Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air! 
Thou waters that encompass us! 
Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep! 
Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all, incessant! 
Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm,
Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
How ill to e’er forget thee!

For I too have forgotten,
(Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
    wealth, inventions, civilization,)
Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
    mighty, elemental throes,
In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy’d.

} A Persian Lesson

For his o’erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

“Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,
Allah is all, all, all—­immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes—­yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.

“Has the estray wander’d far?  Is the reason-why strangely hidden? 
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world? 
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life;
The something never still’d—­never entirely gone? the invisible need
    of every seed?

“It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception.”

} The Commonplace

The commonplace I sing;
How cheap is health! how cheap nobility! 
Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;
The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,
(Take here the mainest lesson—­less from books—­less from the schools,)
The common day and night—­the common earth and waters,
Your farm—­your work, trade, occupation,
The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all.

} “The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete”

The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas’d,
The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage,
The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant,
Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the dissolute;
(What is the part the wicked and the loathesome bear within earth’s
    orbic scheme?)
Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot.

} Mirages