Many the marvels of earth, the more marvellous wonders on high, Worlds past number on worlds, blank lightless abysses of sky; But thou art the wonder of wonders, O Man! Thy impalpable soul, Atom of consciousness, measuring the Infinite, grasping the whole: Then, on the trivialest transiencies fix'd, or plucking for fruit Dead-sea apples and ashes of sin, more brute than the brute. Yet in thy deepest depths, filth-wallowing orgies of night, Lust remorseless of blood, yet, allow'd an inlet for light: As where, a thousand fathom beneath us, midnight afar Glooms in some gulph, and we gaze, and, behold! one flash of one star! For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit is free For the human to mix with divine; from himself to the Highest to flee. Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:--and the song that we hear Has been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp'd music is clear:-- For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still breathes the light air Of the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied repair, Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know not the doom In the Marah valley of life laid up for the sons of the womb. --I speak not of grovelling hearts, souls blind and begrimed from the birth, But the spirits of nobler strain, the elect of the children of earth:-- For the needle swerves from the pole; they cannot do what they would; In their truest aim is falsehood, and ill out-balancing good. Faith's first felicities fade; the world-mists thicken and roll, 'Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o'er-hazing the eye of the soul. Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise The phantasmal figures of passion; earth's mirage exhaled to the skies. And they go as the castled clouds o'er the verge when the tempest is laid, Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array'd:-- Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore! So these, in the shrine of the soul, for a Moloch sacrifice cry, The conscience of candid childhood, the pure directness of eye:-- Till the man yields himself to himself, accepting his will as his fate, And the light from above within him is darkness; the darkness how great!