Through the river, and through the rifts
Of the sundered earth I gaze,
While Thought on dreamy pinion drifts,
Over cerulean bays,
Into the deep ethereal sea
Of her own serene eternity.
Transfigured by my tranced eye,
Wood and meadow, and stream and sky,
Like vistas of a vision lie:
THE WORLD is the River that flickers by.
Its skies are the blue-arched centuries;
And its forms are the transient images
Flung on the flowing film of Time
By the steadfast shores of a fadeless clime.
As yonder wave-side willows grow,
Substance above, and shadow below,
The golden slopes of that upper sphere
Hang their imperfect landscapes here.
Fast by the Tree of Life, which shoots
Duplicate forms from self-same roots,
Under the fringes of Paradise,
The crystal brim of the River lies.
There are banks of Peace, whose lilies pure
Paint on the wave their portraiture;
And many a holy influence,
That climbs to God like the breath of prayer,
Creeps quivering into the glass of sense,
To bless the immortals mirrored there.
Through realms of Poesy, whose white cliffs
Cloud its deeps with their hieroglyphs,
Alpine fantasies heaped and wrought
At will by the frolicsome winds of Thought,--
By shores of Beauty, whose colors pass
Faintly into the misty glass,--
By hills of Truth, whose glories show
Distorted, broken, and dimmed, as we know,--
Kissed by the tremulous long green tress
Of the glistening tree of Happiness,
Which ever our aching grasp eludes
With sweet illusive similitudes,--
All pictured over in shade and gleam,
For ever and ever runs the Stream.
The orb that burns in the rifts of space
Is the adumbration of God's Face.
My Soul leans over the murmuring flow,
And I am the image it sees below.
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