Puslapio vaizdai
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And sometimes Wrong and Right, the thing we fear, The thing we cherish, draw confusedly near;

We know not which to choose, we cannot separate Our longing and our hate.

But Love the Conqueror, Love, Immortal Love,
Through the high heaven doth move,

Spurning the brute earth with his purple wings,
And from the great Sun brings

Some radiant beam to light the House of Life,
Sweetens our grosser thought, and makes us pure;
And to a Higher Being doth mature

Our lower lives, and calms the ignoble strife,
And raises the dead life with his sweet breath,
And from the arms of Death

Soars with it to the eternal shore,

Where sight or thought of evil comes no more.

Love sitteth now above,

Enthroned in glory,

And yet hath deigned to move

Through life's sad story.

Fair Name, we are only thine!

Thou only art divine!

Be with us to the end, for there is none

But thou to bind together God and Man in one.

THE BEGINNINGS OF FAITH

All travail of high thought,

All secrets vainly sought,

All struggles for right, heroic, perpetually fought.

Faint gleams of purer fire,

Conquests of gross desire,

Whereby the fettered soul ascends continually higher.

Sweet cares for love or friend

Which ever heavenward tend,

Too deep and true and tender to have on earth their end.

Vile hearts malign and fell,

Lives which no tongue may tell,

So dark and dread and shameful that they breathe a present hell.

White mountain, deep-set lake,

Sea wastes which surge and break,

Fierce storms which, roaring from the north, the midnight forests shake.

Fair morns of summer days,

Rich harvest eves that raise

The soul and heart o'erburdened to an ecstasy of praise.

Low whispers, vague and strange,
Which through our being range,

Breathing perpetual presage of some mighty coming

change.

These in the soul do breed

Thoughts which, at last, shall lead

To some clear, firm assurance of a satisfying creed.

THE ODE OF DECLINE

With forces well-nigh spent,

Uneasy or in pain,

Or brought to childish weakness once again,
With bodies shrunk and bent,

We come, if Fate so will, to cold decrepit age.
The book of Life lies open at its latest page.

Only four score of summers, and four score
Of winters, nothing more,

And then 'tis done.

We have spent our fruitful days beneath the sun;
We come to a cold season and a bare,

Where little is sweet or fair.

We, who a few brief years ago,

Would passionately go

Across the fields of Life to meet the morn,
We are content, content, and not forlorn,
To lie upon our beds, and watch the Day

Which kissed the Eastern peaks, grow gradually grey.

Great Heaven, that Thou hast made our lives so brief And swiftly spent!

We toil our little day and are content,

Though Time, the thief,

Stands at our side, and smiles his mystic smile.

We joy a little, we grieve a little while;

We gain some little glimpse of Thy great laws,
Rolling in thunder through the voids of space;
We gain to look a moment on Thy face,

Eternal Source and Cause!

And then, the night descending as a cloud,

We walk with aspect bowed,

And turn to earth and see our Life grow dark.

Was it for this the fiery spark

Of Thy Eternal Self, sown on the vast

And infinite abysses of the Past,

Revealed itself and made Creation rise

Before Thy Eternal Mind:

This little span of life, with purblind eyes

That grow completely blind;

This little force of brain,

Holding dim thoughts sublime,

Too weak to withstand the treacheries of Time;

This body bent and bowed in twain,

Soon racked by growing pain,

Which briefer far than is the life of the tree,

Springs as a flower and fades, and then must rot
And perish and be not,

Passing from mystery to mystery?

It is a pain

To move through the old fields,—even though they lie

Before our eyes, we know that never again,

Where once our daily feet were used to pass
Amid the crested grass,

We any more shall wander till we die;

Nor to the old grey church, with the tall spire,

Whose vane the sunsets fire,

Where once a little child, by kind hands led,
Would spell the scant memorials of the dead,-
Never again, or once alone,

When pain and Time are done.

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