Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE MYSTIC, by PHILIP JAMES BAILEY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE MYSTIC, by             Poem Explanation     Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Who holds not life more yearful than the hours
Last Line: From the beginning, and of all being last.
Subject(s): Faith; Mysticism; Prophecy & Prophets; Superstition; Belief; Creed


WHO holds not life more yearful than the hours
Since first into this world he wept his way,
Erreth much, may be. Called of God, man's soul
In patriarchal periods, comet-like,
Ranges perchance all spheres successive; and in each,
With nobler powers endowed and senses new,
Set season bideth. So with him it seemed
Of whom I speak, the initiate of the light,
The adopted of the water and the sun.

TIME'S sand-dry streamlet through its glassy straits
Flowed ceaseless; and he lived a threefold life
Through all the ages; yea, seven times his soul
Commingling, leavened with its light the world.
First in the feasts of life, and the sun's son,
Through all God's homely universe he roamed
Lordly, and spake to earth the lore of stars,
The mother-tongue of Heaven our Fatherland.
Born to instate mankind in veriest truths,
By nature symbolled in gem, bloom, and wing;
To give to all the hope of bliss reserved,
And ultimate certainty of angelhood,
He, like a river which through gullies, rocks,
And deserts runs its purifying race
To Ocean's thrice regenerative depths,
Chose thorough all probations his own path,
And voluntary trode the downward way;
For they whose eyen by spirit-fire are purged
Move ever up the reascent to light,
On a cœlestial gradient, paved with wings;
Disrobed him of all privilege, and alone
Suffered the dignities yearned for by the mass
But that he might ennoble servitude.

Grounded in Nature's sacred cipher, he
The myth-insculptured language of the light,
In templed tome and lay columnar read,
The masque of gods. But not all spirits can bear,
Untutored, full and free access of truth.
The sage, who ken the verities of soul,
Whose be the preview clear of prophet-bard
To ope the inner spirit by outward keys,
Who while unclothing still can screen the truth,
That inexpressive wisdom — silence known —
Unless in this wise, lip them not aloud.

Initiate and perfect in mysteries,
He graduated triumphant. Thrice he set
His foot upon the mount of light divine
And eyed the all beneath him. First, ere earth,
Like the libation of a crownéd bowl,
O'erspilled the depths of the unknown abyss,
By Nile with honey flowing, that through soil
Promethean, swift as eagle pouncing, drops
Oceanwards, sun-beloved and primal land
Of magic marvels; giant head of earth
First looming from the flinty seed of fire
And pre-æternal darkness — eldest ally
Of lost Atlantis, lost ere Europe crept
From Chaos' lap, — long time he wandered; (him
His mother, child of royal priest, conceived
Dreaming of Gods in visions of the night,
Amid consphærate harmonies, and awaked
Never until she clasped her dream-born;) bent
To snatch from labyrinthine secrecies,
Wherein the holy mystics taught their rites,
Regenerant Truth; from hall to hall pursue,
As though from sphere to sphere the winged soul,
Through all disguise the æternal unity;
Through all terrestrial ill cœlestial good;
Through triple darkness light; through matter's marble veil
The divine spirit, all parent of the sun,
Queen of heaven's azure world-hive, celled with stars.

He at his birth the starry stamps received,
For every limb held commune with its god,
And planetary gifts plenipotent;
The moon dispensed him riches, and the sun
Mind-wealth, that so before his dazéd eyne
The splendid spectrum of immortal fame
Perpetual danced; soul-compulsory power,
The god of psychopompous function, round
Circling the sun with fourfold force; love's star
The joys that come with beauteous shapes and eyes
Dewy and blue; courage the god-star red;
Supremacy and justice they who held
Successive, if usurped sway, o'er the skies.

Around him lay the great concerted whole;
The moaning winds and cadent waters, fire
Aspirant, sea bass-toned and reboant earth;
For only man's crude ear of discord dreams,
Jarring the orbéd harmonies of heaven.
And for the cause that soon as born his lips
Dropped music, like to the dew-bright beads of honey
From fleshy flowerets pendent, nectarous, he
The over-dominant movement of all life
Knew, and elicited its vital moods.

The soul of every animal, from the ox,
Thunder begotten, to the solar wolf —
As he re-rose from Hades, — god of death,
Thenceforward to man hallowed — to destroy
The spirit of all ill; and scarab, type
Of the great world-artificer; from the lord
Of golden flocks, lamb-headed, to the goat
Sacred to sin in all rites, he, in turn,
Bespake, and each to him the awful word
Passed, that makes ope the thousand courts of life;
The universal and æternal sign,
Itself life, death and immortality,
Which silenceth yet answereth all demands,
And bindeth evil with an endless chain.
Armed and impowered therewith, no foe he fears
Who seeks salvation in the heights of heaven.
Asp-crowned, gold shod (thus treat the abhorréd gold
Of false esteem), his breast bedight with gems, —
Home of all virtues and the embrace of Truth, —
He prayed, he prophesied, divined, and judged.

In granite graven, and on porphyry hall
And ceiling, with imperishable touch,
He wrought the rise of night, and chaos' growth,
The gross alluvium of time's turbid stream, —
And birth of Love, that venerable babe,
The recreator he of deathless life;
Wrought in that spirit awe-bound, wherewith, of old,
The workman chiselled some cherubic shape,
Nor knew but that the God who doth create
And animate the whole — from whom the whole,
Like essenced, emanateth — might appear
In manifestive brightness, and array
His Being in the form the holy artist framed.

Close dogged by evil he the dateless hills,
Mountains of gems, of gold, of silver gained,
Within whose wombs he wonned; but chased in vain;
For the more vanquished he, more power was his.
Him, naked ghosts of maddening beauty, lamped
By green and glistering gryphons' lidless eyes,
Led to alchemic vaults, where sat some seer
Great jewels minting, and from the refuse gold,
That naught be wasted, rounding royal crowns.
The costliest of all treasures, knowledge how
Like treasures to produce, he gathered there,
Nor cumbered him with perishable proofs.
Though by this tempted, and that warned, he took
The path of light, instinctive, and was saved.
For having fought his way through flood and flame,
Helped by good dæmons, hindered by the bad,
And closed the gates of thunder on the gods
Where they in their marmoreal heaven abode,
Dark as the hourless mansions of the dead,
And tested all things; in the coffined core
Of the heaven-wedding pyramid, at last
He fainted in perfection; and discerned
How sweet was truth, for death in truth was life.

In that blest death the gods divided him,
And the stars claimed the portions erst their own;
They so adored him. World-beloved was he.
The sun his head; the starry souls his eyes;
His locks redundant asked the watery powers;
The living spirit his temples; his strong hand
The lord of fate; his bent knee worshipful
The goddess of divine life; and his feet
The guardian of the destinies of souls.

