University of Virginia Library

1

Thronged with the unpetitionable truth,
Which from the love-surrendered and one heart
Shone in the spirit's starred tranquillity,
Hued with deep light the soaring wings of song,
And thro' the labyrinthine flesh transfused,
Subtile as fire, the elemental blood,
We felt the indefectible prodigy
Of life respond to our prodigious lives,
While, with an eye new-opened to discern
Meaning and revelation, we beheld
The immemorial loveliness of earth! ...
The mountain rose in power beneath our feet,
Vestured in basalt and the endless grass;
Crested with forest swelled the distant hills,
Whence towering unalterable amid
Spacious serenities of sky and sun
Rose the ranged peaks of naked stone. ... Below,
Gold lightnings kindled on the leaping stream,
And over nurtured fields and pasturage
Coloured new harvests and perennial bloom,—
While over all, like benediction, lay
Calm azure of the immeasurable skies
And stintless gold of the down-pouring sun! ...
And we, in that exceeding hour, were not
Passionless or insensible! The voice
Of the united being of the world,
Life's unison and love's antiphonal,
Sang like an ocean to the inward ear;
Beneath earth's bridal garments, gemmed with light,
Enwreathed with flowers, and perfumed with the faint
Measureless motion of sun-sweetened airs,
The invariable beauty, like the clear
Transfiguration of a dream, appeared
To the dazed vision of the inward eye,—
While in the spirit and the sense we took
Our lover's will of the consenting bride! ...
Thus to our eager and initiate sense—
In love and the sole spirit's truth conjoined,—
Yielding her violated privacies,
Nature revealed her nuptial nakedness;
And we, against our human breast of love,
Held the one heart of life, and felt our hearts,
Filled with its mighty pulse, thunder to song! ...
So, in the mind's resolvent unity,
All powers and phases of the natural world
Showed the one urge within, and we discerned
In the rich tissue of apparent things
The secret sense which is not theirs but ours;—
So, of the sunlight and the mystic dust,
The flowering hills, the open face of heaven,
We phrased the full heart's wordless harmonies;—
And so, to us, in liberty and light,
Seemed the scarped summits of abiding stone
Like the pure pinnacles of thought that rise
In the clear aether of the mind's starred heaven! ...

2

O life's exceeding hour of strength and grace,
Of gentleness and passion, when, like gods,
We walked in native virtue, and, at ease,
Fashioned in beauty our apparent lives!—
When, interfused, the heart's persuasive trust,
In spirit and the enraptured sense contrived
Of our two beings one communion,
And life's ephemeral metamorphoses
Yielded their secret and were one and ours! ...
Then was it well with us!—and so, in truth,
So is it always with us, if we knew!—
So are we always kinsmen of the sod
And leagued with skies and mountains! Truth is one
In the wide purpose of the spirit's life;
And love's fount flows forever! ... And so it is
That when at last the liberated heart,
With love or the rapt spirit's strength fulfilled,
Gives what so long its senseless thrift withheld,
We feel the mind's immortal pregnancies
Come perfectly to birth, and haply see,
Clear in the freshening light, the pure gold's gleam
Shine in the spirit's inmost treasuries! ...
And so are we delivered! ... So it is,
As by the wind of loosed, uplifted wings
Or the strong, tender touch of a loved hand,
On secret chambers of the heart and mind
Some unsuspected door is set ajar,
And all at once we feel the thrill and tone
Of a great music, and the lyric cry
Of phrased, puissant voices, sweet with song,
Where, in life's holiest sanctuary, unknown,
Unsought, inviolable, Olympian,
The grave Gods feast together, and take no wrong
Of the frail, feeble things we are and do!
And thus—Yea, thus indeed—thus perfectly—
We are advised how dull we are and blind;
How with contracted powers our lives are waste;
How we are bound like slaves, like victims scourged;
And how in shame, damnation and defeat
The brief times of our being are passed away,
Which well might be, in each momentous hour,
Valid with victory and phrased in song,
Fragrant with love, and with the natural truth
Of the pure spirit freed and sanctified—
As one exceeding hour was once to us:—
To us who were, from love-surrendered hearts,
Thronged with the unpetitionable truth! ...