Come to the hillside with its crown of woods
And see the springing grass and vine and tree
Answer keen nature's kiss with leafy glee;
See blushing maples don their verdant hoods
With the long lines of climbing hemp for snoods,
The young brake's crosier and the errant bee,
And hear the blackbird's glad garrulity,
And the hoarse ravens talking to their broods!
Ye say: "Of old, these lives were weeds that first
Sprang from the soil, the soil itself from rocks
Plowed by the glaciers, and the rocks were, erst,
The molten lava heaved with billowy shocks
In the slow curdling of the thin fire-mist;—
Where, then, did life-germs hold their ante-nuptial tryst?"
A life diffused through universal space,—
Name it or not, it lifts your soul in awe,
Ever evolving, through unerring law,
The myriad forms of every breathing race;
In the heart's warmth survives a vital trace
Of the old fire-mist, whence the loves that draw
The aspiring heavenward, and the pangs that gnaw
The lost soul groping in some desert place:
Ye see no darkness but the shadow cast
By Being basking in the Eternal Sun;
There is no void; through all the hollow vast
Flows the Great Soul that makes the cosmos one.
Not man alone, but every creature moves
To its fulfilling, even as through invisible grooves.
Is it for nothing that our loveliest
Aspire to be more lovely, and the wise
Sink deeper mines for wisdom's golden prize?
Who more pursues the better than the best?
Who sooner toys with danger in the quest
Of new horizons than the brave whose eyes
Have seen all perils under alien skies,
From austral snows to Hecla's burning crest?
What means the insatiate hunger of the herd,
The inveterate instinct that persists and clings
To the black robes of Mystery till it wrings
From her shut lips a syllable of that word,
Letter by letter, that the ages spell,
Till wild-eyed prophets dare pronounce the ineffable?
No planet wheels around an utter void;
No orb goes aimless through the gloomy deeps,
But still to some determinate good it sweeps.
When, world by world, the starry host deployed
With many a sun and glimmering asteroid,
In maddening gyres adown the shuddering steeps,
Some leash invisible ensphered their headlong leaps
Around their crater through each vast cycloid
The very pebble, high at random tossed,
Holds the same curve and seeks a kindred goal;
One law attends them, that no waif be lost.
Are dumb clods wiser than the human soul?
Are worlds centripetal, and must man alone
Down the sheer tangent shoot into the vast unknown?
Have souls no central sun whence life proceeds?
Is man’s vast yearning to no whitherward?
His love a snare, his high ideal, adored
In silent awe, a fate-fire’s lamp that leads
To the dark gens of all unlovely creeds?
Where marched the heroes whose keen shafts have gored
The threatful dark, with all its lies abhorred.—
To soulless Nothing, or Faith’s golden meads?
Not all go darkling, but all seek the same,—
The infinite Something longed for or denied,
Nameless, or marked with many a fatal name,—
Baal, Teutates, Moloch,—deified
Distractions of the Unknown God, or One
The Soul of all our souls, creation’s central Sun.