Dear to the bearded serpent, spirit supreme,
Whose omnipresent eye approves the world, —
Eye of the world of life, and nature's soul,
Who lapped him in his cold blue coils, and flew
Where live the stars: there, 'mid nocturnal day
Where Death's grim orb illumes the restless ghosts,
And with his scourge on their own hearts inscribes
The tortures of the evils they have done,
He, weighed 'gainst Truth, down-dipped the skyey scale.

Thence, hawk-like, through the purgatorial air,
And many-regioned æther, peaceful, pure,
Soul-quickening, soared he to the crescent moon,
And sailed the sky's abysmal sea of suns
In ark crystalline, manned by beamy gods,
To drag the deeps of space, and net the stars,
Where, in their nebulous shoals, they shore the void,
And, through old night's Typhonian blindness, shine.
Then, solarized, he pressed onwards to the sun,
Lord of the living, guardian of all good;
And, in the heavenly Hades, hall of God, —
Whose eye begat the sun, whose mind the moon,
The goodness and the wisdom of their sire, —
Had final welcome of the firmament.
The true, triunal God, thrice-greatest, one,
Man, man-god, God, who symbolled, led him through
The sky-arched, God-built temple of the world.

TIME'S arid rivulet through its glassy gorge
Lapsed ceaseless; and again by Gunga's wave,
(O life and bliss assuring fount of heaven,
The life-flowings divine of Deity,
How mighty, how mysterious is thy name!)
He, of a damsel, sacred to the god,
With fellow-maidens sporting, whom a cloud
Of sunset glory clasped, and circumfused
With vital brilliance, dropping — next was born.

Through the star-gates of the high luminous land
Came down the immortal aspirant of life.
With royal abnegation of all power
Prior, all motion, many a million years
He had suffered as a mountain, and to heaven,
In fiery heart-floods, for a thousand moons
Without pause, preconfessed his sins, and then
Æternal silence laid her snow-cold hand
Upon his lips, and they were iced for ever;
(After in life, the mount wherein he had been
Enstoned he recognized, and felt it throb
Beneath his footsteps, heartlike 'neath a hand.)
A thousand years, an oak, he crowned the hill,
And navies traced to him their ancestry;
In the sea's arms a million suns he passed;
Among the insect race that winged the air
Or crawl the dust, the like; among the birds
That skim the sky, a myriad; thrice that term
Through all four-footed tribes of nature, fierce
Or bland; from these, through various grades of men,
Of divers nations the o'er-topping stems,
To the high peers of perfect sanctity,
Native wherein, at length, the hundredth time,
By pure persistency in sacred rites,
And stern assimilations of the soul
To fleshless life, even as the holy live,
Through seven bright spheres successive, he, his soul
Lift upwards, like a mountain by the main,
That laves his marble feet sea-deep, and high
O'er shore, plain, verdure, cloud, snow, vapor, bares
To the chill sky his reverent brow; and he
This our initial world where all things fixed
Or free are passed; the re-existent orb
Skyey wherein, until time's destined doom,
All that have lived mindful of sacrifice
And holy rites sleep calm; and, as he passed,
He to the dimly gleaming shadows taught
A prayer would ring them entrance into bliss,
Like to the magic horn, in faerie halls,
Of blast resistless; thrice blown, every gate
Of every palace opens like a flower:
The odorous home of lightness, coolness, warmth,
Change pleasing and perpetual, where they bide,
Imbowered in all delights conceivable,
Who, perfected by God's love to themselves,
And that pure love to all His love requires,
Upsoar to heaven, immediate, as the soul
Bursts from its bodily chrysalis; — the mid-world
Between celestial and terrestrial spheres,
Where first the denizens of each commune,
Without or veil or shadow, toil or mask;
There giants and divinities divide
The far-expanded sphere, and now in peace,
But oftener far in war; the birth-world where
The souls of the unhallowed, of all creeds
And nations, dwell; where lower lives, too, lost
For sins of man, by general doom of fire,
Or flood, or sacrifice, are all re-born; —
The mansion of the penitent blessed, where saints
Austere, and sons of the Supreme, self-ruled,
Reside in infinite freedom, to which sphere
A silver gate, a golden to the last,
Gives access; the abode sublime of truth;
By wisdom, duty, verity only gained,
Gained never to be lost; for there is God,
Creator, and Preserver, and Destroyer;
Initial, and perfection of all Being;
The infinite fulness of all spirit; sum
And sun of all the souls of all the spheres,
Wherein, through every life of man or brute, —
In origin, not end, alike divine, —
He darts his raylets vital and æterne,
He, the untempled God, above man's thought.

For lo! time's end, when, on his snowy steed,
The great Preserver, blazing like some star,
That with dischevelled infinites of light
Between the sun's breast and the icy arms
Of space extremest oscillates, sudden draws,
From out its sheathéd night, his gleaming glaive,
And robs the age of life; then, all renewed,
Peace, innocence, and purity shall bind
In flowery chains, the bonds of liberty,
The race divine of man, the fruit of God; —
And the whole earth, though now half-burning sands
Or frost-white wilds, bloom into Paradise.
And after, even this shall cease; the spirit,
Inured to meditate alone on God,
Pleasure no more can please, finds scant delight
In fragrant fields, grows discontent with heaven;
Yea, in pure wantonness with terror, tears
The masque material from Time's phantom face.
All Being shall then be reabsorbed in God,
All minor deities in Him shall merge,
As water vases, broken in mid-sea,
Unite therewith the element they contained,
And add their calculable drops to its
Immensurable abysses, whence were cast,
As out of moulds, the mountains of the world;
For all that shows not God, illusion is.

And as earth's thousand seas, streams, lakelets, pools,
Their separate image of the star of noon
Hold, though he be but one, so every soul
Its semblance of the One Divine retains
Which all illumines, sweetens all; and his,
Affied to God, in massive ease and power
Languescent, well might wield the world at will
Whose whispered mandates awed the thunder down.
He, lion-like within the desert, dwelled
From men apart, and so, intact of soul,
In heart ascetic, continent in thought,
The intelligible luxuries of life
Shunned; to a boundless level planed his soul;
Fasted on fruits; and out of writhen frond,
Or flowery chalice, quaffed the fountain free.

By virtue of which liberated state,
Lofty and passionless as date-palm's bride,
High on the upmost summits of his soul,
Wrought of the elemental light of heaven,
And pure and plastic flame that soul could show,
Whose nature, like the perfume of a flower
Enriched with aromatic sun-dust, charms
All, and with all ingratiates itself,
Sat dazzling purity; for loftiest things,
Snow-like, are purest. As in mountain morns
Expectant air the sun-birth, so his soul
Her God into its supra-natural depths
Accepted brightly and sublimely. Vowed
To mystic visions of supernal things;
Daily endowed with spheres and astral thrones,
His, by pre-emptive right, throughout all time;
Immerged in his own essence, clarified
From all those rude propensities which rule
Man's heart, a tyrant mob, and, venal, sell
All virtues, aye the crown of life to what
Passion soe'er præpotent, worst deludes
Or deftliest flatters, he, death-calm, beheld,
As though through glass of some far-sighting tube,
The restful future; and, consummed in bliss,
In vital and æthereal thought abstract,
The depths of Deity and heights of heaven.

