The Everlasting Jew

(From “Hellas”)

THE JEW of whom I spake is old, so old

He seems to have outlived a world’s decay;

The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean

Seem younger still than he; his hair and beard

Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;

His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries

Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct

With light, and to the soul that quickens them

Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift

To the winter wind; but from his eye looks forth

A life of unconsumed thought which pierces

The present, and the past, and the to-come.

*****

Thou art an adept in the difficult lore

Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest

The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;

Thou severest element from element;

Thy spirit is present in the past, and sees

The birth of this old world through all its cycles

Of desolation and loveliness,

And when man was not, and how man became

The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,

And all its narrow circles—it is much.

I honor thee, and would be what thou art

Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,

Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,

Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any

Mighty or wise. I apprehended not

What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive

That thou art no interpreter of dreams;

Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,

Can make the future present—let it come!

Moreover thou disdainest us and ours!

Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.