Divine Immanence, The

    Upheaves it into manly throes,
So, throbbing through our world’s unrest,
    God like a heart-beat goes.
As down the jarring thunder-cloud,
    In the day of stormy weather,
The rushing lightning flies to crowd
A million buds, by the hot sun bowed,
    With beauty and life together,—
So the soul of Nature, serene in strife,
    Unjarred by the tramp of storms,
Thrills through her heart with the pulses of life,
    And shapes from within all her beautiful forms:
        From drifting atoms, inert and dull,
            In the deeps of the dark abyss,
Builds islands of light in a waveless lull,—
Like the monads of ocean,— and fills them full
    Of unbonded life and bliss;
Gives even to anguish a joyful crown;
From blackest clouds that over us frown
    Rain the richest blessings down,
And pours far round an endless stream,—
New lives, new wills, and selves that seem
Self-moved in all they do and deem.

The seen points backward to the primal force
    That wove its garments in the silent loom
Of the Invisible; from its mystic source,
        Occult in fathomless gloom,
The new life creeps unerring in its course,
Winding up slowly into more and more,
Till its desires are winnowing wings to soar
    In wide gyrations to a grander doom,
Where, still refined, the ethereal spark finds room,
Won from the Infinite Soul, to dwell and warm
The clay it fashions to a nobler form.
Then thought leaps, flashing, from its cloudy screen,
    And lights the path it came
    With an inconstant flame,
Until sublimed to glorious prophecy
    And vision deep as high;
    When the subtle claw is seen
That binds all truths in woven harmony,
     Is seen the mountain path that leads
    From crystal spar
    And spermy weeds
To archangelic Hierarchs throned afar
    High over sun and star,—
     Ay, to the Throne Almighty, when proceeds
    The vast array
Of errant worlds that throng the Milky Way,
And words that roll beyond in never-fathomed day!