Mundi et Cordis :: :: University of Virginia Library

The earth—now wearing on its forehead young
Unopen'd leaf-buds, and a few pale flowers;
Now with the summer's green and blossom hung,
And lavishing warm love on all the hours;
Now with its myriad globes of rich ripe fruit,
And its arboreous leaf-work, million-hued;
Now cold in winter's winding-sheet and mute—
But its deep heart with brooding life imbued:
Its early flowers and bursting buds
Struck by chill winds and cloud-rain'd floods;
Its summer mantle rent and sodden,
By all the elements down-trodden;
Its golden fruit and foliage scatter'd,
And its dead limbs oppress'd and shatter'd
By the strong wings of wind and storm,
And frozen in its heart-depths warm!

2.

What should be thy emblem, Mind?

The weltering ocean,
In calm or commotion—
Now with heaven's own hue
On its bosom blue;
Gentle and slow, with lustrous shadows
Of clouds thin-woven,
By light airs cloven,
And studs of light o'er its azure meadows:
Now dark and still
As intents of ill,
And a mighty mirror
For every terror—
And inly-folded, like resolved will:
Now rolling and foaming
In thunder and fire,
Like the turbulent coming
Of rending desire:
Now vailing to midnight its quivering crest;
Wearing starbeams and moonlight in love on its breast.

3.

What is thy meet emblem, Mind?

The holy beauty of the sky,
Dim shroud of that vast Deity

To whose veil'd ray all rays we see
Are cloud; with all the spirits that roam
Beneath its ether-woven dome:
The sun, whose space-enfolding flight
Steeps the inebriate earth in light;
The unresting moon, the love-beloved;
The planets and pale constellations;
The cloud-stars, where the soul, reproved,
Dreams of immensity, and quivers;
And ever-changing clouds, that flee
Before the wild wind's inspirations,
Like oceans dark and gleaming rivers,
And in tempestuous exhalations
Work change eternal o'er the earth and sea.

4.

As heaven upon the deep descendeth,
God—or whate'er that spirit's name
Whose torch lit up the undying flame
That lampeth in the eyes of space—
Falls on the mind:
As light and wind
Blend on the many-colour'd ocean's face,
So with our common thought that spirit blendeth:

As the sea shakes the earth
With every billow's birth,
The mind with all its strife
Shatters the nerves of life!