University of Virginia Library

Who hath not marked how graciously the Dawn
Comes smiling when some stormy night hath gone?
As Beauty lifts the heaven of her eyes
Full on you large with their serene surprise
That you should dream such gentleness could dart
The looks that hurt you to the very heart!
Calm eyes, that through luxurious reaches roll
The richness of their rest upon the soul.

So comes the Morning; new heavens rise above,
And open wider arms of larger love
Than ever: glad blue Ether, with the bliss
Of sunshine, laughs and kindles at its kiss.
There lie the tears of tempest, softly-bright
As Heaven had only rained in drops of light.
The air, an overflow of Heaven's own balm,
Nought but Earth's music breaks the divine calm.

Yet that same Morning looks on ruin and wreck,
And soothes a sea that lifeless swept the deck
Of some proud ship, and glorifies the wave
That landward heaves the mariner's glassy grave;
Playfully rippling, shoaling goldenly o'er
Dead seamen dimly drifting to the shore!
Terribly innocent, Morning laughs on high,
While Ocean rocks them with its lullaby.

So came the Morning, smiling, crowned with calm,
After my night of trouble, breathing balm.
Fair Earth with all her night-long-tearful eyes
A-sparkle with the soul of new sunrise!
On every blade there hung a drop of dew,
And every drop a live star shimmered through:
All phantoms of the night by shadowy stealth
Retired with Darkness from our world of health;
All life unshrouded, to Heaven's influence bare,
Took wings of morning in the open air.
Our world, a warm safe nest of happy souls,
Basked in the brightness as the lily lolls
In whiteness bosomed on the sunny stream,
Whose ripples lip her where she lies a-dream.

The stream, that crept a river of death by night,
Full of dark secrets, ran a river of light!
Such sense of rest to all glad things was given,
As earth were cradle to the peace of heaven.
A more than common freshness fed the breath
Of being; there was no least taint of death.
My nightmare over, I would dream no more
Of murder and the charnel at life's core;
Or nameless creatures that may haunt old graves
Bat-like, and flit from out lone, twilight caves.
Green earth, glad heaven, gladly vied to win
Thought out-of-doors, yet would it brood within,
Sullen and shy as fish that will not rise
To any tempting lure of feathered flies,
But haunt the pool where, horribly quiet, lies
A dead child, with its wide-awake blue eyes.

Lonely I wandered in my garden-ground,
Musing on Life, the Death's-head rosily crowned,
And of the mystery that shrouds us round,
And of the mournful possibility
That, in some blindness, we may lose the key
Which to the keeping of each soul is given
To ope the door, and so be shut from Heaven;
Raking the ashes and the dust of death,
Long after we have done with human breath;
And of the features printed on my brain
In vision that would evermore remain,
And, any instant, sinister and swart,
From out the light, at turn of eye, might start;
And I should see him! as 'neath the Tunnel's are,
Where, down the shaft, day lightens through the dark,
Some chosen victim momently may mark
His murderer, with those snaky eyes at work
Fixed on him; in whose spark malignant lurk
Cold fires of death drawn inward for the spring;
The dagger-flash leaps in their glittering!

So, till its horrors almost lived to sight,
My spirit brooded o'er the bygone night;
Reflecting all the strife in upper air,
As you have seen, by some sea-margin, where
The circling sea-bird hovers, dreamily slow,
In likeness of the wave that sways below,
The Spirit of its motion on the wing:
Over that night my mind kept hovering.
At length the growing image of my thought
To some such final shape as this was wrought—

From end to end of things we may not see,
Nor square the circle of Eternity;
But, I can not believe in endless hell
And heaven side by side. How could one dwell
Among the Saved, for thinking of the Lost?
With such a lot the Blest would suffer most.
Sitting at feast all in a Golden Home,
That towered over dungeon-grates of Doom,
My heart would ache for all the lost that go
To wail and weep in everlasting woe:
Through all the music I must hear the moan,
Too sharp for all the harps of Heaven to drown.