Attached to things divine alone, as seal
To chart affixed, he all truth taught and sought,
Sweetly retired. As Eden's olive groves,
That, in the luminous mysteries of the sun
Perfectly ripened, were withdrawn to heaven
So pure, and so intact, like diamond gas
Exhaling 'neath the keen, fire-hearted lens,
Lighter than light, imponderable power,
His spirit soared, unwavering, up the skies.
He to the deities, as his nearer blood,
Willed all his grand domains, in trust, to keep
Holy and free; and still, to bar all strife,
His poor and ignorant kin, the kings of earth,
He piteously remembered ere he passed
Through deathland, to the ultimate realm of light,
And shared his orts among them; they, his gates
Quitting, scarce grumbled their ungrateful thanks,
Because that, like the setting sun, he left
A world of gold behind him, free to all.

TIME'S arid streamlet through its glassy gorge
Flowed pauseless; and, by Sida's crystal flood,
Which, as with sea seven-tided, bathes the base
Of the high mount of vision, he was born
Again, to teach, to all the nations, life.

Born of the tree blood-sapped, which, on the steep
Of knowledge, thrice, by vital wind, impregned,
Buds forth her life, the mother of the world,
Upon the royal rock four-faced, he dwelled,
The tripod mountain, with its jewelled feet
Long while; the orient side of silver pure;
Beryl, the brow which overawes the sun,
When, abdicating Heaven, he calls the stars
To attest his end imperial; the dead north
Of glowing gold, the south of ruby paled.

Up shining streams and over odorous lakes,
In golden boat or silver, pearly oared,
Dimpling the wave, he sped; or dashing high
The fragrant foam; and now his limbs imbathed
Amid immortal nymphs, serenely pure,
Like living lilies floating on the tide,
In love with their own shadows, as they lay
Beneath the cooling moon. From sacred trees
Ambrosial fruit and gem-wrought raiment, tinct
With the sun's infinite aureole, he culled;
And walked resplendent with his meteor eyes
Thrice round the dragon king, world-lifed, who saw
The first, and will the last of gods surview;
So vast and vile a monster, heaven and earth
With thunderous groans and lurid blushes hid
Their starry heads, when God, in words of fire,
Asked them his generation, — Hell-begot,
Hell-born, they said, we know no more of him.
Yet sought he not illumination thence,
But due confession of divinity;
For, in the radiance of a frame divine,
In natal and cœlestial light he stood.

Though pure in aspiration, pure as is
The pearl-rose halo round a star, so, proof
Of the divine within us and the strain
Of the cœlestial heavenward, yet he sinned,
In virtue of his nature, and sought earth;
For sin is nature; and through all life's gates,
Like to the perishing flowery arches reared
Before some fane, he willed to pass, for he
The ultimate sanctity and æternal joy
Foreknew that they led up to; and, perchance,
By his own consciousness of final bliss,
He might the hearts of millions fortify.

Now the destruction and re-birth of things
He saw, and preached, and warned mankind they came;
By water first; the gentlest rain distils
In the beginning like small dust, until,
Enlarging, gradual, every drop descends
Huge as a millstone, and all life is drowned;
Then rise seven suns, successive, and at once
Inhabit Heaven, till the whole orb be drained
Of ocean, sea, lake, river, moisture, damp,
Parched to a powder; last of all, a wind
Light as a leaf's breath 'gins to blow, and blows
Stronger and stronger, till the tempestuous blast
Uproots the mountains, eddying them about
Like feathers in a whirlpool; all the rocks,
Disintegrate, lie loose and level dust,
And the vast sphere is scattered o'er the skies,
Like sand o'er an arena. Water again
Installs the regeneration of the world,
Condensing some few atoms which the wind
Rounds into rain-drops; and, cohæring thus,
Drives languidly together, mass by mass;
The lighter particles rise, and air become;
The grosser fall, and cause the element earth;
This, fire solidifies, till, whole at length,
The fused orb rehabilitated rolls
As theretofore upon its cœlar path.
Thus, thrice made pure, by water, fire, and wind,
In essence, earth spreads wide her lap, and heaven
(In flowery showers, cropped by the hand of gods,
Fruits, riches, and the robes of truth) descends;
While censer-clouds condensed of sun-fired fragrancies
Perfect the sweet lustration of all life.

In saintly destitution, sacred need,
He, light of time, his life-day harmless passed,
Sparing all life by charity; and, since
All soul-sin seems a missing of the mark
Resultant from imperfect force or aim,
Exhorting all to look and work for good,
In the supreme beneficence of God.
For evil is temporal only, nor can be
In the divine æternal. From the void,
Along with bright creation, as its shade,
It rose, and back to vasty void returns.

TIME'S arid runnel through its glassy gorge
Glode ceaseless; and, anon, where the huge stream,
Son of the sea, bursts through the skyey gates,
Born of an angel maid and heaven descended,
Who, bathing in its midst, the white-orbed flower,
Of root eternal born, eternal bud,
Upon its waters floating, tasted and ate;
Till, her within, its golden-dusted stem
Branched crosswise into life, and fructified
To soul; the flower-begotten son of heaven,
From birth immediate, perfected his steps,
Assuming all divinity; and hailed
Himself the incorporate order of the skies.

Nursed by the starry sea and those twin lakes
Named eyes of heaven, and fed on the bright gems
Dropped from dracontian lips, whose virtue gave
Sole sustenance to his being, and whereby
The living lines, on fiery wivern's back,
The secret counsel of the universe
Once read, translated all things, he achieved
At one enlightening pang and blessed his woe.
Reason supreme him made innately wise,
The stars prophetic and the holy moon,
Interpreter to time of things æterne,
Ruler of rites and sacred festivals.

And the invisible heavens the giant world
Through him instructed; him, O star of earth!
Thou saddest, wisest, eldest of all lights!
The formless origin of things, and how,
Proceeding from itself, the infinite
Finite becomes; returning thitherward,
The finite infinite, whereby the parts,
O'erleaping the interstitial net of death,
Regain that continuity of soul
Which ones them with the boundless and divine.

Throned upon lion hides and dragon skins, —
Cloud-breathing dragons homed in heights of air,
Amid the golden land his mellower years,
Studious of immortality, he passed; —
Now by the moon-enclosing mountain, now
Scaling the cloud-throne where the immortal fowl
Of mighty fortune wafts from his jewelled nest
The winds of all the world, — he gave the youth
Ubiquitous dominion 'tween his wings;
And bore him swift to the cities of the skies,
Gleaming aloft, tranquil, in starry bliss; —
Now where the sacred soul-tree scents the breeze,
'Mid marble cities, by the shore of pearl;
Or where the fountain, sprung from lightning flash,
The fire-born water, flows, in whose bright depths
He consecrates himself; around its source
The true immortals dwell, of man unseen.

