University of Virginia Library

Thou hast passed the fatal border,
Thine eyes are open wide,
And where is that new order
Should be on the other side?
The light of old is darkened,
And knowledge dwells with pain,
Now fain wouldst thou have hearkened
And turned thee back again.
So many foes assail thee,—
The sorrow of weak will,
The sorrow of friends that fail thee,
The hurt of loving still,
The sorrow of idle speaking,
The sorrow of waning youth,
The sorrow of fruitless seeking,
The bitterness of Truth.
Thou askest, who will show thee
The thing that thou shouldst do,
And a hollow deep below thee
Returns thine answer, who!
The devious ways are doubled,
Thou hast doubted what is sin,
Thou art tired and dark and troubled,
And disconsolate within.

Lonely soul, I know thy trial, thy denial once was bitterness to me,
No white ray of hope hath found thee,
All grows dim and fleeting round thee,—
Only forms of things external
Shadowed o'er a dream diurnal,
Only what the self discerneth still returneth for its essence but to thee.
Thou hast passed through wildering mazes,
Thinking in and thinking in,
Till the spirit reels and dazes
And the moving sands begin.
Thou has peered behind the curtain,
And the clouds seem ever shifting,
And the ocean darkly drifting,
And there is no sure nor certain
In the shadow world thou knowest
Save the grave to which thou goest.

Now no more thy choice is free
Face what thou hast willed to see,
Set thy nerve to face the gloom,
Bold to wrestle with thy doom,
Clear away all tangent issues,
Memory's weft of phantom tissues,
Fling the dear child dream apart,
Hug the haggard truth to heart!
Either less than nothing worth
Fruitless pangs for bitter birth,
Aimless wanderings over earth,
Any dawn of any day
To the life whose goalless course is
But the sport of unknown forces
In a worse than wanton play;
Or there must be something other, oh, my brother, than our nothingness to find,
Something still besought for blessing though confessing we are lost and spirit-blind,
Something dimly apprehended
Not in thee begun or ended,
Vainly questioned by thy “whence”
Out of thine experience,
Something that in all our being though unseeing yet as surely we pursue,
Which thy will accepts unproving, ever moving, ever fruitful, therefore true.

What is this which whispering saith
All thy being is by faith,
Only faith and nowise knowing
Moves thy coming and thy going,
Faith in power to perform,
Faith that effort is not vain,
Good that was will be again,
Faith that peace will follow storm:
Surely thou canst find evolving
From begetting and dissolving,
Something ever growing, gaining,
Through the transient remaining,
Not alone that sea's unchanging ever-ranging monotoning rhyme,
But on every tide's returning
Surely dawns to thy discerning,
Something of the waves upcasting
That confirms the everlasting
As a shore for ever forming through the storming of the ocean drift of time.

In the tale of ages hoarded,
Witness is of this recorded,
Wrongs that were and passed away,
Night that was where now is day,
Human needs that struck in blindness
Answered back in human kindness,
Harvests reaped in latter years
Richer for long rain of tears;
This across the dark sea's drifting marks the lifting of the cloudy veil and far
As we cry our no surrender, dawns the splendour of Hope's solitary star.

Ah, but Hope, I think thou sayest,
Beams on havens, smiles to peace!
Where is Hope, oh, thou that prayest,
When the whirlwinds find release,
When the blind force wakes to raven,
And the shaken hills fall down,
And the ocean whelms the haven,
And the puny prayers drown!

Thou hast deemed the sowing wasted
Where the harvest fell untasted!
Years of labour unrewarded
Love's surrenders unrecorded,
All the pains that none may tell
Spent to do one small thing well!
Then the sudden storm arises
Big with passionate reprises,
Sweeps away what lives have striven, dearly given in their sacrifice of joy,
And the wave of life is stricken
And the generations sicken,
Or the mountains burst asunder, or the thunder bellows earthward to destroy,
Silence drowns the human cries,
Mocked and vain the effort dies.

Oh, but Faith shall overthrow
Utmost evidence of woe,
Seeing nature knows no treason
To the evermore of reason,
Nothing dies though all things alter,
Only faith and courage falter.

All these shocks of desolation
Are but birth-pangs of creation,
Last convulsions of the forces
That ordained the stars their courses,
Witness of a work not ended, love-befriended since the dawn of all began,
Thwarting forces that dissever,
God's denials of the never
Ere earth settle down for ever,
To the silence of completeness in its meetness for the excellence of man:
Nature lives and life fulfils
Those old laws which laid the hills,
In her wildest-seeming mood
Still benevolent and good.
Through the ruin o'er the wrack
Gems of life come throbbing back;
Not by earth shall cease to live
What was never earth's to give;
Life more live shall be again,
After death and human pain
Man's eternity remain.

