The Impartial Gods

The impartial Gods their generous bounty send
           As oft by dark-winged angels as by fair:
           Around an Eastern monarch’s purple chair
The pale Circasian & the Nubian bend,
                      And on his will attend, –
Co-equal servants of his least desire,
As Night & Morning serve the Eternal Sire.
                      Whoever moans impatient of the storm.
                      And chides the nebulous gloom that gorm
Her streaming mantle, wrongs a masking friend,
           The gray-veiled daughter of the clear
Blue-eyed & all-sustaining atmosphere, –
Nor less her sisters of the golden hair,
           Aurora & sweet Hesperus,
           The twin twilights who gladden us
When o’er the horizon’s crystal wall they bend
           To kiss their cloud-borne sister there,
           And all their waving looks in triple glory blend.

It is our misty storm-engendering air
That scatters life & soft-light everywhere,
And its thick vapors are the Golden Fleece
That warms the Garden of the Hesperides, –
           Blunting the keen frost-arrows hurled
           By Boreas from his polar world,
On their impenetrable yieldingness.

Exempt from shadow is exempt from light, 
And life is quenched in Nature’s cloudless height.
Far up beyond the passions & the pains
Of this fair world, beyond the hurricanes,
And the forked lightnings & the drenching rains,
Eternal blackness as of Nature’s grave,
           Shuts, over all, its low concave,
Where the sad stars burn rayless, & the sun,
           Sullen & red, swings icily on,
And not a pulse in all the alternate air
Moans to your moan or vibrates to your prayer
No living thing can draw one gasping breath
In that dim requiem of perpetual death;
Invisible Frost is Supreme despot there,
And pale Vacuity repulses all,
As if its hollow were an adamant wall

Whoever soars to touch that empty sphere
Beyond our cloud-realm & our golden light
Yearns for the affluent boons of day & night, 
For rain, & its white ghost, the snow, on dear,
Translucent wings, & for the cool embrace –
           Bare-bosomed & face to face, –
Of the caressing mists that fold us here!

And he whose soul, – aloof from human care,
           From tremulous love, & pain that nurtures love,
                      Lies cold in glittering dream, above
Our hopes & joys, the thrill to do & dare,
           High aims, & victories over man’s despair,
           Earth, & the rude, reluctant elements, –
                      Shall he not feel, at last, the intense
          Remembering influence
           Of that high, crystalline sphere, between
                      The starry worlds that warm the buzzing hives
                                 Of all fraternal lives? —
           And yearn for denser air, & keen
           Delight of generous pulses? Ah! if never,
           Then frozen stork forever,
           Deader than Memnon, in his desert sand
           That monumental soul shall stand,
    A thing for shuddering awe,
To teach the living that the first life-law
Is natural sympathy, & that but here,
In our cloud-bearing, sun-drenched atmosphere,
The infinite hues of being can appear,
           To shape a landscape, or a soul to draw
Its wealth from beauty, – & only throbbing hearts
Live, & revive the world in ever-living Arts!