WHAT art Thou, Mighty One, and where Thy seat?
Thou broodest on the calm that cheers the lands,
And Thou dost bear within Thine awful hands
The rolling thunders and the lightnings fleet:
Stern on Thy dark-wrought car of cloud and wind
Thou guid'st the northern storm at night's dead noon,
Or on the red wing of the fierce monsoon
Disturb'st the sleeping giant of the Ind.
In the drear silence of the Polar span
Dost Thou repose? or in the solitude
Of sultry tracts, where the lone caravan
Hears nightly howl the tiger's hungry brood?
Vain thought, the confines of His throne to trace Who glows through all the fields of boundless space!
As yonder lamp in my vacated room.
With arduous flame disputes the darksome night,
And can, with its involuntary light,
But lifeless things that near it stand, illume;
Yet all the while it doth itself consume;
And, ere the sun begin its heavenly height
With courier beams that meet the shepherd's sight, There, whence its life arose, shall be its tomb.
So wastes my light away. Perforce confined
To common things, a limit to its sphere,
It shines on worthless trifles undesigned,
With fainter ray each hour imprison'd here.
Alas! to know that the consuming mind.
Shall leave its lamp cold, ere the sun appear!
I SAW Old Time, destroyer of mankind;
Calm, stern, and cold he sate, and often shook
And turned his glass, nor ever cared to look
How many of life's sands were still behind.
And there was Death, his page, aghast to find ́
How tremblingly, like aspens o'er a brook
His blunted dart fell harmless; so he took
His master's scythe, and idly smote the wind.
Smite on, thou gloomy one, with powerless aim!
For Sin, thy mother, at her dying breath
Withered that arm, and left thee but a name.
Hope closed the grave, when He of Nazareth,
Who led captivity His captive, came
And vanquished the great conquerors, Time and Death.
ALBEIT nurtured in democracy,
And liking best that state republican
Where every man is kinglike and no man
Is crowned above his fellows, yet I see,
Spite of this modern fret for Liberty,
Better the rule of One, whom all obey,
Than to let clamorous demagogues betray
Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane
Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street
For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign
Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade,
Save Treason and the dagger of her trade,
And Murder with his silent bloody feet.
I THINK a stormless night-time shall ensue
Unto the world, yearning for hours of calm :
Not these the end,-nor sudden-closing palm
Of a God's hand beneath the skies we knew,
Nor fall from a fierce heaven of fiery dew
In place of the sweet dewfall, the world's balm,
Nor swell of elemental triumph-psalm
Round the long-buffeted bulk, rent through and through.
But in the even of its endless night,
With shoreless floods of moonlight on its breast,
And baths of healing mist about its scars,
An instant sums its circling years of flight,
And the tired earth hangs crystalled into rest,
Girdled with gracious watchings of the stars.
|