University of Virginia Library

Out of the hush'd low valleys, and the dells
Unseen, where we have lived,—out of the sphere
Of calm accustom'd faces—characters
Akin, and smoothen'd to a common type
By intercourse,—out of the household ways
And home delights and habits, which have shut
In warm seclusion thro' their early growths
Our delicate souls,—out of the days when all
Our little thoughts and meagre knowledges
Dwelt as in dreams, unconscious of themselves
And full contented,—we arise, bewitch'd
By the inarticulate voice of circumstance
That will not be withstood, and plant our feet
Upon the dizzy edges of the world.
Knowest thou what we feel?

Didst ever wind
With lazy eyes and unexpectant heart
For many a league along some noiseless path,
Thro' forest-glooms and hanging dark ravines
And cloud-wreaths from the hills,—and suddenly,
Turning some rocky barrier of the path,
Burst on a broad and beautiful champaign,
Swimming in sunlight, rich with waving corn
And towns and farms and rivers,—where a glow
Of balmy breaths steams upward, and beneath
Rings with far music all the twinkling air?
Didst ever climb with vague unheeding feet
Some sloping downs, and where the level brow
Darkens against the sky, look down, and plunge
Thy mazed soul in the blue light of the sea?
Thou knowest what we feel.—A naked fool
Soak'd i' the melting snow! a lean, lost fool!—

We speed again thro' books and men and things—
How! a new consciousness is here—our life
Opaque has grown transparent, self-illumed!
“I have not here a feeling or a thought
That has not been another's,—only work'd
Afresh and kneaded, thro' the diverse souls
Of many generations: I'm a toy
Made by the thousand for a fair, and each
Twin to the other; why, such counterparts
May change and shuffle thro' a thousand deals,
And no one be the wiser!

Other men
Wear large imposing wisdom on their brows—
Walk crown'd and glory'd thro' the land, and seem
To read the faces of all heaven and earth
As easily as a brother's: but I toil
Aye in the slippery shallows, while the sea
Of knowledge rises to my very lips,
Then ebbs for ever.

Nature unto me
Is a veil'd Pythia, from her twilight shrine
Murmuring poetic mysteries; and this
Tho' the small scope of our horizon bounds
My every quest!

The whirlpools of the earth—
Hot seething cities—I walk into them
And curse my understanding: what a maze
Of unintelligible interests,
Unseen connexions, puny facts that stand
Alone and unexplain'd, or sweltering lie
In heaps of rank confusion, heaving up
To blurr and blind the dizzy soul that dares
To keep its Being unabsorb'd, and ask—
What mean these things? A rout of gaudy beads,
Slipt from the string, and sliding up and down,
Shorn of a visible purpose and a home—
A hissing whirl of life, from darkest deeps
In the hill-side that shoots thro' narrow light
To plunge into a darker. Every face
Whose eyes meet mine, is as the nucleus
Of some thick nebulous galaxy of lives,
Wheeling dependent orbits intricate
Beyond, beyond my ken—is as the rise
Of sudden dolphins thro' the tremulous sea,
That in the sunlight curl, and plunge, and leave
That little moment for their history.

Widening my eyes to grasp a larger ken—
How can I track the fierce electric speed
Of such an age as ours? How extricate
From mountainous masses of effect the old
And generative causes, or perceive
Which way and where the Past hath work'd and striven
To bring us up to this,—and in what shape
Its reverend shadows on the fields around
Do lie, and how with swift unconscious ebb
The very Present where I gazing stand
Fails into Memory; and the light how far
Of these our deeds, when we are in the west,
Shall climb the distant zenith; and how long
Our throes and pulses all may linger on,
And shake the sensitive Future as they go
To likeness of ourselves?

