That midnight when the moon was tall

I walked alone by the white lake—yet with a vanished race

And with a race to come. To walk with dead men is to pray,

To walk with men unborn—to find the way.

I have seen many days. That night I watched them all.

I have seen many a sign and trace

Of beauty and of hope:

An elm at night; an arrowy waterfall;

The illimitable round unbroken scope

Of life; a friend’s unfrightened dying face.

Though I have heard the cry of fear in crowded loneliness of space,

Dead laughter from the lips of lust,

Anger from fools, falsehood from sycophants,

(My fear, my lips, my anger, my disgrace)Though I have held a golden cup and tasted rust,

Seen cities rush to be defiled

By the bright-fevered and consuming sin

Of making only coin and lives to count it in,

Yet once I watched with Celia,

Watched on a ferry an Italian child,

One whom America

Had changed.

His cheek was hardy and his mouth was frail

For sweetness, and his eyes were opening wild

As with wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail.

Perhaps he faced, as I did in his glance,

The spirit of the living dead who, having ranged

Through long reverses, forward without fail

Carry deliverance

From privilege and disinheritance,

Until their universal soul shall prove

The only answer to the ache of love.

“America was wistful in that child,”

Said Celia afterwards—and smiled

Because all three of us were immigrants,Each voyaging into each.

Over the city-roofs, the sun awoke

Bright in the dew

Of a marvellous morning, while she spoke

Of the sun, the dew, the wonder, in a child:

“He who devises tyranny,” she said,

“Denies the resurrection of the dead,

Beneath his own degree degrades himself,

Invades himself with ugliness and wars.

But he who knows all men to be himself,

Part of his own experiment and reach,

Humbles and amplifies himself

To build and share a tenement of stars.”

Once when we broke a loaf of bread

And shared the honey, Celia said:

“To share all beauty as the interchanging dust,

To be akin and kind and to entrust

All men to one another for their good,

Is to have heard and understood,

And carried to the common enemy

In you and me,

The ultimatum of democracy.”

“But to what goal?” I wondered. And I heard her happy speech:

“It is my faith that God is our own dream

Of perfect understanding of the soul.

It is my passion that, alike through me

And every member of eternity,

The source of God is sending the same stream.

It is my peace that when my life is whole,

God’s life shall be completed and supreme.”

And once when I had made complaint

About America, she warned me: “Be not faint

Of heart, but bold to see the soul’s advance.

The chances are not far nor few....

Face beauty,” Celia said, “then beauty faces you.”

And under all things her advice was true.

... Discovering what she knew,

Not only on a mountainous place

Or by the solving sea

But through the world I have seen endless beauty, as the number grows

Of those who, in a child cheated of simple joyOr in a wasted rose

Or in a lover’s immemorial lonely eyes

Or in machines that quicken and destroy

A multitude or in a mother’s unregarded grace

And broken heart, through all the skies

And all humanity,

Seek out the single spirit, face to face,

Find it, become a conscious part of it

And know that something pure and exquisite,

Although inscrutably begun,

Surely exalts the many into one.

“I shall not lose, nor you,”

I said to Celia. Over the world the morning-dew

Moved like a hymn and sang to us: “Go now, fulfill

Your destiny and joy;

Each in the other, both in that Italian boy,

And he in you, like flowers in a hill!”

... She was the nearness of imperfect God

On whom in her perfection was at work.

Lest I should shirkMy share, I asked her for His blessing and His nod—

And His breath was in her shining hair like the wind in golden-rod.

“But, Celia, Celia, tell me what to be,”

I asked, “and what to do,

To keep your faith in me,

To witness mine in you!”

She answered: “Dare to see

In every man and woman everywhere

The making of us two.

See none that we can spare

From the creation of our soul.

Swear to be whole.

Let not your faith abate,

But establish it in persons and exalt it in the state.”