Earth’s wrong, and woe, and savage right
That fierce breaks ignoble peace,
Tend slowly to new life and light;
God’s plummet sounds like the infinite
Of Chaos, and His worlds increase!
Under the earthquake’s grinding wheels
The granite mountains, torn in chasms,
Are crumbled down to mellow hills;
The softest dew that night distills
Has had its birth in thunder-spasms.
With grain by grain the coral clift
Is piled below the barren seas,
Till storms its awful peaks uplift,
And reeds, that on the billows drift,
With living emerald sow the leas.
In many a rough and stinging burr
Young beauty veils her nascent germ;
The chords of music’s dulcimer
With clearest tunes, harmonious, stir,
When tightest drawn from term to term.
So may wrung heartstrings give a tone
More sweet than gentlest fate could win;
The holiest anthems round the throne
Thrill with the drying shriek and moan
Poured from the riven heart of sin.
God’s good and man’s life oft apart,
Oft meet at last by separate doors;
The pangs that sting a tortured heart
Are very blessings if they start
The blood to run a nobler course.
There is no blind, malignant Chance;
The wandering atoms feel the sway
Of force creative; till they dance
Harmonious in the sunbeam’s glance,
As star-worlds in the Milky Way.
The loneliest cannot walk apart;
A Hand unseen is in his hand,
A heart is beating with his heart;
And thrills of home-like music start
The pilgrim in a desert land!
Let him thank God, who at the last —
Though sorely scourged by storm and wave —
On any solid shore is cast;
There shall he find the very blast
That ruined, drifts him food, to save.
More proudly may he tread the wreck
Of shattered hopes compelled once more
To bear him home, than, ere the check
Of fates adverse, he trod the deck,
Of his gay barque and turned from shore.
Strength comes of trial, soon or late;
And that omnipotence of will
Which dares to man a helmless fate,
No sleek-browed fortune can create,
No scowling fortune daunt with ill.
Gain from Loss