Where, on the hill of dreams, the flower of sleep
Flings forth its silky leaflets, he the juice
Drank of millennial herb, a thousand years
All blight resisting, which to age brings back
Electric youth, the glory, this, of earth,
And king of flowers. From him the holy learned
Religion, justice, temperance, wisdom, faith,
Outer and inner knowledge, endogenous truth,
The five-fold world and elemental lore;
All mysteries hidden and imperfect, all
Public and perfect secrets of the world,
Of Heaven, earth, lightning, mountains, fire, and clouds,
Water and wind, and when the end draws nigh.
To spirit transcendent of inferior spheres
Nature is always ominous; notes of birds
Doomful, and animal movements; sun-shot gleams,
And noon-day apparitions, shades, and pools
Wherein the eve-star tricks her tresses bright;
And upward arts of fire; presaging all
Immortal destinations that so man,
In likeness of divine perfection made,
Happy on earth but happier far on high,
Might reinstall the primal state of heaven.

Alms gave he, as an alchemist, whose gold
Flows inexhaustless, or whose pearly draught
The potable perpetuity of life
Vouched to its proud possessor; till at last
As man, the errant babe, intent on death,
In orbital aphelion with his sire,
Back to the irresistible bosom of love
Wheels his precipitous foot, and with a smile,
Foreseeing his apotheosis there,
Bounds to embrace the beauty infinite;
So he, divinely rooted in the world,
And lifting into life his facial flower,
Back to the pre-eternals called of God,
Passed, disappearing in the essential heavens.

TIME'S sand-dry runnel through its glassy strait
Flowed checkless; and the immortal seeker now,
The son of seven bright parents, orbs divine
In precreative fire conjunctive ranged,
Upon the hallowed ground where Phrat still pours
His Paradeisal wavelets, cave-born, stood,
Gray-bearded from his birth; and onward, urged
By the divine affinities of truth,
Which, in the lowest depth, sees but a step
Back to the pure perfection of the heavens,
He crept, in stifling darkness, through a cave
High vaulted, yea a world cave, where, as in Heaven,
The truth first glimmered on him like a star;
Showing where waited him a white winged steed,
That, fed on fiery adders, slaked his throat
From burning wells. Him mounting, on he sped
Through lions, wolves, and dragons, men of might,
Open or secret enemies, sands of fire
And storms of hail, the world's contempt or hate,
The spells of wine and gold, luxurious love,
Seductive beldames and adulterous ghouls,
Vices that flesh devour, defile the dead,
The sun-fowl, spirit of life-consuming time,
The dæmons that in mental darkness dwell,
The brazen fort of royal tyranny,
With sin-black hills engirthed (circumferent six,
Central the seventh) all-mastering, though half-spent;
Through threatening files of flamy ghosts and fiends
Created from primæval darknesses;
The horrors of all visionary hells;
Huge spectral dæmons, figurative of sins;
And clueless mazes to the mouldy abyss
Where, couched on rottenness, and guarded sole
By pitfalls brimmed with crawling, weltering worms,
Lo! the white monster which appalls the world;
Death, but not him. O'er moats of sanguine slime,
And towers where glared a green and ghastly light,
And battlemented walls of human bones,
He sprang triumphant on his shrieking foe;
Smote him, and from his heart three blood-drops black —
Black as the night the Son-God passed in hell —
Wrung; thence ascending by a starry stair,
Each step a bliss, a virtue, he emerged
Soldier of God, and conqueror of all fear,
Therewith to purge the eye of wisest man.

Scaling on foot the mount of heavenly fire,
Where throned on triple columns sate the sun,
He, in the glory of the bridegroom, stood,
And knelt to hear the luminaries divine,
The first created witnesses of God,
Who in His bosom holds the living world
As shepherd in his arms star-spotted fawn.
From the moon's hand her starry stole he took,
And zonelet studded with thrice ten beamy rings,
Shining with light genetic, either side
Broidered with signs, though breathing, living not.
Indued, bespake him then the Perfect Light
In wisdom's signal silence, and unrolled
Before his eyes the archives of the heavens,
The original deeds of God's great government,
Star-writ, the golden-winged tongue of gods,
Time's charter, and the fire-bound book of love,
And heaven's all trinal lights. There too he viewed,
Participator of God's general light,
The infinite circlet filled of Deity,
The world-wheel through the which he had winged in soul
Beyond the high and azure plain of truth,
To alight upon the peak of happiness: —
There converse held with all the eloquent orbs,
Interpretative stars, and counselling gods,
Who thoughts divine, thoughts earthly, interchange.

Sword, sceptre, key were given him, robe of white,
And ring of royalty, wherewith he found
Due worship of the golden-bearded kings,
Who from the mystic satchel where the lots
Are cast of destiny, to him brought forth
The inedible fruit of immortality.
They in his hands the volumed lightnings laid,
And bound him by an oath which all things heard,
In thunderous echo of the unuttered word.
The balanced hemispheres he held, wherein
The good and evil of all time are weighed,
With universal justice, whence is shown,
By all-solicitous love and doom divine,
Man is, of God, the mean, and God, man's end;
For to the true soul all are ends divined,
From everlasting, to their ordinal stand.

Out of the world-bright cup of divination,
Filled from the stream of life, that 'neath the throne
Of light rolls ever, where its rhythmic flow
Breaks into song-fraught wavelets lipped with light,
He quaffed, and, mirrored in its rim, beheld
All forms of future things; the magic rose,
Of speechless virtue, proof 'gainst all vile charms,
That blossomed on the bank, he culled and smelled,
And, from its fragrance, knowledge of the passed
Perfumed his being; from the whole he knew,
Truth of all times and wisdom of all worlds,
That all the constellations of the skies
Shall lapse into the lamb, within his arms
The cross of light upreared, while in her hand
The virgin tunes her star-strung, lilied lyre.

Of the cœlestial vine, ten thousand branched,
Which stretcheth o'er the skyey roof of earth,
Heaven's holy tree, whereon the luminous fruit
Of soul unborn, in glittering clusters hung,
One by one dropping into mortal moulds,
A golden shower, he tasted; and by stealth
Plucked from the pomegranates of Paradise,
Unknown to crowds, the secret fruit of life,
Star-orbed, immortal, ripe with solar seed
The single seed, deathful yet mastering death,
And knew himself divinified; for he,
With lote and holy honeysuckle crowned,
As well the bruised theangeline, which gives
Prophetic sense, as juice of aglaophant,
That subjects to the eye the invisible world,
And horn sweet herblet of immortal life,
Sipped, till transmute he stood, star-headed; felt
His eyes irradiate with an inward light,
And recognized his angels where they wheeled,
Like mated falcons round their creanced young,
Saluting him in rapture, man of men,
Sole son of life, the crown and heir of time.

