Pondered their blaze of colour, and believed
That butterfly wooers choosing their bright mates
Through centuries of attraction and desire
Evolved this loveliness. For he only saw
The blaze of colour, the flash that lured the eye.
He did not see the exquisite pattern there,
The diamonded fans of the under-wing,
Inlaid with intricate harmonies of design;
The delicate little octagons of pearl,
The moons like infinitesimal fairy flowers,
The lozenges of gold, and grey, and blue
All ordered in an intellectual scheme,
Where form to form responded and faint lights
Echoed faint lights, and shadowy fringes ran
Like Elfin curtains on a silvery thread,
Shadow replying to shadow through the whole.
Did eyes of the butterfly wooer mark all this,—
A subtlety too fine for half mankind?
He tossed a shred of paper on to his lawn;
He saw the white wings blindly fluttering round it.
He did not hear the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
_Was this their exquisite artistry of choice?_
_Had wooers like these evolved this loveliness?_
He groped into the orchestral universe
As one who strives to trace a symphony
Back to its cause, and with laborious care
Feels with his hand the wood of the violins,
And bids you mark—O good, bleak, honest soul,
So fearful of false hopes!—that all is hollow.
He tells you on what tree the wood was grown.
He plucks the catgut, tells you whence it came,
Gives you the name and pedigree of the cat;
Nay, even affirms a mystery, and will talk
Of sundry dark vibrations that affect
The fleshly instrument of the human ear;
And so, with a world-excluding accuracy—
O, never doubt that every step was true!—
Melts the great music into less than air
And misses everything.
Everything! On one side
The music soaring endlessly through heavens
Within the human soul; on the other side,
The unseen Composed of whose transcendent life
The music speaks in souls made still to hear.
He clung to his _vera causa_. In that law
He saw the way of the Power, but not the Power
Determining the way. Did men reject
The laws of Newton, binding all the worlds,
Because they still knew nothing of the Power
That bound them? The stone fell. He knew not why.
The sun controlled the planets, and the law
Was constant; but the mystery of it was masked
Under a name; and no man knew the Power
That gripped the worlds in that unchanging bond,
Or whether, in the twinkling of an eye,
The Power might not release them from that bond,
As a hand opens, and the wide universe
Change in a flash, and vanish like a shadow,
As prophets had foretold.
He could not think
That chance decreed the boundless march of law
He saw in the starry heavens. Yet he could think
Of “chance” on earth; and, while he thought, declare
“Chance” was not “chance” but law unrecognised;
Then, even while he said it, he would use
The ambiguous word, base his own law on “chance”;
And, even while he used it, there would move
Before his eyes in every flake of colour,
Inlaid upon the butterfly’s patterned wing,
Legions of atoms wheeling each to its place
In ever constant law; and he knew well
That, even in the living eye that saw them,
The self-same Power that bound the starry worlds
Controlled a myriad atoms, every one
An ordered system; and in every cloud
Of wind-blown dust and every breaking wave
Upon the storm-tossed sea, an infinite host
Of infinitesimal systems moved by law
Each to its place; and, in each growing flower,
Myriads of atoms like concentred suns
And planets, these to the leaf and those to the crown,
Moved in unerring order, and by a law
That bound all heights and depths of the universe,
In an unbroken unity. By what Power?
There was one Power, one only known to man,
That could determine action. Herschel knew it;
The power whereby the mind uplifts the hand
And lets it fall, the living personal Will.
Ah, but his task, his endless task on earth,
Bent his head earthward. He must find the way
Before he claimed the heights. No Newton he;
Though men began to acclaim him and his law
As though they solved all mysteries and annulled
All former creeds, and changed the heart of heaven.
No Newton he; not even a Galileo;
But one who patiently, doggedly laboured on,
As Tycho Brahe laboured in old days,
Numbering the stars, recording fact on fact,
For those, who, after centuries, might discern
The meaning and the cause of what he saw.
Visions of God and Heaven were not for him,
Unless his “facts” revealed them, as the crown
Of his own fight for knowledge.
It might be
The final test of man, the narrow way
Proving him worthy of immortal life,
That he should face this darkness and this death
Worthily and renounce all easy hope,
All consolation, all but the wintry smile
Upon the face of Truth as he discerns it,
Here upon earth, his only glimmer of light,
Leading him onward to an end unknown.
Faith! Faith! O patient, inarticulate soul,
If this were faithlessness, there was a Power,
So whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that shared it with him;
The Power that bowed His glory into darkness
To make a world in suffering and in death,
The passionate price that even the Omnipotent
Must pay for love, and love’s undying crown.
He hardly heard the whisper; could not hear it
And keep his own resolve. He bowed his head
In darkness; and, henceforth, those inward gates
Into the realms of the supernal light
Began to close.
