XI
The sky is gone! a faded yellow blot
Stains the grey mist with which the great sun-slayer
Has wiped his golden blood from all the air.
The land has vanished; distance now is not,
And yet all hound is melted, and no spot
Has place or limit, that you might declare,
Here is it, and behold it ceases there!
Swung on a listless wave my little boat
Like a lone bubble is hung out, afloat
In a dim infinite without a where.
This shapeless shadow, clinging, yet dispersed,
Dense without darkness, torn but with no end,
Impenetrable nothing, the pale first
Of formless being seems, where rayless glories blend.
XII.
Great, ghostly ships that are but denser mist,
Drift for a moment from the gray unknown
Into its deeps again, with murmurous moan,—
The dream of voices that no more exist.
A far, faint sob, as of a soul abyssed
In gloomy billows, tells me whence, alone,
The grey loon calls his brother from a zone
Where Mystery keeps, with Silence, endless tryst!
How deep the hush! yet deeper for the sound
Dropped like a pebble in its waveless sea;
The dying ripple making more profound
The slumber of the unbroken mystery.
If death could breathe, or living forget its strife,
Then life were blissful death, or full harmonious life.
XIII.
Now for an hour the universe is mine!
The things that have denied me are gone hence,
Cloud, sky, and man, the landscape's rock and fence,
Its far and near, the mountain's purple line
And the vast meadows flecked with shade and shine;
All measures of time and space, all difference, -
The mother of finites to our mortal sense, —
Are past, dissolved in unity divine.
Out of the luminous dark, the clair-obscure,
Ruled by no sunbeam, by no shadow crossed,
Looks only God, immaculately pure,
For all that hints diversity is lost;
Alone with Him, the indivisible deep,
I feel His trailing robes, unseen, around me sweep
George Shepard Burleigh
For-Bound