The Poetical Works of Robert Montgomery :: :: University of Virginia Library

Between the living and the dead our life
Throbs like a brief vibration; and how soon
This pendulum of anxious being stops!
E'en in a moment, by some touch or tone
Arrested, lo, the life of sense concludes,
And we are launch'd beyond the tracking eye
To follow; by the Infinite absorb'd,
And in the secret of Eternity!

And yet, as though Reality were here
Alone authentic, how the hollow show
Of things, which eye, or ear, can apprehend
O'ercomes, and with monopolizing charm
Our cheated mind attracts, and blunts the edge
Of fine perception, for the spirit-world
To come! And oh, how rarely hoping Youth
Turns to the future a prophetic gaze,
Beyond this earth of shadows! Tomb on tomb
O'er life's descending pathway throws a shade;
And many a heart-ache to some fever'd brain
Must pay sad homage, ere the mocks of time
Be scatter'd, and our nobler dreams of soul
Their reign commence, and teach the gay to think.

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Then, throbs the immortality of thought
Within us! then, adown the gulf unknown
Of Life's hereafter prescient fancy looks,
By faith made holy; while we learn to feel
That body forms the prison-house of soul,
And, out of it the dead indeed are free!

And such are round us, in ethereal hours
When earth recedes, and through the rents of Time
Beyond the Visible we dare to gaze,
And gather wisdom from a world unseen,
Though not unshadow'd by foreboding mind.
Thus may all clouds of Sadducéan tinge
Dissolve, and placidly our dreams recall,
And the loved features of our dead, recast!
By lonely shores, by melancholy seas,
At moonlight's trance, or sunset's dreamy close,
Down vaulted aisles or churchyard's cypress-gloom
Slow-pacing; or, beneath pictorial forms
By Art's eternity of hues preserved,
How oft we ponder o'er some face beloved!
Till, by that resurrection which the heart
Rehearseth, we can bid their cherish'd tones
To wake, and hear their wonted footsteps glide.

But, deep the truth omniscient Scripture tells
And sanctions,—not one pulse of conscious Mind
The Will Divine hath ever caused to play
In human being, hath a single rest
Experienced, since the primal throb began!
The spirit-people of God's world Unseen,
Millions on millions though their number be,
Are conscious, more than when by flesh encased,
And clogg'd in action. Not a soul's extinct!
Still A dam thinks; still Alexander feels;
Cæsar hath being; Cleopatra lives;
And those crown'd butchers, whom the world calls brave,
Are feeling more than when they battles fought:
Yes, all who have been, great, or good, or vile,
Patriarchs, prophets, intellectual kings,
Heroes, or warriors, and those laurell'd priests
Of truth, the poets of Eternity,
All are a living, though a sightless, race;
Each in himself a hell, or heaven, become!
For Mind is everlasting; and the Man
Is there in essence, when contingents die.
Thus may the Dead a more than sermon preach
To awe the living, and this truth impress,
That as we die, for ever we endure!
The same in principle the heart abides:
Since Morals in their root continue one
And changeless, though the Soul hath taken wing.

Hence two Worlds claim us, by a sleepless law;
But one moves round us, palpably instinct
With life and passion; and, alas! absorbs
In the wild vortex of its vain delight,
What to the other, though unseen, we owe
Of faith and conscience. Thus, for time we live
As well as in it; thus, our hearts deny
The Infinite that waits behind the Veil;
And when the living from our gaze retire
We talk as though they lived not, and were quite
From Being parted, as to sight no more!
Yet this is madness in the garb of sense;
The blinding mock of necromantic dreams,
Dilating time into eternity
And which eternity to time contract.
For faith and reason in this truth conjoin,
The dead are living, but their life unheard,
Unfelt, unknown, beyond ideal thought
To image, seldom can that man inspire
Who walks by sense, and worships but the same.