sublime.
The purple gloom, that like a veil
Rests on that ever swelling tide,
Full oft reveals a friendly sail,
With tidings from the further side.
O soul of man! to conscious power
From elements of death outwrought,
The Living Word forecast thine hour,
And found the dwelling-place it sought.
High in the heavens forevermore,
The stars of truth eternal shine;
Sail on, O man, from shore to shore;
The power that guides thee is divine.
In the beginning was the Word—
The Word as present now as then—
And by its quickening power is stirred
New life within the souls of men.
Thus on, still on, the current rolls,
Through daisies blooming on the sod,
Through creeping things, though living souls,
Through “quickened spirits” up to God.