All things being are in mystery; we expound mysteries by mysteries; And yet the secret of them all is one in simple grandeur: All intricate, yet each path plain, to those who know the way; All unapproachable, yet easy of access, to them that hold the key: We walk among labyrinths of wonder, but thread the mazes with a clue; We sail in chartless seas, but behold! the pole-star is above us. For, counting down from God's good will, thou meltest every riddle into Him, The axiom of reason is an undiscovered God, and all things live in His ubiquity: There is only one great secret; but that one hideth everywhere; How should the infinite be understood in Time, when it stretcheth on ungrasped for ever? Can a halting Œdipus of earth guess that enigma of the universe? Not one: the sword of faith must cut the Gordian knot of nature. God, pervading all, is in all things the mystery of each; The wherefore of its character and essence, the fountain of its virtues and its beauties. The child asketh of its mother,--Wherefore is the violet so sweet? The mother answereth her babe,--Darling, God hath willed it. And sages, diving into science, have but a profundity of words; They track for some few links the circling chain of consequence, And then, after doubts and disputations, are left where they began, At the bald conclusion of a clown, things are because they are. Wherefore are the meadows green, is it not to gratify the eye? But why should greenness charm the eye? such is God's good will. Wherefore is the ear attuned to a pleasure in musical sounds, And who set a number to those sounds, and fixed the laws of harmony? Who taught the bird to build its nest, or lent the shrub its life, Or poised in the balances of order the power to attract and to repel? Who continueth the worlds, and the sea, and the heart, in motion? Who commanded gravitation to tie down all upon its sphere?-- For, even as a limestone cliff is an aggregate of countless shells, One riddle concrete of many, a mystery compact of mysteries, So God, cloud-capped in immensity, standeth the cohesion of all things, And secrets, sublimely indistinct, permeate that Universe, Himself; As is the whole, so are the parts, whether they be mighty or minute, The sun is not more unexplained than the tissue of an emmet's wing.