Come with me and I will show thee, I who know thee, to the solitary place,
Where the morning-lighted road is haply God is speaking plain and face to face,
Far beyond the wildering city
And the discord of its cries,
Where our impotence of pity
Draws a blindness on our eyes,
Where is life for aye renewing all the ruin of the used and the outworn,
Where you feel the conscious essence in quiescence as the flower-buds are born;
Where the woodbird fearless launches
On the wing he trusts to bear,
Where the waving forest branches
Stir an ever limpid air,
Where the world's heart throbs its fountain
Through the rent of granite hill,
With the silence of the mountain
And the small voice crying still.

Too long our lives have lain at ease
When simple joys have ceased to please!
Consider all this singing mirth
The eternal miracle of earth,
Very death implying birth.
A while agone and all was grey,
A mist was wrapped about the day,
The broken trees were black and torn,
The sky all joyless and forlorn;—
Then see how simply and how sure
The mother nature works her cure,
A sudden thrill, there runs a sign
Through all the intricate design,
A little sun, a little rain,
And all the glory is again!
No human logic shall destroy
The mighty balance here for joy!

Is the heart not beating stronger
By one dread that dooms no longer?
Joy thou hast if thou wilt use it,
Hope if thou wilt not refuse it,
Clearer yet from yonder summit
Eyes shall see that overcome it.

Up and on then! Higher, higher
Climb the upland of desire,
Till the valleys fade from wonder,
Like a blue sea rolling under,
And the lowlier echoes die
Near the silence of the sky!
Art thou dizzy at the steepness, and the deepness of the chasm under thee?
At the light which strikes so purely, very surely, thou art dizzy to be free!
Far beneath the mist shapes roll,
Brows may face the glory fearless,
Eyes are open wide and tearless,
And self-conscious is the soul.

Here where seldom since the world was
Thought has travelled, feet have trod,
Nature with a wealth as lavish
Thrusts her marvels through the sod;
In the silence, on the mountains
Man has ever sought for God!

Dimly under roll before thee
All the ages of the earth,—
Forms that cast the shadow story
Of creation and of birth:
Phantom shapes of first existence
Looming hugely up through time,
Shadows cast down wastes of distance
From the mist-light of the prime;
Giant strife of forces heaving
Through a half-created day;
Life surviving, strength retrieving
What the torrent tore away;
Stalks a gaunt and huge-limbed nation
Hunger haunted, born to dearth,
Compassed round with desolation
Through bare hollows of the earth;
Wandering races sternly striving
With the infinite to do;
And the good of them surviving
For assertion of the true;
Slowly mounting up from chaos
Warring each upon his kind,
To the first prayer,—“Lest they slay us,”
From a spirit born but blind:
Till the need of kindred uses
Shed a fitful light on life,
And they swore their savage truces
To the demon of their strife:
Then a little love like leaven
Working upward, dimly seen,
Till beneath the sun in heaven
Tracts of barren earth grew green:
And there rose the prophet speaker
Pent in narrow grooves of race,
Here and there an earnest seeker
In his own appointed place:
Sagas of the wandering nations,
Idol carvers of the lake,
Runes inscribed in mountain stations
Which the haunting spirit spake;
Truth begets her own recorder,
In the drift and waste impearled,
Slowly grew the dawn of order
On the dark and waiting world.
Slowly light on light ensued,
Voices filled the Solitude.

Light on light! for ever breaking with the waking to the consciousness of mind,
But the love that needs must guide it not beside it yet, long lingering behind:
Reason working blind and crudely,
With the passion of the child,
Strength and passion blending rudely
For the taming of the wild;
While some Titan marked his border, welding order, and on many a sanguine plain
Fell the corn before the mowers that new sowers might replant the world again.
Rose the hero's intercession
'Twixt the human and his doom,
Heralding a new progression
From a darker deep of gloom;
Till the forms grow plainer nearer
Memory known and dreamed and dearer
All that human effort made for,
Warred for, lived for, died for, prayed for,
Prayed in all the names that slumber without number in the aves of the dead,
Balder Ormuzd and Osiris
Mark the height where man's desire is,
And the temples on the mountains and the fountains and the oracles of dread;
These and tides of Empire rolling for controlling savage hearts and wanton hands
Till the wildest learned submission and tradition found the law that binds the lands.

