X
The fire, to which the Magi prayed,
The Aztecs sacrificed and kneeled,
Whose ceremonies now are sealed,
Whose priests are dust, whose people weighed,
Since God permitted such, should man,—
All ignorant of heavenly ends,—
Despise the means, since Earth began,
God works by to perfect His plan,
Which through immediate forms ascends
Of Nature, lifting, race by race,
Man to the beauty of His face?
Through Nature only we arrive
At God: identical with truth,
By periods of repeated youth,
Through Nature must the Ages strive;
The Epochs, that must purify
Themselves through her experience,
Her knowledge, which each Age lays by
To clothe it better for the sky
In robes of new intelligence
Befitting life, that upwardly
Approaches ends which none can see.
XI
Within the world awake behold
A world asleep ... the wildwood shades!
With limbs of glimmering coolness lolled
Along the purple forest glades:—
Sleep in each unremembering face,
The sea-worn Greeks knew these of old,
And named “the lotus-eating race.”
Within the life asleep I mark
A life awake; a life intense,
That spurs the sap beneath the bark
With tender hints of violence,
The liquid germs of leaf and bud,
And in the ponderable dark
Fulfils the offices of blood.
O wiser than Thy works!—behind
Thy works,—who shall behold Thy place?
Beyond the suns whose beams burn blind
Before the glory of Thy face!—
Among the least of worlds, shall we
Presume to give to Thee, defined,
A place and personality!
XII
Across the hills, that roll and rise
Beneath the blue, adoring skies,
Maturing Beauty by the old,
Dark forest stands, as might a slave
Before a Sultan sitting grave,
Grim-gazing from a throne of gold.
Across the hills, that rise and fall,
I gaze with eyes grown spiritual,
And see the Spirit of the Dew
From out the morn, that stains the mist
With amber and with amethyst,
Blown, bubble-bright, along the blue.
What king such kingly pomp can show
As on the hills the afterglow?
Where ’mid red woods the maples sit,
Like scarlet-mantled sagamores,
Who, from their totemed wigwam doors,
Watch, through red fires, the ghost-dance flit.