  I Light and night, whose clouds and glories change and mingle and divide, Veil the truth whereof they witness, show the truth of things they hide. Through the darkness and the splendour of the centuries, loud or dumb, Shines and wanes and shines the spirit, lit with love of life to come. Man, the soul made flesh, that knows not death from life, and fain would know, Sees the face of time change colour as its tides recoil and flow. All his hope and fear and faith and doubt, if aught at all they be, Live the life of clouds and sunbeams, born of heaven or earth or sea. All are buoyed and blown and brightened by their hour's evasive breath: All subside and quail and darken when their hour is done to death. Yet, ere faith, a wandering water, froze and curdled into creeds, Earth, elate as heaven, adored the light that quickens dreams to deeds. From the shrine that is lit not of sunlight or starlight the sound of a limitless word. And visible: none that hath eyes to behold what the spirit must perish or see Can choose but behold it and worship: a shrine that if light were as darkness would be. Of cloud and of change is the form of the fashion that man may behold of it wrought: Of iron and truth is the mystic mid altar, where worship is none but of thought. No prayer may go up to it, climbing as incense of gladness or sorrow may climb: No rapture of music may ruffle the silence that guards it, and hears not of time. As the winds of the wild blind ages alternate in passion of light and of cloud, So changes the shape of the veil that enshrouds it with darkness and light for a shroud. And the winds and the clouds and the suns fall silent, and fade out of hearing or sight, And the shrine stands fast and is changed not, whose likeness was changed as a cloud in the night. All the storms of time, and wrath of many winds, may carve no trace On the viewless altar, though the veil bear many a name and face: Many a live God's likeness woven, many a scripture dark with awe, Bids the veil seem verier iron than the word of life's own law. Stone or steel it seems, whereon the wrath of chance is wreaked in vain: Stone or steel, and all behind it or beyond its lifted sign Cloud and vapour, no subsistence of a change-unstricken shrine. God by god flits past in thunder, till his glories turn to shades: God to god bears wondering witness how his gospel flames and fades. More was each of these, while yet they were, than man their servant seemed: Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed. Yet haply or surely, if vision were surer than theirs who rejoiced that they saw, Man might not but see, through the darkness of godhead, the light that is surety and law. On the stone that the close-drawn cloud which veils it awhile makes cloudlike stands The word of the truth everlasting, unspoken of tongues and unwritten of hands. By the sunbeams and storms of the centuries engraven, and approved of the soul as it reads, It endures as a token dividing the light from the darkness of dreams and of deeds. The faces of gods on the face of it carven, or gleaming behind and above, Star-glorified Uranus, thunderous Jehovah, for terror or worship or love, All radiant and transient and awful and mortal, and leave it unmarred and sublime. As the tides that return and recede are the fears and the hopes of the centuries that roll, Requenched and rekindled: but strong as the sun is the sense of it shrined in the soul. II In the days when time was not, in the time when days were none, Ere sorrow had life to lot, ere earth gave thanks for the sun, Ere man in his darkness waking adored what the soul in him could, And the manifold God of his making was manifest evil and good, One law from the dim beginning abode and abides in the end, In sight of him sorrowing and sinning with none but his faith for friend. Dark were the shadows around him, and darker the glories above, Ere light from beyond them found him, and bade him for love's sake love. About him was darkness, and under and over him darkness: the night That conceived him and bore him had thunder for utterance and lightning for light. The dust of death was the dust of the ways that the tribes of him trod: Strange horror and hope, strange faith and unfaith, were his boon and his bane: And the God of his trust was the wraith of the soul or the ghost of it slain. A curse was on death as on birth, and a Presence that shone as a sword Shed menace from heaven upon earth that beheld him, and hailed him her Lord. Sublime and triumphant as fire or as lightning, he kindled the skies, And withered with dread the desire that would look on the light of his eyes. Earth shuddered with worship, and knew not if hell were not hot in her breath; If birth were not sin, and the dew of the morning the sweat of her death. The watchwords of evil and good were unspoken of men and unheard: They were shadows that willed as he would, that were made and unmade by his word. His word was darkness and light, and a wisdom that makes men mad Sent blindness upon them for sight, that they saw but and heard as he bade. Cast forth and corrupt from the birth by the crime of creation, they stood Convicted of evil on earth by the grace of a God found good. The grace that enkindled and quickened the darkness of hell with flame Bade man, though the soul in him sickened, obey, and give praise to his name. Bade man shed blood, and inherit the life of the kingdom of death. "Bring now for blood-offering thy son to mine altar, and bind him and slay, That the sin of my bidding be done": and the soul in the slave said, "Yea." Yea, not nay, was the word: and the sac |
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