Fair creations pass before thee,
Sunrise crowned and silver shod,
Lit with all the halo glory
Of man's morning dreams of God;
Rose in Greece the star of beauty
And the fables gathered form,
Rome proclaimed the star of duty,
And the stars outlive the storm;
Slowly, spite the world's derision,
Through the old pathetic strife,
Gained and grew the stedfast vision
Of the seers who taught us life;
How they stand out grand and stoic more heroic than the heroes they dethroned,
Drank their hemlock mute and smiling, unreviling, disregarded and disowned!

Though the forms obscured in distance
Rises one with mild insistance,
O'er the hero's incompleteness
O'er the code and o'er the creed,
With a voice of passing sweetness
Toned to touch the human need:
One among loud wildering cries
Still, with pity in his eyes,
One despised and thereby purest
One in bonds and thereby surest,—
Man's defiance round him hurled,
Standing lone against the world;
And a sound like music thrilleth
Yonder dark and misty vales,
For a gentle answer stilleth
All the world of human wails,
Love is first! on love relying,
Love the gain and life the loss,
Crowned with sorrow, stabbed and dying
On the shoulders of the cross!

Love is first, though all agree not,
Points the way, though all men see not;
Though the road seem only steeper, depths the deeper, for the height we have to climb,
Though mirages false bedizen our horizon, and a halo decks the prime,
Though the aging eyes regretful
Search the vanished vales of youth,
And a memory half-forgetful
Gilds the bitter lips of truth.

Heed not thou man's false divining in the shining of thy true and stedfast star,
Mark not thou the marsh light's luring the obscuring of the winded clouds that mar,
Heed not all the groves of error,
And the phantom thrones of terror,
All the shadows of the sun,
All the infinite undone!
What is all the wrinkled past
By the while the world shall last!
These endure their little season,
But the timeless eyes of Faith
See the transience of treason
And the impotence of death.
Life shall pass and be reborn,
Night as ever yield to morn,
As surely as there dwells in thee
The instinct of eternity;
While through the changing chances,
And by the conquered throes,
The scope of life advances,
The individual grows!
Unbound by superstition,
From forms and precepts free,
His warrant in tradition,
His law in Liberty!
Say through chaos dawned a True,
An Order, and a work to do:
And clearer as each deed is dared
The higher heights beyond are bared:
Say 'twas sorrow and 'twas sin
Human hearts were tempered in;
War was but that peace ensue,
Falsehood to assure the true,
Lust for life to weary of,
Hatred to constrain to love;
Death is but the trance that brings
Promise to the worm of wings!

Much is needed to surrender
Much of brave and dear and tender,
False renowns that once were true
While their work was yet to do,
Liens of nation, ties of lands,
Severed hearts and parted hands,
All of chaos that survives
Thwarting our unmoulded lives,
All the idols time has shed
Reverence over from the dead,
Much beloved of yesterday,
Worlds to do yet lie before us
Swell the mighty triumph-chorus;
Nothing good has passed away!
Look not back with longing eyes,
On before the gold age lies!

By those heights we dare to dare,
By the greatness of our prayer,
Ever growing, loftier reaching
To a royaller beseeching,
By the olden woes washed painless, white and stainless in the tears of bitter price,
By the strength of our assurance to endurance of the need of sacrifice,
Not by dreaming but by using,
Not by claiming but refusing,
There shall dawn on eyes unsealing the revealing of a self that knows and grows,
And the stream of thy devotion find the ocean where its meaning overflows.

So take the thread that seemed so frail,
Have faith to hope and never quail,
For all the weary woes of earth
And all the hollowness of mirth,
Accept but this divine in man
Believe I ought to means I can,
And comprehend the perfect plan.

Lift thee o'er thy “here” and “now,”
Look beyond thine “I” and “thou,”
Every effort points the next,
And the way grows unperplexed
To wider ranges, larger scope,
All things possible to hope!
Till thou feel the breath of morning shadow scorning, and on spirit wings unfurled
Win the way to realms of wonder,
Rolling starward with the thunder,
Flashing earthwards with the lightning to the brightening the dark edges of the world,
Till the vastness shall absorb thee,
And the light of lights enorb thee,
And the wings on which thou soarest
Thou wilt need to shade thine eyes,
For the radiance thou adorest,
For the nearness of sunrise;
Then thy strongest strength shall be
In thine own humility,
Wrapt into the holiest holy
In thy worship vastly aisled,
Bend the knee and whisper lowly
“Our Father” with the child!