Ah no! the world that God designed
He shows us in dreams, but leaves mankind
To shape to His plan. The goal He gave,
But the path to the goal ’tis ours to find.
No meaner plan than our dream unrolls
Can ever again content our souls;
The wonder fades from the paths around us,
Our faith remains in the unseen goals.
The wonder outlasts, the goals exist;
The beauty abides, but the way we missed;
And a mile may open the way we looked for
A turn may lead to the longed-for tryst.
THE ROAD INTO THE WORLD
We travelled by an old and beaten road,
But everything we saw was strange and new:
Each ripple of the mountain stream that flowed
Beside us, every drop of sunlit dew
That filled the flowers that on the wayside grew,
The laughter of the south-west wind at play
Along its own untrodden path of blue,
All made the earth forget its yesterday,
And with their own youth touched that old and beaten way.
They told us that our road would lead at last
Into the world,—not that which once was spread
Before our childhood’s dream, unknown and vast,
But one which man had fashioned in its stead.
This world lay now before us, and we sped
To drink its wonders, counting not the cost.
Our endless pathways to their ends had led;
The bounds of our unbounded we had crossed;
The unknown way was found, but our old world was lost.
We had exchanged our infinite domains,
The undiscovered regions of our quest,
For the round earth wherein no sea remains
Uncharted, and no land is unpossessed;
But still our hearts were filled with the old zest
To travel and adventure and explore:
The unknown called us, we could find no rest
Till, by those paths which men had trod before,
We found the world they found and bore the loads they bore.
With every soul that on the earth is born
The whole creation is made young again;
And all the paths that pilgrim feet have worn
Are new for those who follow,—every stain
That marred them is washed out by sun and rain,
And verdure fresh makes all their borders sweet.
So on that road of bygone joy and pain,
With the day’s new-born flowers about our feet,
We sought an ancient world grown young our youth to greet.
And pleasant of that world it was to think,
And all that we had heard in song and lore
Of old grey cities on the ocean’s brink,
Where to their anchorage the great ships bore
Bales from the Orient, and golden store
From the far south, and, dark and grim and tall,
Behind the dreaming masts rose floor on floor,
Warehouse and granary, and over all
Loomed some great tower or dome of Mary or of Paul.
The vanished regions of our old surmise
We mourned not now, for eager we had grown
To read the record of the centuries,
And enter the great kingdoms of the known.
Ay! better than the unexplored and lone
We deemed that world in which the human heart
Was written, where mankind had built and sown,
And fought for truth and love, and taken part
In the eighth day’s creation—God-inspired Art.