And ‘What!’ exclaims
A larger spirit in my ear—‘What! spend
Squander and spill the sum of thy regards
On deeds and interests of one little land?
Thou seest the unequal triad, that divide
The sovereignty of Time—that they provoke
And sorely prove the weak inquiring soul,—
That chiefly, closing round our central place,
The neighbourhoods stupendous on each side
Whelm us in grandeur, like the perplext roar
Of cataracts,—that, winged for escape,
Shoots the frail Present timidly between
Those cloven bergs cyanean, imminent
With bulky heights of Memory and of Hope:—
So too, nor less, the Kosmos that we see—
Expansive space—faints timidly beneath
Her cumulative wonders: ancient homes—
Forlorn encampments of the vagrant Past,
Long tenantless; imperial monuments,
Whose unregarded ruins no wide boons
Nor teachings influential call their home,
And mix for us sweet gratitude with awe,—
Memorials of oblivion; others, which,
In deepest death exuberant with life,
Hail us from far, and with adopting voice
Take half the world for citizens and sons;
About whose odorous fields their pilgrims walk
Knee-deep in legends and high memories,
While every whisper of the current air
Is music to a Pæan: neighbourhoods
Where the meek bosom of the patient Earth
Fierce hoofs of battle wounded; where the free
And dainty steps of Fortune and of Fame
Most oft did visit, and abode most long,
And left with largest tears; wherever men,
Holpen of circumstance, or innate strength
Of race, or high infectious excellence
And heavenward promptings of the age and clime,
'Mid blessings and 'mid sympathies arose
Of woods and waves and mountains and the blue,
And group'd themselves magnificently far
From common times,—with nourishment divine
Of cool nepenthe and fair asphodel
Feeding themselves to heroes. Then the lands
That now i' the wayward bosom of Renown
Lie cradled—mountains by volcanic strength
Shot through blind clifts in some dull plain to shame
The ancient hills—deep-toothed gulfs, wherein
The wandering whirlpool of men's energies,—
The wrestlings of whate'er imperial race
Carves its own name upon the passive age,—
Foams unresisted: what innumerous sounds
And pantings of illimitable life
In these full lands arise! The royal boom
And thunder of the armies of the earth,—
The voice of many workers, smoothing out
Over the craggy barriers of To-day,
A passage for the Morrow,—the wide crash
When tyrants fall, and the crush'd peoples rise,
And make themselves immortal—but how soon,
Gulping deep draughts of hot delirious blood
Out of the foemen's skulls, do gorge themselves
To madness! Next, nor viewless nor apart
In thought if yet in time, unveiling stands
The silent Future, in her own new spheres
And distant climates seeking to be born:
She is unknown by face, and yet how clear
We mark her throes and struggles in the womb,
Till with the moving cycle she emerge
Full-panoplied!’

Concerning this our world,
And her great trinities of Space and Time,
That goading spirit preaches, till my soul
Bursts with distress and eagerness. But more:
For I have seen a vision, that swam in
Thro' the transparent awnings of my eyes
In sleep—a dream of wonder and despair.

I stood among the courses of the worlds,
A shadowing spirit near me, to unfold
Whate'er of lesser mystery might be dwarf'd
To human understanding. All around
Huge suns were driving like gigantic hail
Across the blank of space: and I, though swoln
To an archangel's bulk, was fain to dip
And swerve, when any of the swarming crowd
Shot toward me. Not with restless noise they moved,
Like the swift fierce inventions of the earth,
But calm and silent as the path of souls
Upborne by buoyant angels through the vast
Into our Father's bosom; and I saw
That that old fabled music of the spheres
Was but the cooling of an orb's warm face
Against the gelid ether.

Not for long
We stood in ravishment, deep-plunged amid
That seething hive of planets and thick stars,
Without a special interest; for behold,
Far down a vacant avenue of gloom—
A long deep gorge—out of the purple dark
A point arose, and travell'd up that bare
Black fiord, enlarging ever, till it curved
A rapid arc among the shoals of stars,
And rounded up to me. I felt a thought
From that unseen immortal at my side
Explode within me—‘This is thine own Earth!’
With feelings then as of some voyager
Fresh from grand halls and vasty pyramids
Of the old East, who enters once again
That little chamber of his youth, I stoop'd
Above the puny world as bends some girl
Over an insect in her palm, and scann'd
With shaded eyes the wonder as it pass'd:—
Thick creamy clouds of glowing vapour clung
Round the swift orb, and from the whirling bulk
Curl'd flakes and ribbon'd shreds of showery foam
Spun like a rain of burning blooms, and dash'd
Against my eyes, and lavishly behind
Swept o'er the oblivious vast a billowy breadth
Of lurid bronze: but I, thro' jagged rifts
That slit the wreathing masses as a maid
Parts her bright hair in clusters with the morn,
Beholding, probed to the dark rugged rind
O'the earth, and saw a moving dust of men,
Hot, smoky, drifting ever to and fro
Across the aimless desert; and perceived
A storm of little voices, screaming up
To the great heavens for food and air and rest,
And health and truth and knowledge and for fame;
And heard among that rout low breaths of prayer,
And tender women's voices, and clear men's,
Wandering amazed, like a meek melody
That winds alone amid the crashing chords.

I learnt no more: for the coy vivid Earth
Fled thro' my fingers, plunging eagerly
Among the sheltering worlds, as dives a hind
Into dew-blossom'd thickets of the morn.

Bravely the sparkles of that sheeny trail
Toil'd in her surging wake; until from high
The long unfinish'd slope of her ellipse
Shone like the broken circlet of a god
Falling thro' space: but in the far extreme
That thick bright flood grew shallow, and its blaze
Unknit and shiver'd into many threads
Of tremulous light, that flicker'd like a web
In air, till one by one they snapt, and all
The beaded atoms brilliant were ysprent
Thro' the abyss, and languish'd and grew dim,
And flash'd and fumed and were extinguished;
Like stragglers in the desert, when that huge
Swift choking death is imminent behind
Their fleeter fellows.

