William Thomas was born April 3, 1832, and very early showed signs of
poetic talent. He published a volume of poems, 'Caniadau Islwyn'
(Messrs. Hughes & Son, Wrexham), about 1867, some of the finest pieces in
which, including "Thought" and "The Vision and Faculty Divine," are
extracted from a long poem "The Storm," which has never yet been
published. A complete edition of his works is now in the press. He died
Nov. 20, 1878.
Night.
Come, Night, with all thy train
Of witnesses. I love
The stars' deep eloquence,
That with the morning hours
Grows mute again.
Thy stillness cries to human sense,
"There is a God above,
And worlds more fair than ours."
The day is night which hides the stars from sight!
Our night for day is given
To make more plain the path to heaven.
It is the Sun
That at its rising makes the infidel,
And all day long the world alone
Its tale can tell.
Oh welcome, Night, that bid'st the world be still,
That through the stars eternity may speak.
Too early, Dawn, too early dost thou wake:
Too early climbest up the Eastern hill:
Too early! stay: so quiet is the Night,
And in her pensive breeze such sympathy,
She shows us suns that suffer no eclipse,
O'er which the grave's dark shadow ne'er can lie.
Nay! come not yet, O Dawn: thy laughing lips,
Thy wanton glance, and frolic songs of glee,
The convocation of those holier spheres profane,
And when night vanishes, heaven is hid again.
Come, balmy Night! O peaceful hours,
When on its axis sleeps the untiring wheel,
And from this loud-voiced world of ours
No taint of earth can on the breezes steal.
The weary sailor, when time's tempests rage,
Joys when he sees, on the far shores of heaven,
The fiery line of stars, as beacons given
To guide him to the eternal anchorage.
The Vision and the Faculty Divine.
When it will, it comes,
Like the rain or the bow
Or the nightingale's lay
By the lake below:
As free from restraint as the seraph that roams
O'er the ebbing waves of the dying day,
When the reddening west, 'twixt the sun and the sea,
Seems to open the door of eternity.
When it will, it comes,
Like the stars that are driven
O'er the cloudwrack riven.
When it will--to the world it owes no debt,
No times, no seasons for it are set.
When it will--like all that belongs to heaven.
Not so the sea
That hath its laws and rules and door:
Whose ebb and whose flow
In the ears of men beat evermore,
Like time's great pendulum to and fro.
And the time of whose visits is known long before
As it rolls to the moment from shore to shore.
Not so the sun,
Time's fountain and head,
Whose shadows to hours and minutes creep,
As into their fold the gathering sheep.
The Alps, in their garb of eternal snow--
So far from the world they grow white with dread--
The moment know
When from the East's ever darkening sea
He will rise--the image of Deity.
And the birds, the same moment awaking, blow
The world's great trumpet that men may know
That night hath fled,
And day is risen again from the dead.
Like the rainbow it comes--
As the sign of the covenant made long ago
'Twixt Godhood and thought, when, abating its flow,
The sea of eternity brought into sight
Time's far distant mountains, and safe on their height
There rested, by God to humanity brought,
The Ark of eternal, immutable Thought!
Thought.
We are not certain that the mighty soul
Doth err, when far above the narrow groove
In which man walks from childhood to the grave
It rises, murmuring things unutterable,
And spurns as lies the outward forms of sense,
And, like a shooting star, enfranchised seeks
The spaces of eternity.
Hath not
The soul a hidden story of its own,
A tide of mysteries breaking on a far
And distant shore, where memory was lost
Amid the mighty ruins of a world
Or worlds now vanished?
Are the stars o'erhead
Things as divine and glorious as poesy
Is wont to sing? Is't not some power in us,
Some memory of a yet diviner world
And things illumined by the light of God
That dowers the stars with beauty, gives them strength
And grandeur? 'Tis in us the stars have being,
And poesy's self is but the memory
Of things that have been or the seer's glance
At things that shall be--a future and a past
Both greater than the present.
Who hath not
Within him felt some long forgotten world
Sweep through the corner of his former self,
Or touch some jutting peak of memory?
Or can we prove a poet's imaginings
Are not the remnants of a higher life,
A thousand times more glorious, lying hid
Within the deepest sea of his great soul,
Till comes the all-searching breath of poesy
To bid them rise? Oh hail, all hail the hour
When God reveals Himself, and like the sun
Illumines every epoch of our being,
And through them all the Spirit's path shines clear
From God, through Nature, back to God again.
The Variety of Wales.
Oh where with such variety
Her charms doth nature pour,
Or beauties lavish as on thee,
Thou world in miniature?
Now stern and frowning she appears,
Anon her smile most radiant wears.
Between the hills which upward soar
Fair valleys lie afar,
Where wakes no wind, no torrents roar
Our perfect peace to mar,
And many a mere to human eyes
Reflects the Peace of Paradise.
As ramparts high thy mountains rise
Against the wind and rain,
To break the strength of wintry skies
And rush of storms restrain.
And safe beneath them smiling spreads
The green expanse of fertile meads.
Though thou art little, dearest Wales,
Though strait thy limits are,
Upon thy mountains and thy vales
Are beauties rich and rare:
Thy bounds are narrowed, but to me
Sufficient thy variety.
The Sick Minister.
Even now my brethren preach the word,
While here I helpless lie;
How the thought frets me like a cord--
Their work and my infirmity.
Their every effort, Father, crown with power,
And all their utterance with Thy unction dower.
And unto me, here in my house, be given
Patient submission to the will of Heaven.
Time was, I thought one Sabbath's rest would be--
One Sabbath's rest with nought of toil to tire--
Like some fair island in a stormtoss'd sea,
Or pause in music of the eternal choir.
But it is with my heart on this fair morn,
As with the reaper on a summer's day,
Who hears the sickle sweeping through the corn,
And he for weakness needs at home must stay.
'Twixt us and men, us and the world's wild din,
The Sabbath is a day of rest;
But betwixt us and God--because of sin--
A day of labour to each earnest breast.
And think not, till thou lie beneath the sod,
Preacher of Peace, there can be rest for thee,
Time is the week-tide of the sons of God,
Their Sabbath is--Eternity.
Life, like the Heavens.
Life, like the heavens, doth endless worlds contain;
Each day's a world where good or ill holds sway:
For through life's spacious vistas as we stray
Hour after hour we sow with varying grain.
Sown even to the wayside, down the plane
Of Time thus passes every flying day--
Never, till Time's brief seasons fade away
Into Eternity, to rise again.
But 'neath the ripening rays of righteous fate,
To blade and ear the seed grows silently,
'Gainst that great day whose reapers angels are:
When all Time's hours before the Throne laid bare,
World heaped on world, shall for the sickle wait
Of endless death--or immortality.
The Poets of Wales.