University of Virginia Library

Beautiful orb, that rulest the sky, bright joy of creation,
Helios! oldest of gods, when earth, with divinity teeming,
Spake to the eye and the heart of a race that believed in their feelings
Now they call thee a globe, a fiery sphere in the welkin,
Blindly wheeled, the causer of light, but wheeling in blindness;
Blindly wheeled by a law, with might despotic, compelling
Atoms, and suns, and moons, the dust that turneth the balance,
Clouds that float in the sky, and waves that swell in the ocean.
Beautiful Sun! whom millions worshipped, bright joy of creation!
Still let me deem thee a god!—or, if potent Science deny me
This heart-worship, which lived when men had faith in their feelings,
I from Philosophy borrow a name to baptize thee—be greeted,
Light-giving eye of the God, whose soul is the life of the Cosmos!
Eye not seeing, like vision of men, with tamely recipient
Organ, but causing to see, creative, procreant, plastic;
Eye in which Plato believed, and the broad-viewed thinkers of Hellas,
Ere mechanical men, with curious lines and triangles,
Measured the skies, and mapped the bald ungodded creation;
Eye of the welkin, I praise thee! the glory that waked in the Persian
Hymns of awful delight, and sent the Pelasgic Apollo
Forth, a glorious youth, with golden locks down-flowing
Over the shoulders that bore the quiver with arrows resounding:
Me that glory inspires in the clime of the mist-wreathed mountain;
Me thy deity stirs in the land, where a jealous theology
Watches the words of the wise, and grudges free thought to the thinker.
I will praise thee; inspire my heart with flooding emotion!
Fill me with thoughts as rich as the leafy tree, which redundant
Shakes her tresses around, and waves her beauty before me!
Teach me to praise thee with skill, that whoso hears may adore thee,
Helios! beautiful orb, the plastic eye of creation!

Beautiful Sun! when the procreant breath on the primal waters
Brooded, divinely stirring the crude and weltering Chaos,
Water, and earth, and air, and fire, in dim elemental
Strife inorganic convolved, and rolling in huge confusion,
Then thou wert not, beautiful Sun! but evident darkness
Struggled with fitfullest fire, in dismal yawning abysses
Joyless. Forth from the thought of the all-creative Jehovah
Walked thy luminous round with intelligential clearness.
Chaos before thee fled; the vast convolutions of darkness
Rolled away; the elements, freed from tangled embroilment,
Grouped their atoms, and sought in kindred classes to mingle.
Thou, bright eye of the world, didst order the infinite discord,
Thou, first servant of God, the Supreme Causer of order!
Moulded by thee in the slimy swathes of mud primeval,
Struggled the formative life in the plant; thy ray calorific
Fashioned the germs of growth, and shapes of exuberant beauty
Sprang from the bursting clod with leafy splendour enfolden.
Gently the blade of the grass came creeping over the meadow;
Stately rose the tree; and in graceful rings symmetric,
Spread the fresh-green fern its fan to the zephyr gigantic.
Beautiful world! from year to year in gladness I greet thee;
Yearly the power of the Spring, and the ray of the life-dispensing
Glorious Sun invests the old and hoary creation
Fresh in juvenile green; and yearly my heart within me
Beats to the pulses that stirred, when Helios moulded the Cosmos.
Beautiful trees! that with far-sent fangs securely rooted,
Clasp the rock, and with rounded stems, erect and stable,
Rise to the light; then swinging your arms with opulent leafage
Broadly tufted, or finely needled, drooping or spreading,
Sway to the breeze: ye forests, that wave with various grandeur,
Dark with the veteran pine, or light with the tapering larch-tree,
Stout with the bunchy plane, or soft with the fine-leaved linden,
Smooth with beech, or rough with the large-flowered spears of the chestnut,
Fragrant with pendulous birch, the white-stemmed pride of the dark brown
Mountain torrent, that scoops the shelvy bed of the mica:
Praised be the beauty of trees! them Helios brought from the darkness,
Cherished their seeds in the rift of the rock, and lustily reared them,
Richly with verdure to clothe the old grey sides of the mountain.
