University of Virginia Library

LINES ON THE SUN.

Sun! Beatific Sun, i' the year's wintriest day
If thou com'st forth with pomp in every ray,
A little world of summer round thee smiles,
The barren clouds laugh out to flowery isles,
To little skyey oases of bliss
Too fair to gaze on from a world like this,
Without fond yearnings and keen longings deep
To climb the severing and untrodden steep!
Sun! Beatific Sun, thrice glorious Sun,
Thou can'st make precious all thou look'st upon,
All things grow beautiful beneath thine eye—
As though they drank ætherial poetry,
From thy divinest aspect—was the Sea
Set in this earth to be a glass for thee!
Were the unnumbered stars with their soft rays
Scattered, to be as foils to thy crowned blaze,
Through endless space (when trembling into light
They wake remembrance of thy matchless might)
Through endless space that sparkles with their gleams—
But burns—but blazes with thy Kingly beams!
Sun! Beatific Sun! 'tis thou hast given
To us clay-moulded mortals Earth and Heaven,
For both to thy enlightening beams we owe—
Without which neither could we view or know;
And still from thee, Oh! orb divinely bright,
We mount in thought towards the Light of Light.
Thou Godlike Sun!—thou shinest but to say,
“My Maker bade me make the glorious day,
I shine upon His worlds—obey His word,
And sway the universe to serve its Lord;
I reign and rule His great creation still,
To make that reign subservient to His will!”
Oh! bear the brightness of a perfect day
Far through our Souls, and let each stainless ray
Meet with a thought as pure and as serene,
And brighten thou that Spiritual Scene,
For powers of darkness there full often brood,
And turn to evil all our hopes of good.
Sun!—Beatific Sun! no ray of thine
Upon that Spiritual Scene can shine,
A Heavenlier Light—a Spiritual Sun
Must shine and smile those clouds away—or none.