Than the meeting of the eyes?

Nature poureth into nature

Through the channels of that feature.

Riding on the ray of sight,

More fleet than waves or whirlwinds go,

Or for service, or delight,

Hearts to hearts their meaning show,

Sum their long experience,

And import intelligence.

Single look has drained the breast;

Single moment years confessed.

The duration of a glance

Is the term of convenance,

And, though thy rede be church or state,

Frugal multiples of that.

Speeding Saturn cannot halt;

Linger, – thou shalt rue the fault;

If Love his moment overstay,

Hatred’s swift repulsions play.

URIEL

It fell in the ancient periods,

Which the brooding soul surveys,

Or ever the wild Time coined itself

Into calendar months and days.

This was the lapse of Uriel,

Which in Paradise befell.

Once, among the Pleiads walking,

SAID overheard the young gods talking;

And the treason, too long pent,

To his ears was evident.

The young deities discussed

Laws of form, and metre just,

Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,

What subsisteth, and what seems.

One, with low tones that decide,

And doubt and reverend use defied,

With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere,

Gave his sentiment divine

Against the being of a line.

‘Line in nature is not found;

Unit and universe are round;

In vain produced, all rays return;

Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’

As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,

A shudder ran around the sky;

The stern old war-gods shook their heads;

The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;

Seemed to the holy festival

The rash word boded ill to all;

The balance-beam of Fate was bent;

The bounds of good and ill were rent;

Strong Hades could not keep his own,

But all slid to confusion.

A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell

On the beauty of Uriel;

In heaven once eminent, the god

Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;

Whether doomed to long gyration

In the sea of generation,

Or by knowledge grown too bright

To hit the nerve of feebler sight.

Straightway, a forgetting wind

Stole over the celestial kind,

And their lips the secret kept,

If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But now and then, truth-speaking things

Shamed the angels’ veiling wings;

And, shrilling from the solar course,

Or from fruit of chemic force,

Procession of a soul in matter,

Or the speeding change of water,

Or out of the good of evil born,

Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,

And a blush tinged the upper sky,

And the gods shook, they knew not why.

THE WORLD-SOUL

Thanks to the morning light,

Thanks to the foaming sea,

To the uplands of New Hampshire,

To the green-haired forest free;

Thanks to each man of courage,

To the maids of holy mind;

To the boy with his games undaunted,

Who never looks behind.

Cities of proud hotels,

Houses of rich and great,

Vice nestles in your chambers,

Beneath your roofs of slate.

It cannot conquer folly,

Time-and-space-conquering steam;

And the light-outspeeding telegraph

Bears nothing on its beam.