Beautiful flowers! the joy of the meadow, the grace of the garden,
Triumph of genial light, disparted in colour, and scattered
Wide o'er the verdure of earth, with beneficent wild profusion,
Wonderful! filling the eye with continuous feasts, and the heart with
Thrills of dainty delight! Full oft in your quest I have wandered
Deep into murkiest woods, and high where the pinnacled granite
Shelters the snow through the summer, and far where the cataract thunders
Over the storm-seamed brow of the grim-indented mountain:
There the bell, and the cup, and the purple star have found me,
Beautiful, crowning with life the forehead of bleak desolation,
Smiling, like children's eyes, with miraculous light from the deep black
Yawning chasm, that seemed an abode for barrenness only.
Beautiful flowers! or gemming the snow-wreathed hills, or at random
Spotting with vegetive gold the broad fat fields of the lowland,
Nodding in airy clusters aloft, or broad as a buckler,
Floating in lazy pride on the bosom of deep slow waters,
'Neath hot tropical suns; in lowliest guise, like the sorrel
Shading its delicate tints 'neath the moss-grown stumps of the forest,
Or in magnificent globes high-blown, with petal on petal,
Closely-massed, and cunningly cut into curious splendour,
Looking in face of the Sun with the vermeil pomp of the Summer;
Lovely parade of beautiful growth, divinely unfolden
World of colour, I bless thee, and praise the Creator who gave me
Eyes to drink in the light, and share thy magical fountain,
Helios, beautiful orb, the plastic eye of creation!

Beautiful Earth! in vesture of various light enveloped,
Glorious! ever to me thy beauty has been as a garden
Gemmed with flowery delight, and breathing odorous sweetness!
Ever new wonder hath thrilled my wondering eye, beholding
Each soft line of thy grace, each ample front of thy grandeur.
Oft with vagabond foot thy fields I have traversed at random,
Free, with savage delight, by modes and fashions uncumbered,
Nourishing thoughts as light as the gull that floats o'er the billow,
Breezy and fresh as the Zephyr that tosses the green and plumy
Glory of trees in the light, and pouring unsought and unhindered
Hymns of vital delight! I praise thee, God, and thy sunlit
Earth, the garden of man, as abroad I wander in fancy,
Viewing again and again thy wealth of wonderful pictures,
Hung in the halls of the soul by thy magical many-hued mirror,
Memory, mother of Thought! And now my fantasy lifts me
Far to the lands of the South, where Light, like a queen majestic,
Sways with sovereign strength, and smiles with broad, diffusive,
Liberal brightness unsullied; and there the bluff rock-forehead
Stands in the flash of the sea, high-crowned with the nicely-measured
Marble pillars, as white as the flower which bursts in the morning,
Hung with memories of worship as fair as the light which surrounds them,
Dian, or radiant Apollo, or she, the blue-eyed virgin,
Daughter of Jove, strong-fathered, with weighty spear and buckler
Bright, far-glancing, a sign to the worn sea-wandering sailor.
There my fantasy lifts me, and there on sun-woven pictures
Feeds and fattens with joy. Or me, with a turn of my musing,
Suddenly thought transports to the castled crags of the Rhine stream,
Terraced with vines, and brewing by mystic brewst of the sun-light
Wine, which gladdens the heart: and there I see in the arbour
Knots of men and women, the gentle, the kind, and the thoughtful,
Feasting on sunny delights, and the sportive freak of the moment,
Harmless-bubbling; or wandering far through mazes of leafy
Copse-wood wild, and making the old grey ruin re-echo
Free with songs, the voice of an easy sweet-blooded people,
Plain, unbribed by the cumbersome pride which fetters the Briton.
These thy pictures, O Sun! the living, the varied, the changing
Ever, but ever the same, wide-spread in magnificent fulness
Wonderful! Who can declare the wealth of luminous glory,
Flowing in radiant oceans, where stars are wheeling in mazes
Vast, uncounted, unscanned by the glass of the farsighted gazer?
