CHRYSANTHUS. Ah! how shallow is my mind! How confined! and how restricted![3] Ah! how driftless are my words! And my thoughts themselves how driftless! Since I cannot comprehend, Cannot pierce the secrets hidden In this little book that I Found by chance with others mingled. I its meaning cannot reach, Howsoe'er my mind I rivet, Though to this, and this alone, Many a day has now been given. But I cannot therefore yield, Must not own myself outwitted:-- No; a studious toil so great Should not end in aught so little. O'er this book my whole life long Shall I brood until the riddle Is made plain, or till some sage Simplifies what here is written. For which end I 'll read once more Its beginning. How my instinct Uses the same word with which Even the book itself beginneth!-- "In the beginning was the Word" . .[4] If in language plain and simple Word means speech, how then was it In the beginning? Since a whisper Presupposes power to breathe it, Proves an earlier existence, And to that anterior Power Here the book doth not bear witness. Then this follows: "And the Word Was with God"--nay more, 't is written, "And the Word was God: was with Him In the beginning, and by HIM then All created things were made And without Him naught was finshed":-- Oh! what mysteries, what wonders, In this tangled labyrinthine Maze lie hid! which I so many Years have studied, with such mingled Aid from lore divine and human Have in vain tried to unriddle!-- "In the beginning was the Word".-- Yes, but when was this beginning? Was it when Jove, Neptune, Pluto Shared the triple zones betwixt them, When the one took to himself Heaven supreme, one hell's abysses, And the sea the third, to Ceres Leaving earth, the ever-wing`ed Time to Saturn, fire to Phoebus, And the air to Jove's great sister?[5]-- No, it could not have been then, For the fact of their partition Shows that heaven and earth then were, Shows that sea and land existed:-- The beginning then must be Something more remote and distant: He who has expressly said 'The beginning,' must have hinted At the primal cause of all things, At the first and great beginning, All things growing out of HIM, He himself the pre-existent:-- Yes, but then a new beginning Must we seek for this beginner, And so on ad infinitum; Since if I, on soaring pinion Seek from facts to rise to causes, Rising still from where I had risen, I will find at length there is No beginning to the beginning, And the inference that time Somehow was, ere time existed, And that that which ne'er begun Ne'er can end, is plain and simple. But, my thought, remain not here, Rest not in those narrow limits, But rise up with me and dare Heights that make the brain grow dizzy:-- And at once to enter there, Other things being pretermitted, Let us venture where the mind, As the darkness round it thickens, Almost faints as we resume What this mystic scribe has written. "And the Word", this writer says, "Was made flesh!" Ah! how can this be?