They with him ranged the lucent orb throughout
In after times man's home to be, wherein
Plain, perfect, shadowless, like a globe of glass,
Men shall be known of separate nations only
Because their lands of different jewels are;
The continents of diamond, isles of pearl;
There shall be but two mountains, this of gold,
Of silver that; the seas shall all be wine,
The lakelets hydromel, the rivers milk;
And, like some mystic palace, every home,
A star-walled city, seven-fold fortified.

He at their hest (so Heaven's own book of spheres
Insculpt in arrowy light, ordained) his soul
In the moon's argent streams did imbaptize,
And purified his spirit in the sun;
A handful there of astral fire then seized,
And hid it in his bosom like a flower;
From whence all sacred light was kindled here.

One with all truth, he held himself divine
While e'er he breathed; a flowering branch of light,
That by intense devotion shed a bloom
Of luminous beauty round the blinded mass;
A part supreme of the all-whole supreme;
Perfection in perfection perfected;
Abstracted from the world and gained to God.

Whirled in a wingéd chariot with the skies
Down through the planetary gates of light
And lunar valves descending, earth again
He raught, and, mingling with its chequered race,
On the far fields of fire his God adored.

TIME'S arid streamlet through its glassy gorge
Slid ceaseless; and the sphere-experienced now,
Like to the pine, that, from its own sweet fruit,
Springs into crowned perfection, from that crown
Again educing its delicious end,
Fell, with a falling star, into the breast
Of a mild nymph, who by the muse-loved bank
Of sweet Ilissus slumbered. Sore amazed
She watched the growing wonder of her side,
Nor knew the mystery till ten times the moon,
Working like marvellous birth in heaven, and still
As oft recovering crescent purity,
Ushered the throbbing secret into light,
That he his starry ancestry might hail.
Witting right well what 't was to fall from Heaven,
From the immovable star-plane to the prime
Conceptacle of motion, moonwards, through
All spheres in graded order, to the orb
Where dwells, in secret cell, the hermit Life;
His lot he knew, and straightwise calmly went
His heaven-inquiring way, how best he might
Win back the death-lost birthright of the skies.

Plunged in primæval darkness he began,
From the first breathings of the universe,
His godlike quest. By all the elements
He was advised and aided. The vast sea
Absolved him of all soil of sin; the earth
Embraced him as a child in her dark breast,
And of her life the active passion taught;
Fire lent him torches kindled at the shrine
Of some volcano's mighty altar, reared
By mightier nature to the almighty sire,
That he might light the holy to their end.

Air gave him access to the gods, and made
Her boundless reaches, rich with ore of light,
Common to man and all divinities;
The æthereal fields of fire impalpable,
Where the pro-kosmial forms of thought abide,
Divine, of God projected, won his soul,
With pure ingenerate beauty, to explore
Mind's genial mysteries; theirs true life alone.

But though all helped him, none could satisfy:
The course and destiny of that he sought
Was from him hid in Hades. Many a rite
Mysterious, secret, sacred, night and day,
With numbers, with a winnowed few, alone,
Yea sole, at last, he pressed through, till to him
The sun and moon, the glorious twins of light,
God's golden seal, God's silver seal, grew dim
To the self-luminous truth in Hadean halls
Which shining showed the soul, whose fate he urged,
The bride-queen of the God that sought her love,
And dowered her with Elysium's diadem.

Rapt to the breast of fontal Deity
Divine embraces there received he, both
Adoring and adored, by gods themselves
Worshipped and men, he moved felicitous;
The radiant serpent nestling in his breast
And twining round his waist, caducean. Thence
Regenerate, and divergent weal and bale,
Bound to the sovran sceptre still of power,
In the necessitous knot of life and love
Assigning, godlike to the universe,
Consociate of divinity, he viewed,
With starry and all sympathizing eye,
The sublunary realms of deathly life;
Felt the assimilant influences of heaven
Flash through his soul with lightning joy, and meet
Reply in earth-born fulminations made;
Saw the precontinence of the whole by God
Within Himself, and ebb of Being's sea.

Blessed with all visions holy and divine,
Communion holding only with the wise,
Silent in light (the radiant lizard loves
And lives in light, himself all constellate)
With Truth he joyed (as when the moon, disguised
Like naked nymph, her limbs of light revealed
To him, enamored, on the Latmian hill,
Whose touch was inspiration, whose embrace
Deific, seemed absorption into heaven);
Abstinent of all matter, every cause
Of mental perturbation, base desire,
Eradicate and razed, the lunar ark
Of pure regeneration awed he viewed;
Beheld the æternal husbandman of heaven,
Who sowed with star-seed all the wilds of space,
Scattering the worlds broadcast upon his way;
And to that tilth cœlestial set his hand.

But not descent alone knew he; from where
Earth's Atlantean horizon upheaves
The inconceivable convex, to the sum
And polar point of light he passed, and thence,
As at earth's natal movement, downwards struck,
Through starry strophès and conversive glide
Of orbs that round the ever-festive sun,
And unformed stars, to heaven's immortal gates;
And as all nature animate on earth
Began with life amphibious, so fore-starred
By the cœlestial crab, with whom the world
Its eastward march commenced, — (for truly earth
Crept ere she flew upon the breathing winds,
Rounding the void inane, — and gradual all
Accomplish due perfection,) — he between
The aselline starlets and the manger dim
Won, studious of the universal life;
Isis' twin godlings, silence and the light,
Showed him their common immortality;
The bull with horns star-nebbed; the ram, disk-crowned;
And fish Euphratean, taught their varied life,
Their spheral natures and spiritual hopes;
For of all these the denizens aspire
Towards the invisible and paternal heavens;
By his æthereal side he paused who pours
(On templed tablet traced), from ample urn,
The first effusion into chasmy space.
That starry stream and matter prime of worlds,
River of God, on silver wings he swam,
By goat-fish, crocodile, or horned whale,
The mountain-swallowing deluge embleming,
And demigod, who voluntary died,
Aiming star-headed arrow winged with light;
Who taught him there sidereal truth as once
The Larissæan youth Parnassian lore;
By scorpion death-stinged, or Typhonian snake,
He boldly hied; and by the assessor stern,
With rod and balance poised, saw weighed the worlds,
And heard the utmost measurement of time;
Beside the maid fruit-bearing he espied
Her new-born starlet, the god altar-throned,
By all the moons encircled of the year;
And lion, hearted with a royal orb,
Which nigh his shaggy shoulder bore the sun,
Invincible, who, 'neath his yoke of light,
Compels the starry armies of the heavens;
He, thief divine, heaven's starry apples steals,
And glories in the feat; in slumber lulls
Air's orbéd eyes o'erwatchful of the earth;
Unfolds the love of beauty to the gods;
Fills earth with nymphs and heroes, and their seed
Semi-divine; usurps the throne of heaven;
From west to east, foot-swiftest of all things,
Courses the sky; withdraws the moon from earth;
Yet mindful of the time when once with eye
Extinct he groped the concave, till the flock,
Ram-marshalled, 'scaped the darkness of the sun,
And victims, death devote, renewed their life;
And once, by night o'ercome, his locks of light
Shorn, — but Time's temple hath not fallen yet;
Nor yet the Herculean pillars, east and west,
Embracing, hath he hurled to total wreck;
Nor yet the gates of glory gone for aye.