Me such glory confounds. I rather, with wise limitation,
Feed on the shows of truth, and chiefly the sights of my dear-loved
Strong Caledonian home, the land of the flood and the mountain.
Beautiful Scotland! or where thy broad hills, smooth, green-mantled,
Sink to the vale, far fringed with the pomp of mansion and villa,
Rich, well-gardened; or where the might of thy Grampian rises
High, far-sweeping, majestic, and flushing far with the purple
Springy heather, deer-trodden. How blest to the foot is the labour,
High from thy breezy heath to brush the dew, Caledonia!
Whether pursuing the stag to his haunt on the lone, rock-girdled
Mountain tarn, or regaling the eye with grandeur of high-piled
Peak on peak, and feasting the ear with music of waters
Rushing adown birch-glens, where the trout in the amber caldron
Shoots as swift as a fresh young thought from the brain of the thinker.
Here thy glories, O Sun, in the shifting play of the shadow,
Thousandfold varied, appear, when the skirt of the delicate-floating
Mist now rests on a crag, now round a black tremendous
Precipice skirs, as swift as the rush of dreams in a dreamer.
Oft on a broad bare mount, Bencleugh, or lofty Muicdhui,
Sombre hangs a pall of dark dense cloud from the welkin;
Sombre the traveller looks, the unwearied climber of mountains,
All his prospect is dimmed, the glory of hills is departed.
Sudden the curtain uprises; beneath the rim of the dark cloud
Luminous shines the carpeted plain; the silvery landscape
Glorious glistens along the line of the shimmering river;
Castle and crag gleam out; the old grey-centuried turret
Rises over the wood; the white-washed cottage is glinting
Far through the dark-blue pine; the spire in the village is twinkling
Bright in the Sun; the vents of the populous far-spreading city
Shoot their white-blue fumes in beautiful scrolls to the welkin,
Telling of labour and power, and thought, the mighty magician.
Such thy glories, O Light, on the broad brown mountains of Scotland!
Such thy wonderful sleight on the pictured face of the high-land,
Helios, beautiful orb, the plastic eye of creation!

Beautiful Light! the child from the rayless womb of its mother
Sudden emerging, and claiming his lot in a larger existence,
Free, self-rooted, self-centred, from thee, thou centre of gladness,
Knows the beneficent thrill that quickens the sensuous nervlets,
Delicate, timorous, soon to embrace with miraculous grasping
Realms of measureless knowledge. By thee the full-grown thinker
Nurses his ken, and learns to be wise by looking and loving,
Clearly scanning the smallest, and widely surveying the largest
Forms of exuberant life, with a full and ripe comprehension.
Thine is the circle of Being; the bond art thou that unitest
Nearest and farthest of things with a potent function, electric,
Wonder-working. By Thee the Earth with the Heaven communeth,
Knowing with known, and lover with loved; and through infinite spaces
Star sends message to star, and comet shoots greeting to comet.
Beautiful Light! with cunning disposal of lens and of mirror
Science may torture thy forms, and question thy Protean splendour,
Call thee a radiant matter, or feel thy quivering pulses,
Telling of rise and of fall in the undulant flow of thy beauty.
Me this beauty suffices. I look, and enjoy, and adore thee,
Godlike, born of a God, with virtue divinest redundant!
Father of lights, receive this lisping hymn of my worship;
Thou first Sun of all suns, first glory of glories, and only
Substance of all that seems, prime mover of all that moveth,
Fill my heart with thy brightness, and teach me with open receptive
Faculty ever to live on the fulness of beauty around me!
Teach me ever to thrill to the breath of thy grace, as a well-tuned
Harp responds to the touch of a subtle and dexterous harper.
Thus no discord shall master my fate; and in harmony sweetest
Human shall chime with divine. Thus teach me, O Father, to praise thee!
Thee, the source of all life, and thy Sun, the joy of all living,
High hung up for a sign in the hall of the glorious Cosmos,
Helios! beautiful orb, the plastic eye of creation!