The Constant in the Varied

There is no moment in the flight of years
Where age begins and young life disappears,
No point between the daylight and the dark
That parts the two with its dividing mark;
No certain line that shuts from interflow
The good and evil of our lives below;
The zones of earth, the zones of life and thought,
Deny the abrupt boundaries we have wrought,
Softly they mingle, till, advancing, one
Holds for a space its solitary throne.
So pass the ages, Golden, Iron, Steam,
With contact interfused, as in a dream,
And all our Eras are but tenth-wave swells;
Of an eternal tide, beneath which dwells
The Eternal Mover, vital none the less
In the lone ripple than where billows press
The great rocks from their bases! We divide
The year to moons, the moon to weeks, and hide
In partial names the never-broken flow
That naught can hasten, naught can make more slow

Though still unfixed the line, — our twilight past, — 
We stand involved in midnight gloom at last;
Yet, even here the black is less intense
For stars that wander in the voids immense; 
We live unconscious of what steals away,
And wake from youth’s fair vision, old and gray;
Yet even in youth the seeds of wasting grew,
Even oldest life hath instincts of the new!
The widowed Age, still mourning Truth’s decline,
Starts in the flash of some new dawn divine,
Singe hallelujahs to that better day,
That throbbed unseen in midnights far away,
And lives to celebrate in choral song
The birth of gods now buried centuries long!

From age to age some soul divinely great
Mounts o’er the level of our poor estate;
And, mindless of the confluent tides that gave
Its grand preeminence tot hat crowning wave,
We mark its period, and re-date old time
By the accession of that force sublime;
Though not a pulse of all the untold past
But here ran tremulous to be seen at last!

We give the crown to moments when our sense
Grows conscious of the Eternal Immanence,
Half seeing what is, still blind to what has been,
Believing words just fashioned when first seen, 
Though, through untraveled space a million years
May fall to bring the light of distant spheres.

Though sense demand, with step by step, to climb
The dateless periods of eternal time,
Our souls have hints of that unruffled stream
That joins all Eras in one Now supreme,
As sunken continents hold the rooted isles
In one firm mass, down ocean’s dark defiles;
And in the dissonance of a thousand powers
On thrones discreet, in separate lands and hours, 
Behold, in glimpses the unjarring One, –
Of time, space, power, the endless unison!
Then all our stormy epochs fade away
In the still light of God’s eternal day!