The Infinite Patience

Long are the ways and deep the rents
Between the radiant firmaments,
And slowly up the gloomy steeps
The hour of consummation creeps;
But somewhere from the abysses vast
Ye hear the murmured cry – “At last.”

Eternal growths outweary time,
And over crumbling ages climb;
While watching hearts who see no term,
No wing-bud on the grave’s black worm,
Count all as triumphs of decay,
And quench in grief the dawning day.

The waiting Seraphs saw, through tears,
The chaos of uncounted years
Still seething in black swirls of doom,
Down æons of unyielding gloom,
Before, foam-fringed with nebulous bars,
The dark mass curdled into stars.

This globe, the mellow morning glads,
Flamed out through burning chiliads,
A terror to the icy voids
Beyond the huddling asteroids,
While odorous bloom and verdant pine
Waved bodiless in the Thought Divine.

Broad cycles, wheeling, went and came,
While earth convulsed her giant frame
To bear her brood of monstrous things –
Titanic beasts and Saurian kings, –
Kneading and tempering, grain by grain,
Her brute clay for a human brain.

Shows not the vigil of an hour
How the young cereus dons her flower;
Long years her slow, unfevered blood
Builds from her heart the expanding bud,
That bursts to bloom in midnight’s deep,
While the faint watcher nods in sleep.

Thus slowly, out of the soul or sod,
Blossom the century plants of God;
Unwearied faithfulness may mark
The opening glory in the dark.
That scarce the slumbering soul discerns
When the broad noon around him burns.

A heart impatient of delay
Would harvest what was sown to-day;
Or, sickening, drop a nerveless hand,
And leave untilled the savage land
Whose autumn thistles hiss to scorn
Th’ withholder of its golden corn.

To death a summer noon will smite
The mushroom of a summer night;
A thousand winters only gnarl
With strength of old Oak, the forest jarl;
A thousand centuries grind and fuze
The clay a living soul must use.

If countless æons are not long
To brood a Thinker, free and strong,
What are our eighty years of earth
But the first throes of infinite birth?
What but Eternity could unfold
The being all ages wrought to mould?

Heir of the centuries, born at last,
Sole end of all the unhastening past,
The patience that could hunt thy germ
From eldest chaos to its term,
Shall guard its steadfast purpose still
To shape thee to His holy will.

Thou, too, be patient; work with Him
Who works within thee, clear or dim;
Thy steady march shall seem not long
When, perished every sin and wrong,
Thou seest around Love’s righteous throne
A Universe of Good alone!