There resting on that regal sphere of light
And happiest altitude, he stood and knew
The æthereal essence of creation; saw
The world of mind roll Godwards through all time,
And the circuitous course of good in life,
Till temporal and æternal coalesce;
For stars are signs of constellated truths
Æternal in the intelligible heavens;
Saw that to every world, wherever placed,
Shine other eagles, serpents, crosses, crowns;
That hydra sins of foul corruption bred
Subdued by grace are glorified; whose yet
Unceasing sibilation sounds, through life,
To arms, the saintly combat of the soul.
Him, therefore, the celestial fiend, who breathes
The breath of death and from his mortal mouth
Empoisons air; beneath whose fatal fangs
Creation sickens and all evil reigns,
He fought, to free from fear the affrighted world;
Until the all holy and regenerant star
Rise that shall rise, and into light transmute
The sacred body of the universe;
And Truth, triumphant virgin and divine,
All virtues heavenly and humane fulfilled,
All suffering, all o'ercoming, up and rule,
Sweet saviour of celestials. She his brow
There sealing with a seven-rayed star, in sign
Of victory achieved, around his neck
Olympian wrapped the mantling skies moon-clasped;
The solar bowl of blended blood and wine,
That sparkles in the prototypic skies,
The chalice handed aye of Nemesis .
To lips oracular, dreadless he received,
And life reviving quaffed; whence, clear in sight,
He saw the rise of spirit, in its prime
And purity sublimely ignorant, long,
Till after lapse and forfeiture of bliss,
All earthly suffering, and descent of death,
Dearer to him and lovelier for her fall,
Celestial love the soul immortal wed.

Thence tracing the unseen course, which earth shall tread,
In a no fabulous future, when the will
Of man, so oft transversive of the truth,
With God's shall coincide, and all be light, —
The bright abyss he soared, but left unnamed;
Whether in lapse of ages it shall trend
Towards the Orphëan light, — of old there held
Type of concordant spheres, — or southern sign,
That in the heavenly roodloft starwise beams,
Stands untranslated in the book of God.
The book of nature He himself hath writ
God still delights to read, and star by star
Unfolds the volume of the universe
Fate-clasped; in time and order by Him fixed.
Thus conversant with gods, immortal, he
The pure perfection whence he fell regained,
Gifts pleni-solar, and præ-astral powers,
Prophetic, and mnemonic of all time,
With added wisdom of all ill and good.
The gates of death he passed and doubly lived,
The gates of life, whereby the blest ascend;
Then drave his dragon chariot round the world,
Lashing with lightnings till they sweated fire.
Gaming with golden dice, he of the Sun
Won thrice his light; of ocean, deep by deep,
His boundless realms; of earth, her countless lands;
But their own bade them take again, while he
One moment merged in that leviathan womb,
And through the starry tabernacles borne,
By seven bright maids immortal, (gleeful they
At the lost brightness refound,) from the depths
Of heaven's sidereal river drew and drank
The lymph divine of light, the dew of life.

Throughout the vast passivity he passed
All active, through the grand ellipse of life,
And circular progress of the wind-winged world,
Safe from all storms of fate and floods of ill,
And dreadless of the gorgon mask of Death.
All nature gladdened in those rites; the sea
Avouched his safety; fire would harm him none;
Danced moon and sun around him with their stars;
And the Great Father solemnly rejoiced.

Hallowed of heaven and consecrate of man,
He in his palm the eye-crowned sceptre swayed,
And belted sate enthroned and diademed.

TIME'S sand-dry streamlet through its glassy strait
Rilled restless; and the heaven-invested seer,
Of rainbow born and dragon stony-winged,
While lineally descended of the sun,
And cradled in regenerative tomb,
The orbit of his life renewed. Beside
The stream that through the midst the beauteous isle
Disparts, tree hid, tree hight, (where haply once
The tyrant lion of some cavernous land
To lesser brutes his deathful law dispensed,
Or with the jungle monarch, ivory-tusked,
Held thunderous parley by the tidal swamp,)
Or where the wave, prophetic and divine
From Bala pours; or on the far-off coasts
Of sacred isle, where lunar mysteries
Are solemnized, as erst, and consummate;
Or, 'mid rude dwellings, once the abode of gods
Of hostile faiths, he lowly dwelled, and learned
On his cold knee, before white-bearded Eld,
From Truth's pale lips her everlasting lay,
And deepest, pithiest lore. For thrice nine years,
Through fits of silence, loneness, fasting, toil.
He fought the foe of spirit and subdued.
The thrice-thinned juices of the all-healing plant,
With moon-dews mingled and eye-brightening charms
The unseen to see, himself invisible;
Honey, and berries red of the eërie wood,
Oakcorns and apples, roots and wheaten cates,
His fare and bever formed for twice an age,
With amber flowing mead at moonéd feasts.

He on the circular mount of safety dwelled,
Taught by cœlestial serpent of the sun;
And learned his solar syllables of fire,
And the moon's mountain alphabet (first conned
By them of old, who, in the ark-hive, warred
Sole with a world of waters, warred and won);
And from the rock, cave-crested, downwards led,
Eye-bounden, by the hand of priestess maid,
Who in prophetic solitude abode;
Through the returnless valley, and thick-branched
Forest, whose trees sore strived, with audible groans,
Their steps to intercept, they thrid their way
Shorewards, to where the hazy sea of death
Broke in black billows, soundless though their wrath,
Intangible its waters. Pacing thence
Into a skiff of grisly marble, they,
O'er those mysterious straits quick steering, made
The isle of blessed ghosts, with plenar breath
That bright witch-virgin, silent but inspired,
The filmy sail o'erfilling, and called up
With the spirit of her breath so fierce a storm,
That with their madding moil the waves themselves
Inflamed; fire boiled; and all the waters blaze.

Conductress! O enchantress! lead me back,
He cried, among the nations. They, meanwhile
Returning, she to him like power imparts,
Which freely he receives. The o'erflooding stream
Whose freshets grieved the villager, he froze
With one blast of his breath; then, from its bed,
Like to a glistening snake, the evil tore,
And hung it high, stream upwards, on the hill.

