In figure, bone, and lineament?

Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,

Talker! the unreplying Fate?

Nor see the genius of the whole

Ascendant in the private soul,

Beckon it when to go and come,

Self-announced its hour of doom?

Fair the soul’s recess and shrine,

Magic-built to last a season;

Masterpiece of love benign,

Fairer that expansive reason

Whose omen ’tis, and sign.

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know

What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?

Verdict which accumulates

From lengthening scroll of human fates,

Voice of earth to earth returned,

Prayers of saints that inly burned,—

Saying, What is excellent,

As God lives, is permanent;

Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain;

Heart’s love will meet thee again.

Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye

Up to his style, and manners of the sky.

Not of adamant and gold

Built he heaven stark and cold;

No, but a nest of bending reeds,

Flowering grass and scented weeds;

Or like a traveller’s fleeing tent,

Or bow above the tempest bent;

Built of tears and sacred flames,

And virtue reaching to its aims;

Built of furtherance and pursuing,

Not of spent deeds, but of doing.

Silent rushes the swift Lord

Through ruined systems still restored,

Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,

Plants with worlds the wilderness;

Waters with tears of ancient sorrow

Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.

House and tenant go to ground,

Lost in God, in Godhead found.’

BLIGHT

Give me truths;

For I am weary of the surfaces,

And die of inanition. If I knew

Only the herbs and simples of the wood,

Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony,

Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,

Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,

And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods

Draw untold juices from the common earth,

Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell

Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply

By sweet affinities to human flesh,

Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,—

O, that were much, and I could be a part

Of the round day, related to the sun

And planted world, and full executor

Of their imperfect functions.

But these young scholars, who invade our hills,

Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,

And travelling often in the cut he makes,

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,

And all their botany is Latin names.

The old men studied magic in the flowers,

And human fortunes in astronomy,

And an omnipotence in chemistry,

Preferring things to names, for these were men,

Were unitarians of the united world,

And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,

They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes

Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,

And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,

And strangers to the plant and to the mine.

The injured elements say, ‘Not in us;’

And night and day, ocean and continent,

Fire, plant and mineral say, ‘Not in us;’

And haughtily return us stare for stare.

For we invade them impiously for gain;