Not so the sea
That hath its laws and rules and door:
Whose ebb and whose flow
In the ears of men beat evermore,
Like time’s great pendulum to and fro.
And the time of whose visits is known long before
As it rolls to the moment from shore to shore.
Not so the sun,
Time’s fountain and head,
Whose shadows to hours and minutes creep,
As into their fold the gathering sheep.
The Alps, in their garb of eternal snow—
So far from the world they grow white with dread—
The moment know
When from the East’s ever darkening sea
He will rise—the image of Deity.
And the birds, the same moment awaking, blow
The world’s great trumpet that men may know
That night hath fled,
And day is risen again from the dead.
Like the rainbow it comes—
As the sign of the covenant made long ago
’Twixt Godhood and thought, when, abating its flow,
The sea of eternity brought into sight
Time’s far distant mountains, and safe on their height
There rested, by God to humanity brought,
The Ark of eternal, immutable Thought!
Thought.
We are not certain that the mighty soul
Doth err, when far above the narrow groove
In which man walks from childhood to the grave
It rises, murmuring things unutterable,
And spurns as lies the outward forms of sense,
And, like a shooting star, enfranchised seeks
The spaces of eternity.
Hath not
The soul a hidden story of its own,
A tide of mysteries breaking on a far
And distant shore, where memory was lost
Amid the mighty ruins of a world
Or worlds now vanished?
Are the stars o’erhead
Things as divine and glorious as poesy
Is wont to sing? Is’t not some power in us,
Some memory of a yet diviner world
And things illumined by the light of God
That dowers the stars with beauty, gives them strength
And grandeur? ’Tis in us the stars have being,
And poesy’s self is but the memory
Of things that have been or the seer’s glance
At things that shall be—a future and a past
Both greater than the present.
Who hath not
Within him felt some long forgotten world
Sweep through the corner of his former self,
Or touch some jutting peak of memory?
Or can we prove a poet’s imaginings
Are not the remnants of a higher life,
A thousand times more glorious, lying hid
Within the deepest sea of his great soul,
Till comes the all-searching breath of poesy
To bid them rise? Oh hail, all hail the hour
When God reveals Himself, and like the sun
Illumines every epoch of our being,
And through them all the Spirit’s path shines clear
From God, through Nature, back to God again.
The Variety of Wales.
Oh where with such variety
Her charms doth nature pour,
Or beauties lavish as on thee,
Thou world in miniature?
Now stern and frowning she appears,
Anon her smile most radiant wears.