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.