The Unseen Rules All

All life climbs blindly into light, 
     And moves to what is yet unknown;
     To God's archangels round the throne
His glory veils Him out of sight.

The lords of thought, and followers fain, 
     Brahmin and pariah, low and high, 
     The flaming hierarchs of the sky 
And they who darkle in their train, 

Over the same dim vortex lean;
     As through the illimitable void
     Are planet, sun and asteroid
Hurled round a centre never seen.

The darkest clods give fairest bloom;
     We climb, we know net where nor why, 
     From blinding dust to dazzling sky, 
And seek we know not what nor whom.

The thing we neither have nor are, 
     Not this we seem, nor that we see, 
     But the eternally to be —
Gives life to life, and moulds from far.

We see its promise dawn on high, 
     And in the unfolding more of worth,
     In all the common things of earth, 
Than meets the unanointed eye.

He walks not far who walks by sight;
     He finds no world across the abyss,
     Who steers by jutting peaks of this:
Heaven's beacon fires watch boundless night.

Why wanders Uranus in his course?
     Why yearns the needle for the North?
     What speeds the flaming comet forth,
Dread vassal of a hidden force?

A world unknown compels the known, 
     Obedience to a power occult
     Evolves the magnet's grand result;
So tremulous faith leads toward the Throne!

A mystic realm of fear and hope 
     Spreads round the individual soul,
     High over all the planets roll
To write each separate horoscope.

To each It prophesies his own;
     The realm within him; a veiled power, 
     Private to each, the common dower 
Of cabin-bench and kingly throne.

The good we have not is our best,
     For that compels the star-like soul
     To seek an ever-upward goal,
And find in act its only rest.

Life slumbers in the golden corn, 
     Till folded darkly under earth 
     It swells and struggles into birth,
As day of brooding night is born.

And where the Unseen holds darker sway,
     Our life's diviner fruitage blooms,
     In hopes that spring from yawning tombs,
To ripen in the Eternal Day!