I cannot think of Life apart from Him
Who is the life, from cell to Seraphim:
And, if Hell flame unquenchably, must be
The life of hell to all eternity!
A God of Love must expiate the stain
Of Sin Himself, by suffering endless pain;
Sit with eternal desolation round
His feet; His head with happy heavens crowned.

From Him the strength immortal must be sent,
By which the soul could bear the punishment.
I cannot think He gave us power to wring
From one brief life eternal suffering:
And prove the Infinite's own limiting!
If this were so the Heavens must surely weep,
Till Hell were drowned in one salt vast, sea-deep.
Forgive me, Lord, if wrongly I divine;
I dare not think Thy pity less than mine.

I cannot image Heaven as Triumph-Car,
That rolleth red and reeking from the war,
Upborne on wheels of torture whirling round
With writhing souls for ever broke and bound!

God save me from that Heaven of the Elect,
Who half rejoice to count the numbers wrecked,
Because, such full weight to the balance given,
Sends up the scale that lands them safe in heaven;
Who some fallen Angel would devoutly greet
And praise the Lord for another vacant seat,
And the proud Saved, exulting, soar the higher,
The lower that the Lost sank in hell-fire.

I think Heaven will not shut for evermore,
Without a knocker left upon the door,
Lest some belated wanderer should come
Heart-broken, asking just to die at home,
So that the Father will at last forgive,
And looking on His face that soul shall live.
I think there will be Watchmen through the night,
Lest any, afar off, turn them to the light;
That He who loved us into life must be
A Father infinitely Fatherly,
And, groping for Him, these shall find their way
From outer dark, through twilight, into day.
I could not sing the song of Harvest Home,
Thinking of those poor souls that never come;
I could not joy for Harvest gathered in,
If any souls, like tares and twitch of sin,
Were flung out by the Farmer to the fire,
Whose smoke of torment, rising high and higher,
Should fill the universe for evermore.
I could not dance along the crystal floor
Through which the damned looked up at Paradise,
For ever fixed, like fishes frozen in ice.

Such mournful eyes from out their night would gleam
And haunt for ever all my happy dream!
I could not take my fill for thinking of
Those empty places in the heart of Love.

The New World's poorest emigrant will lend
A kindly hand to help a poorer friend.
And I must pray to God from out my bliss
For those who are beyond all help but His—
Pray and repray, the same old prayer anew;
Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.
Because they were so utterly accurst,
Self-doomed, that bitterness would be the worst.
O look down on them from Thy place above,
The look of pity, Lord, half-way to love!

Mere human love, in this, its narrow sphere,
Can never think of those it once held dear,
Who, down the darkened way will pull apart,
But with a pitying eye, an aching heart.
And still, as less the beckoning hand they heed,
The strength of Love grows with their greater need;
The less they heed, the more it yearns to save.
And shall this love be dwarfed beyond the grave,
To lose, on wings, its feet-attainèd height?
Better its blindness, than the eye of light
That coldly down on endless hell could glance
With all its mortal sympathies in trance.

Or will some Lethean wave the soul caress,
And numb it into dull forgetfulness;
Washing away all memory of distress
That others feel, while we but lift the hand
To pluck and eat the lotus of the land,
And those far wailings of the world of tears
Come mellowed into music for our ears,
With just the zestful dash of discord given,
That makes the pleasure pungent—perfects Heaven?

'Tis hard to read the Handwriting Divine;
The vanishing up-stroke so invisibly fine!
There must be issues that we do not see.
The whole horizon of Futurity
Is nowise visible from where we stand;
We are but dwellers in a lowly land:
We think the sun doth set, the sun doth rise,
And yet our world's but turning in the skies.
Seen from our lower level there must pass
Mysteries, so high and starry, we but glass
Them darkly, as we strain our mortal sight,
While 'twixt our souls and them there stands the night.
And then we scratch upon our window-pane,
Dimming its clearness, and we are so fain
To read our own imaginations fond,
For the true figures of the world beyond.
We model from the human life, and so
Feature the future from the face we know.
'Tis always sunless one side of our globe,
And thus we fashion the Eternal's robe.
God made Man in His image, but our plan's
To mould and make God's image in the Man's;
And if my thought be human as the rest,
At least the likeness shall be Man's at best.

