| |
[First published 1849.]
IF, in the silent mind of One all-pure, | |
| At first imagin’d lay | |
| The sacred world; and by procession sure | |
| From those still deeps, in form and colour drest, | |
| Seasons alternating, and night and day, | 5 |
| The long-mus’d thought to north south east and west | |
| Took then its all-seen way: | |
| |
| O waking on a world which thus-wise springs! | |
| Whether it needs thee count | |
| Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things | 10 |
| Ages or hours: O waking on Life’s stream! | |
| By lonely pureness to the all-pure Fount | |
| (Only by this thou canst) the colour’d dream | |
| Of Life remount. | |
| |
| Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow; | 15 |
| 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 | 20 |
| Spring the great streams. | |
| |
| But, if the wild unfather’d mass no birth | |
| In divine seats hath known: | |
| In the blank, echoing solitude, if Earth, | |
| Rocking her obscure body to and fro, | 25 |
| Ceases not from all time to heave and groan, | |
| Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe, | |
| Forms, what she forms, alone: | |
| |
| O seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bath’d head | |
| Piercing the solemn cloud | 30 |
| Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread! | |
| O man, whom Earth, thy long-vext mother, bare | |
| Not without joy; so radiant, so endow’d— | |
| (Such happy issue crown’d her painful care) | |
| Be not too proud! | 35 |
| |
| O 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. | 40 |
| O what a spasm shakes the dreamer’s heart—— | |
| ‘I too but seem!’ | |
| |