Against a foamy torrent in a skiff
Of glass, he fountwards steered, nor, rock-dashed, brake;
Till in the stilly birth-pool, anchored safe
Amid translucent shadows, he, beyond
All watery bruit a stone-cast, rode serene.

By living ladder, to the enchanted chair
Gigantic, hewn of huge and holy rock,
Lifted, he sate and all the stars outstared,
Gazing them down, dog, centaur, eagle, bull;
And the unmeasured monsters of Heaven's main
Came foaming to his feet and licked his hand.
They his heart lighted up; and he from them
Taught wisdom to the serpent; and to spheres
Their secret revolution, silent song,
And sacred circuition of the sun.

Impowered in turn by these with chariest charms,
The sun, from dawn to night-noon, he outeyed
From the peaked mountain which commands the world.
And earth's penumbral pinions, by her side
Quivering; with him he leaped in joy of life
Immortal proven, hand in hand, through air;
In sign whereof, on that most holy day,
Heaven's globéd flower, whose perfume is the light,
Rose from the polar-north perpend, and not
With slow initial motion from the west,
As theretofore, in ages lost to time,
Ere coal-palm leaved, or pristine pine, now tombed
In earth's sepulchral centrals, had put forth
The mystic life-cone, fern her feathery stem.

On many an altar at his beck the sun
Shot down his shafts of light; the heavens and he
Spake miracles together, and exchanged
Sojourn of spirits; for the heavenly came
Earthwards, and heavenwards went the earthlier.

Between the fires of sun and moon he passed
Benefic; and throughout the hallowed land,
As at the great rekindling, when the heavens
Shall shine with souls in galaxies, as now
With stars, beneath the priest creator's hand, —
Dealt forth to all the sun-incepted light.

Upon the pyrameidal mount of law
He sat, and soothed the nations at his feet,
Urging in wavy tribes their yearly right
Of blessing, and prescriptive gift of fire,
The dues of doom, the balance and the chain;
The starry chain which links all souls to God.
Born from between the trinal clifts, age-ripe,
In love and wisdom he all power consummed;
Midst of the luminous circle where the one
The twain o'ertowers, and from the twain the third
Derives, the whole one trine; and where the sun,
Beside his sacred city, as the close
Of the great year conies sæcularly round,
Descends, and sings and dances through the night;
Harping to all around his own high deeds,
The grain and fruit he ripens, and the breasts
Of living things he animates anew,
In countless generations, times untold;
The many-nationed orbs he fills with joy;
The many-citied lands he roofs with light;
The many-isléd seas he sows with life;
While o'er them all his golden robe he casts,
Stands the arch mystic, celebrant of Heaven:
And as the solar song in silence ends,
All gazing on the firmamental eye,
Responsive to the light, his lyre he lifts,
And sings with sphæral power creation past: —

God was, alone in unity. He willed
The infinite creation; and it was.
That the creation might exist, His Son,
And that it might return to Him, the Spirit
Disclosed themselves within Him; thus triune
But as the all-made must of necessity
Inferior be to its creator, thus
Arose the infinite imperfect, time,
The spirit-host angelic, heavenly race,
Brute life and vegetive, electric light,
Matter and fleshly form; to human souls
Nine generations from æternity.
But God, who is Love, decreed it should return
By pure regeneration unto God;
Wherefore was need that He from whom came life
Should taste death, but in tasting swallow up;
That commune with all creatures might be made,
On this hand, and on that, with Deity.
Thus death and evil expiate ends divine;
The Spirit the imperfect hallowing, death
The Son; the soul regenerate hies to God;
And as in radial union with the point
Infinite, both in greatness place and power,
Lives with the maker and the all-made in love.

In anticlinal order next he hailed,
And interpendent harmonies of song,
Gentle and fine as the concurrent curve,
Perpetual, in the orbits of twin stars,
The future fates and times divine to be;
The negative divinity of man;
The holy and unhappy blent in bliss
At last; the passed unburthened of her doom,
Like conscience of her self-secretive truth,
Condemning conduct but assuring life;
And when, in that vast volume penned of God
Whose text is earth, whose margin is the main,
His everlasting service shall become
One hymn triumphant, jubilant; from all
Doubt or fear free, remorse or self-reproach;
Serenely issuing from the soul of man,
As from the lee of the o'ershadowing moon,
Suddenly perfect, glides a star occult.

Ceased he; and all apart as the altar stone
Of some Titanic temple, reared in eld,
The golden and gigantic age of earth,
By sacred groves, sun-founts and seats of gods
Enringed, and radial avenues of rocks
All navelling in the sanctuary divine,
There at the universal mother's shrine,
Round whom nine hallowed maidens minister,
He worships in the granite-winged fane.
From wisdom's pearl-lipped bowl the draught he drains
Of pure oracular rede, which rendereth men
As gods wise, and illumed with day-like light:
Then with his white wand cleaves the skies, and gives
To kings their laws, to states their faith, to both
The empire he disdeigns. To all he makes
Patent his end, (truth's honey-gilded draught
Boding him this,) and on the central shrine,
The great dark stone, symbol of darkness' self
All-emanant, and the divine obscurity
Of Deity, as on the heart of light,
Fanned by the sacred winds, which fail not then
Due service to the high departing soul,
Tempests and clouds the playthings of his power,
Serene in will, and willing not to be,
Upright he sate, and eyed the sun, and died.

Initiate, mystic, perfected, epopt,
Illuminate, adept, transcendent, he
Ivy-like, lived, and died, and again lived,
Resuscitant. On high his nest he wove
In the strange tree whereof man first was made,
Whose roots reach down to hell, whose topmost bough
Waves its bright leaflets in the airs of heaven,
And communed with the universal life,
Beloved of lightning for its kindred birth,
That vivifies its veins; until possessed
Of all that could be known, the whole he knew;
Cropped where they grew the flowers of learning, massed
In meadowy beds, and bright with fragrant dew.

Carving with glyphic art immortal runes,
That rule the reluctant spirits of the dead,
On living wood, with primal matter oned,
Which breedeth still betimes celestial fruit,
He, arrow-like, launched forth — heaven is a bow
The chord whereof is earth — and charmed his way
Led by prismatic clue through spheres and skies,
Fire, ice, and scalding venom-floods of hell,
To prove all sacred truth within himself;
To test all holy virtues; and to know
The sovereign Master of the universe,
Who hallowing, blessed his hemispheral aim.