So the marvel pass'd,
But not my thoughts: this then is all the scope
And compass of those many million hopes
And loves and longings—this is the one home
Of those long linked lives of lordly men,
From Adam down to us—this is the world
Whereof men preach that only over it
The Father bends, and spreads to its full stretch
The cordon of his everlasting arms
To grasp this mote, and hath encircled it
With hugest spheres innumerous, that they
Might pierce with little points of utmost light
The eyeballs of a man! hath hoarded up
The milk and honey of immortal teats
Only for lips of theirs; and ripens aye
For them alone the unutterable wealth
Of Heaven! Why, this microscopic Earth!
Had I but thought, I might have brush'd it dead
With one sweep of a finger or a nail,
And not have cared to blow the dust away!

A larger vision. For that spirit's will
Enabled me, and made that with bold brow
I breasted the great onset of the spheres,
And clove the downward press as a fork'd barb
The solid clouds, and shook from my wide hair,
Like burrs o' the brake, full many driven lights
And floating spangles of the comets' tails;
Soaring the while, until we gain'd at length
A belt of uninhabitable void—
Lagoon on whose calm edge the surf of stars
Ceased and was still.

Therein thro' time untold
We moved, like those old seamen on the strange
And tenantless Pacific—steep'd at whiles
In currents cold, wherefrom no fragrance bare
Sweet record of their birth—full of moist awe,
In that dread Absence of created things
To feel ourselves alive. Then came a plunge
Into another zone of wheeling suns
Thick-group'd, innumerous, as the last,—wherein
Erratic nameless torrents of keen sparks,
A hurrying crew, career'd most lawlessly
Among the staid old worlds: and then, beyond,
Another breadth of desolated dark,
And then new zones, new deserts,—till that nest
Of distant planets round about our sun
Seem'd like a brood all cold and motherless
Of little wailing worlds, entomb'd within
The black umbrageous ether in some lone
Forgotten corner of the universe.—

Enough! O vast illimitable God—
O solemn weight, enormous aggregate
Of wisdoms inconceivable—superb
Gigantic avalanche of splendid truths
And mysteries of knowledge, drowning us
In fierce amaze—cold, cruel, biting plunge
Of something keener than an adder's tooth
Into our wincing vitals!

But the throes
And intellectual agonies, that raved
From side to side of these impregnable
And desperate crags of knowledge, wet with blood
And blind with dust of battles and with tears,
Are still'd—we are too weak to struggle now:
Let the invincible immortals reign,
And we be brutes! Yea, we grow kneaded up
Among the soulless dumb existences
Around, and consciousness as in a mist
Departs, and self forgets itself—we lie
A very nothing: till, with long abode
In the familiar presence of those spells
That wrought us this, we from our frenzied trance
Come forth like men from sickness, rising up
A crush'd, emaciated thing, and slow
With flaccid foot slink shuddering into—

No!
Not death! There comes a brightness from behind—
We are envelopt in clear, shining showers
Warm'd from the big black clouds; and all above
Large rainbows break and glisten on the dark:
O now we know our places and the time!
We were young angels, offering at heaven
Unfledged and immature,—who in vague dreams
Forgot themselves to madness—dreams that scorn'd
To drink their life from this our fatherland,
And died for lack of moisture. But hurrah!
Now we are men—Promethean men, with brave
And nervous hearts, who grasp the royal flame
That welds those struggling errors into truth:—
Not to be transcendental, crunching out
With savage heel unblest the dearer part
That makes us human; not to be as brutes,
And choke with gross rank gush the purer part
That maketh us divine.

And we do know,
In part, our course and purpose in the world—
Why we are here, and with what differing eyes
'Tis meet to look around us as we move:
For, standing in the Present, bosom-deep
In rushing life, that ancient strong desire
That grasps and clutches at the lordly Past,—
That fever'd and regretful hungering
For lovely things departed, smoothens down
To healthier fondness, wholesome as the dew
To flowers that know not rain: nor less the large
Wild Future spheres her vagrant fiery stars
Into most loyal orbits and serene:
And, working staunchly in the painful round
Of daily tasks that wean us from ourselves
And brace and tone us into manliness,
Those high and dangerous beauties, which to see
Toss'd from its balance the unweighted spirit
And bred conceits that made the elders smile,
Lose the false harm that was not of themselves
But us, and cooling into distance, shine
True and undazzling—shooting from afar
Long level splendours, which the porous heart
Absorbs and is refresh'd.

Thus some strong law
Makes, that thro' resignation and thro' toil
And patient long endurance, we shall grow
In knowledge and in perfectness; that thus
We shall evolve its meanings out of Life,
And, or in nature or the wondrous coil
Of our own being or the press o' the world,
Shall see the purpose growing thro' the act,
And see the clues that wind thro' things, and see
Our lesser wisdom branching into more:
That thus, thro' faith and low communion sweet,
That vague Eternal shall become for us
The Father, and the Spirit, and the Son.”