Our Science grasps with its transforming hand;
Makes real half the tales of wonder-land.
We turn the deathliest fetor to perfume;
We give decay new life and rosy bloom;
Change filthy rags to paper virgin white;
Make pure in spirit what was foul to sight.
Even dead, recoiling force, to a fairy gift
Of help is turned, and taught to deftly lift.
How can we think God hath no crucible
Save some Black Country of a burning Hell?
Or the great ocean of Almighty power,
No scope to take the life-stream from our shore,
Muddy and dark, and make it pure once more?

Dear God, it seems to me that Love must be
The Missionary of Eternity!
Must still find work, in worlds beyond the grave,
So long as there's a single soul to save;
Gather the jewels that flash Godward in
The dark, down-trodden, toad-like head of Sin;
That all divergent lines at length will meet,
To make the clasping round of Love complete;
The rift 'twixt Sense and Spirit will be healed,
Before creation's work is crowned and sealed;
Evil shall die like dung about the root
Of Good, or climb converted into fruit!
The discords cease, and all their strife shall be
Resolved in one vast peaceful harmony:
That all these accidents of Time and breath
Shall bear no black seal of a Second Death:
And, freed from branding heats that burn in Time,
The lost Black Race shall whiten in that clime:
All blots of error bleached in Heaven's sight;
All life's perplexing colours lost in light:
That Thou hast power to work out every stain,
That purifying is the end of Pain;
And, waking, we shall know what we but dream
Dimly, our darkness touched by morning's gleam;
There is no punishment but to redeem;
And here, or There, the penitent thrill must leaven
The earthiest soul, and wing it toward Heaven;
That when the Angel-Reapers shall up-sheave
The harvest, Angel-Gleaners will not leave
One least small grain of good—and there are none
So evil but some precious germ lives on,—
The grimiest gutter crawling by the way
Still hath its reflex of the face of Day;
And all the seeds divine foredoomed by fate
To bear blind blossoms here shall germinate,
And have another chance, in other place,
Where tears of gratitude and dews of grace
Shall warm and quicken to the feeblest root,
Till in Thy garden they are ripe for fruit:
For all who have made shipwreck on that shore
Another outfit and one venture more.
So shall we find the Dark of our old Earth
Twin with the eternal Daylight from the birth,
And trodden in the grave-dust we shall see
The serpent-symbol of Eternity,
That only maketh ends meet, head and tail,
A world all blessing with a world all bale.

Thus, in its maze, my mind went round and round,—
Like him, lost in the Bush, who thought he found
The pathway that he sought, because he beat
His track with constant tread of his own feet,—
As round the dew-drenched garden-walks I went
Till, pausing, all unconscious of intent,
Nigh where a greenery of Syringas grew,
And, shedding shadow round, there leaned a Yew,—
Sombrely-ancient watcher by the tomb!
A Nest of Thrushes the live heart o' the gloom;
I saw the earth was cracked, where recent rain
Had crushed and crumbled in a new-made drain,
And human bones were plainly peering through,
As if Death grinned and show'd a tooth or two!
I searched, and, ere the ghastly work was done,
Had gathered half a tiny skeleton,
That had been once a Child.

And then it came
On me that in my dream I saw the same,
And had been warned to calcine them in flame,
And pound them small as is the finest rust,
And on the winds of heaven fling the dust.
I did it, and, although that soul, self-cursed,
Still walks the darkness, we had passed the worst,
And there was peace o' nights at the Haunted Hurst.