If, in the silent mind of One all-pure,
At first imagined lay
The sacred world; and by procession sure
From those still deeps, in form and color drest,
Seasons alternating, and night and day,
The long-mused thought to north, south, east, and west,
Took then its all-seen way;
Oh, waking on a world which thus-wise springs!
Whether it needs thee count
Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things
Ages or hours—oh, waking on life’s stream!
By lonely pureness to the all-pure fount
(Only by this thou canst) the colored dream
Of life remount!
Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts—marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,—
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams.
But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
In divine seats hath known;
In the blank, echoing solitude, if Earth,
Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
Unfruitful oft, and at her happiest throe
Forms, what she forms, alone;
Oh, seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bathed head
Piercing the solemn cloud
Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread!
O man, whom Earth, thy long-vexed mother, bare
Not without joy,—so radiant, so endowed
(Such happy issue crowned her painful care),—
Be not too proud!
Oh, when most self-exalted most alone,
Chief dreamer, own thy dream!
Thy brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown;
Who hath a monarch’s hath no brother’s part—
Yet doth thine inmost soul with yearning teem.
Oh, what a spasm shakes the dreamer’s heart!
“I, too, but seem.”