To him too came from Preadamic kings
The shield of power, graved with seven mystic seals,
Transcript of stars that signalized release
Jointly, to him, of their domain o'er earth;
Incaved wherein, the book of light he conned
And read inscribed the truths which hallow heaven,
Yea, viewed all mysteries not ineffable
And ne'er to be unsealed, denude themselves
Into two truths, of God and man, they one;
The light enlightened and enlightening light.
From scrolls Sethæan and the columned lore
Of lands unknown, or which was wisely hid
In pre-diluvian volumes, (lost, alas!
Neath those ebullient waters which engulfed
The foulnesses and sins of a naught world;
Or if conserved, in purity conserved
Only, within that temple subterrene,
Gem-pillared and nine-porched, from dust-doomed eye
Secreted, by one deathless reared, ere yet
Translated to the bosom of his God,)
The secret orders of the sphere he learned,
Not yet to be revealed, nor till the end,
The coming incandescence of the globe;
Then let the Heavens astounded, list to Fate.
By divine science and cœlestial art
He for the cause of the dear nations toiled,
And augusted man's heavenly hopes that so,
Child of the vast and universal man,
(Man archetypal, starry and terrene,
Whose head is high above the angelic seven,
Whose heart the sun,) he might, by awful rites
Hinted in sacro-sanctities of the wise,
From knowledge of æternal names acquest,
Illumined intellect and pure desire,
Adhæsion with Divinity achieve.

His eyes, from constant converse with the stars,
Conceived an astral virtue, and his brow,
Cooled with their fragrant breath, grew bright; his soul,
One and compatient with the life of time,
Rose kosmical with all God's great designs;
And so on earth their luminous life enjoyed,
The unapparent and essential fates.
For God, when first He form'd man, so insphered,
And veiled with beauty all compulsive power
(Necessity, when isolate becoming
By limited mutations of the will,
A self-determinate freedom and minute)
In the individual soul, that none but they
Who extasie divine enjoy, agnize
The universal impulse, but so act
As though they ordered all things of themselves,
And heaven were but the registrar of earth.
In nations, creeds, and ages, men can trace,
Star-writ in night's imperial book of fate,
The world's vast destinies; but void, alas!
Of introvertive vision, not their own.

To God soul-bounden, as some sacred orb,
Content in its own brightness to outshine,
Or be outshined by others, he the whole
Perceived to him pertain, and him to all;
And found, by nature's ominous sympathies,
His private fates proceed, like-paced, with God's,
And their fore-fixèd purposes concur.

In temple-like totality he held
His heart, hypæthral, open to all heaven;
And to all earth her future and her passed,
Magician-like, divulges from his charts.

As when of old some king of men might trail
Between two hosts his glittering spear, and mark
War's red meridian, in that dusty score
Graving the death of empires and the birth
Of new thrones, till in flow of years arise
One who erases from the face of earth
That sanguine wrinklet, so the universe
Contentiously divaricate, he shows
Made one in spirit with eternity;
For man divine shall reign; shall cede to God
All rights, all laws, both priestly and externe,
Vulgar and regal. One conclusive claim
All passed confirms, and hallows all to come.

To every mind the meaning it hath meant,
Though blindly blundering on through clouds of speech,
And crowds of forms, in surface differing,
He, sole interpreter, with holy rod
Hermetic, explicates, and proves for peace;
That all divisive theories but denote
A secondary standing of the soul,
And partial knowledge only of the truth;
Whose faith is truest into all projects
That blessed secret, unitive and divine,
The totalizing wisdom of all creeds,
The faith æternal and entire, which us
Ones with the heavens; and that in all worlds, though,
By the imperfect mean it passeth through,
(As told in mysteries tauro-serpentine,)
Good begets evil, evil brings forth good
In blest regeneration; and that God,
Who all creates, all saves, all sanctifies;
Man, in himself, both sacred and profane.
These are the laws of light, sweetly severe,
Which show that what disorder seems, gives proof
Of order loftier than the mind of man
(Who holds, because his little eyeball 's round,
The infinites must be all orbicular)
Pews in its petty systems: and these laws
He, sagest Theocrat, whose church is heaven,
Whose state all earth, whose law the book of God,
The sole converter of the universe,
Kept in his heart with holy fire; and thus,
In changeful perfectness, the wheel of life
Trolled underneath his feet, till he beheld
Grim, o'er the funeral hatchment of the world,
Death's empty helm yawn; and his toil was done.

Like Mekkah's milky stone, which wastes away
Beneath the kiss of worshippers, so life
Darkens and wanes beneath its crowd of cares;
While Time's last sands silt up the streams of soul,
Less, gradually decreasing, less and less.

As when in northern marches dies a man
Well famed of men, for virtues, or for birth,
Great grows the press of mourners round his grave,
In ceremonious silence; great the show
Of lawny weepers lifted to dim eyes,
As slowly slideth the bier downwards; all
Bare-headed, wordless; so with simplest pomp
Of their mere presence, all earth's kindred creeds
(And his was perfect, he believed in God,
In God the Spirit, and God-man, the Son)
Clung round his heart and sanctified his end.

All gifts were therefore given him, seals and signs
Of radiant force and triply perfect power.
The spirit of earth to him his double key,
Defensive from all ills, all goblins, gave;
Wisdom her adamantine seal, and Truth
Her sapphire signet; Love his ruby ring.
Spirits and apparitions of pure grace
Came shadowy round at his interior will;
And one in chief, of angel charm, would come,
(As though within her breast a dawn divine,
Insensibly were orbing into life,)
Perfused with roseate radiance, like a star
Veiled in creative fire-mist, who his eye
With spiritual clear-sight filling, showed
Truths past all search, all height, all depth, all bound,
Of interspheral orders, and their rise,
Action, and central end. She in her own
Bright virtue him embracing gave his soul
In secret, sweet assumption into heaven;
And both with filial and parental bliss
Imbued, bade wander through the golden plains
With diamond blooms bestarred; but ere she left,
Lest he celestial pleasures might profane,
Commingling speech thereof with mundane things,
By the thrice sacred kiss of secrecy,
An adamantine oath, his lips she sealed.

The mount of shadow earth each night uprears,
The sun each morn planes down, he clomb, and held
Parley with orb and angel as they passed
Self-luminous on their quests; his nebulous thoughts
Grouping in firmamental unities.
At his will-fraught and evocative word,
The strange star brightened largelier, and poured forth
Its voice of light, or speechlessly withdrew
Into its azure chambers, which the wide
Abyss, precipitous, of space, o'erhang.

The spirit-world, thus lovably coerced,
Did homage, in such service deeming them
Triumphant; and reciprocal with all,
All loyally he ruled. Thereat rejoiced,
All wisdom in one whisper they conveyed,
All language uttered in one mystic word
Wrought of sun-heated fire-flame, first pronounced
Among the angels proximate to the throne;
Where cloaked with threefold light the all Divine,
The infinite point, the circumfused Supreme
Deific dwells, whose thoughts are tinged with heaven,
His own æternal and impropriate bliss,
As clouds and mountains with the noonday light.

For, even as darkness, self-impregned, brings forth
Creative light, and silence, speech; so beams,
Known through all ages, hope and help of man,
One God omnific, sole, original,
Wise wonder-working wielder of the whole
Infinite, inconceivable, immense,
The midst without beginning, and the first
From the beginning, and of all Being last.





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