| |
| O THOU great Movement of the Universe, | |
| Or Change, or Flight of Time—for ye are one! | |
| That bearest, silently, this visible scene | |
| Into night’s shadow and the streaming rays | |
| Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me? | 5 |
| I feel the mighty current sweep me on, | |
| Yet know not whither. Man foretells afar | |
| The courses of the stars; the very hour | |
| He knows when they shall darken or grow bright; | |
| Yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death | 10 |
| Come unforewarned. Who next, of those I love, | |
| Shall pass from life, or, sadder yet, shall fall | |
| From virtue? Strife with foes, or bitterer strife | |
| With friends, or shame and general scorn of men— | |
| Which who can bear?—or the fierce rack of pain— | 15 |
| Lie they within my path? Or shall the years | |
| Push me, with soft and inoffensive pace, | |
| Into the stilly twilight of my age? | |
| Or do the portals of another life | |
| Even now, while I am glorying in my strength, | 20 |
| Impend around me? Oh, beyond that bourne, | |
| In the vast cycle of being which begins | |
| At that dread threshold, with what fairer forms | |
| Shall the great law of change and progress clothe | |
| Its working? Gently—so have good men taught— | 25 |
| Gently, and without grief, the old shall glide | |
| Into the new; the eternal flow of things, | |
| Like a bright river of the fields of heaven, | |
| Shall journey onward in perpetual peace. | |
| |