He knew that they were closing;
And yet—was this the dark key to Creation?—
He shared the ecstasy also; shared that sense
Of triumph; broke the Bread and drank the Wine
In sacred drops and morsels of the truth;
Shared, in renouncement of all else but truth,
A sense that he could never breathe in words
To any one else, a sense that in this age
It was expedient that a man should lose
The glory, and die this darker new-found death,
To save the people from their rounded creeds,
Their faithless faith, and crowns too lightly won.
...
O, yet the memory of one midnight hour!
_Would that she knew. Would God that she knew now...._
Truer than all his knowledge was that cry;
The cry of the blind life struggling through the dark,
Upward ... the blind brow lifted to the unseen.
He groped along the dark unending way
And saw, although he knew not what he saw,
Out of the struggle of life, a mightier law
Emerging; and, when man could rise no higher
By the fierce law of Nature, he beheld
Nature herself at war against herself.
He heard, although he knew not what he heard,
A Voice that, triumphing over her clashing chords,
Resolved them into an infinite harmony.
Whose was that Voice? What Power within the flesh
Cast off the flesh for a glory in the mind,
And leapt to victory in self-conquering love?
What Voice, whose Power, cast Nature underfoot
In Bruno, when the flames gnawed at his flesh;
In Socrates; and, in those obscure Christs
Who daily die; and, though none other sees,
Lay hands upon the wheel of the universe
And master it; and the sun stands dark at noon?
These things he saw but dimly. All his life
He moved along the steep and difficult way
Of Truth in darkness; but the Voice of Truth
Whispered in darkness, out of the mire and day,
And through the blood-stained agony of the world,
“Fear nothing. Follow Me. I _am_ the Way.”
So, when Death touched him also, and England bore
His dust into her deepening innermost shrine,
The Voice he heard long since, and could not hear,
Rose like the fuller knowledge, given by Death
To one that could best lead him upward now,
Rose like a child’s voice, opening up the heavens,
_I am the Resurrection and the Life_.
X—EPILOGUE
Up the Grand Canyon the full morning flowed.
I heard the voices moving through the abyss
With the deep sound of pine-woods, league on league
Of singing boughs, each separate, each a voice,
Yet all one music;
_The Eternal Mind_
_Enfolds all changes, and can never change._
_Man is not exiled from this Majesty,_
_The inscrutable Reality, which he shares_
_In his immortal essence. Man that doubts_
_All but the sensuous veils of colour and sound,_
_The appearances that he can measure and weigh,_
_Trusts, as the very fashioner of his doubt,_
_The imponderable thought that weighs the worlds,_
_The invisible thought that sees; thought that reveals_
_The miracle of the eternal paradox—_
_The pure unsearchable Being that cannot be_
_Yet IS, and still creates and governs all;_
_A Power that, being unknowable, is best known;_
_For this transcendent Being can reply_
_To every agony, “I am that which waits_
_Beyond the last horizon of your pain,_
_Beyond your wildest hope, your last despair,_
_Above your heaven, and deeper than your hell._
_There is not room on earth for what ye seek._
_Is there not room in Me?”_
_Time is a shadow_
_Of man’s own thought. Things past and things to come_
_Are closed in that full circle. He lives and reigns;_
_Dies with the dying bird; and, in its death_
_Receives it to His heart. No leaf can fall_
_Without Him; who, for ever pouring out_
_His passion into worlds that shall attain_
_Love in the highest at last, returns for ever_
_Along these roads of suffering and of death,_
_With all their lives upgathered to His heart_
_Into the heaven of heavens. How else could life_
_Lay hold on its infinitude, or win_
_The strength to walk with Love in complete light?_
_For, as a child that learns to walk on earth,_
_Life learns these little rhythms of earthly law,_
_Listens to simple seas that ebb and flow,_
_And spells the large bright order of the stars_
_Wherein the moving Reason is revealed_
_To mans up-struggling mind, or breathed like song_
_Into the quiet heart, as love to love._
_So, step by step, the spirit of man ascends_
_Through joy and grief; and is withdrawn by death_
_From the sweet dust that might content it here_
_Into His kingdom, the one central goal_
_Of the universal agony. He lives._
_He lives and reigns, throned above Space and Time;_
_And, in that realm, freedom and law are one;_
_Fore-knowledge and all-knowledge and free-will,_
_Make everlasting music._
Far away
Along the unfathomable abyss it flowed,
A harmony so consummate that it shared
The silence of the sky; a song so deep
That only the still soul could hear it now:
_New every morning the creative Word_
_Moves upon chaos. Yea, our God grows young._
_Here, now, the eternal miracle is renewed_
_Now, and for ever, God makes heaven and earth._