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+Project Gutenberg's Etext The Diary of an Old Soul, by MacDonald
+#6 in our series by George MacDonald
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+A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul
+
+by George MacDonald
+
+November, 1999  [Etext #1953]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg's Etext The Diary of an Old Soul, by MacDonald
+******This file should be named doaos10.txt or doaos10.zip******
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+This etext was compiled and prepared by John Bechard,
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+
+
+A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul
+
+by George MacDonald
+
+
+
+
+The Diary of an Old Soul was first published in 1880.
+
+
+
+
+[The dedication refers to the fact that the
+book was originally published using only the
+right-hand side pages of the book, leaving
  
+the left-hand side blank to allow for and
   
+acknowledge any thoughtful reader responses.]
+JB
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find
+Against each worded page a white page set:--
+This is the mirror of each friendly mind
+Reflecting that. In this book we are met.
+Make it, dear hearts, of worth to you indeed:--
+Let your white page be ground, my print be seed,
+Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed.
+
+YOUR OLD SOUL
+
+The Diary of an Old Soul.
+
+
+
+
+
+JANUARY.
+
+1.
+
+LORD, what I once had done with youthful might,
+Had I been from the first true to the truth,
+Grant me, now old, to do--with better sight,
+And humbler heart, if not the brain of youth;
+So wilt thou, in thy gentleness and ruth,
+Lead back thy old soul, by the path of pain,
+Round to his best--young eyes and heart and brain.
+
+2.
+
+A dim aurora rises in my east,
+Beyond the line of jagged questions hoar,
+As if the head of our intombed High Priest
+Began to glow behind the unopened door:
+Sure the gold wings will soon rise from the gray!--
+They rise not. Up I rise, press on the more,
+To meet the slow coming of the Master's day.
+
+3.
+
+Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot,
+And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
+My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
+For I am with myself and not with thee;
+Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
+Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity:
+Oh, thou who knowest! save thy child forlorn.
+
+4.
+
+Death, like high faith, levelling, lifteth all.
+When I awake, my daughter and my son,
+Grown sister and brother, in my arms shall fall,
+Tenfold my girl and boy. Sure every one
+Of all the brood to the old wings will run.
+Whole-hearted is my worship of the man
+>From whom my earthly history began.
+
+5.
+
+Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll;
+Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea;
+My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
+I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
+Oh breathe, oh think,--O Love, live into me;
+Unworthy is my life till all divine,
+Till thou see in me only what is thine.
+
+6.
+
+Then shall I breathe in sweetest sharing, then
+Think in harmonious consort with my kin;
+Then shall I love well all my father's men,
+Feel one with theirs the life my heart within.
+Oh brothers! sisters holy! hearts divine!
+Then I shall be all yours, and nothing mine--
+To every human heart a mother-twin.
+
+7.
+
+I see a child before an empty house,
+Knocking and knocking at the closed door;
+He wakes dull echoes--but nor man nor mouse,
+If he stood knocking there for evermore.--
+A mother angel, see! folding each wing,
+Soft-walking, crosses straight the empty floor,
+And opens to the obstinate praying thing.
+
+8.
+
+Were there but some deep, holy spell, whereby
+Always I should remember thee--some mode
+Of feeling the pure heat-throb momently
+Of the spirit-fire still uttering this I!--
+Lord, see thou to it, take thou remembrance' load:
+Only when I bethink me can I cry;
+Remember thou, and prick me with love's goad.
+
+9.
+
+If to myself--"God sometimes interferes"--
+I said, my faith at once would be struck blind.
+I see him all in all, the lifing mind,
+Or nowhere in the vacant miles and years.
+A love he is that watches and that hears,
+Or but a mist fumed up from minds of men,
+Whose fear and hope reach out beyond their ken.
+
+10.
+
+When I no more can stir my soul to move,
+And life is but the ashes of a fire;
+When I can but remember that my heart
+Once used to live and love, long and aspire,--
+Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art;
+Be thou the calling, before all answering love,
+And in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.
+
+11.
+
+I thought that I had lost thee; but, behold!
+Thou comest to me from the horizon low,
+Across the fields outspread of green and gold--
+Fair carpet for thy feet to come and go.
+Whence I know not, or how to me thou art come!--
+Not less my spirit with calm bliss doth glow,
+Meeting thee only thus, in nature vague and dumb.
+
+12.
+
+Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind!
+My soul in storm is but a tattered sail,
+Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale;
+In calm, 'tis but a limp and flapping thing:
+Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing,--
+To sweep through thee the ocean, with thee the wind
+Nor rest until in thee its haven it shall find.
+
+13.
+
+The idle flapping of the sail is doubt;
+Faith swells it full to breast the breasting seas.
+Bold, conscience, fast, and rule the ruling helm;
+Hell's freezing north no tempest can send out,
+But it shall toss thee homeward to thy leas;
+Boisterous wave-crest never shall o'erwhelm
+Thy sea-float bark as safe as field-borne rooted elm.
+
+14.
+
+Sometimes, hard-trying, it seems I cannot pray--
+For doubt, and pain, and anger, and all strife.
+Yet some poor half-fledged prayer-bird from the nest
+May fall, flit, fly, perch--crouch in the bowery breast
+Of the large, nation-healing tree of life;--
+Moveless there sit through all the burning day,
+And on my heart at night a fresh leaf cooling lay.
+
+15.
+
+My harvest withers. Health, my means to live--
+All things seem rushing straight into the dark.
+But the dark still is God. I would not give
+The smallest silver-piece to turn the rush
+Backward or sideways. Am I not a spark
+Of him who is the light?--Fair hope doth flush
+My east.--Divine success--Oh, hush and hark!
+
+16.
+
+Thy will be done. I yield up everything.
+"The life is more than meat"--then more than health;
+"The body more than raiment"--then than wealth;
+The hairs I made not, thou art numbering.
+Thou art my life--I the brook, thou the spring.
+Because thine eyes are open, I can see;
+Because thou art thyself, 'tis therefore I am me.
+
+17.
+
+No sickness can come near to blast my health;
+My life depends not upon any meat;
+My bread comes not from any human tilth;
+No wings will grow upon my changeless wealth;
+Wrong cannot touch it, violence or deceit;
+Thou art my life, my health, my bank, my barn--
+And from all other gods thou plain dost warn.
+
+18.
+
+Care thou for mine whom I must leave behind;
+Care that they know who 'tis for them takes care;
+Thy present patience help them still to bear;
+Lord, keep them clearing, growing, heart and mind;
+In one thy oneness us together bind;
+Last earthly prayer with which to thee I cling--
+Grant that, save love, we owe not anything.
+
+19.
+
+'Tis well, for unembodied thought a live,
+True house to build--of stubble, wood, nor hay;
+So, like bees round the flower by which they thrive,
+My thoughts are busy with the informing truth,
+And as I build, I feed, and grow in youth--
+Hoping to stand fresh, clean, and strong, and gay,
+When up the east comes dawning His great day.
+
+20.
+
+Thy will is truth--'tis therefore fate, the strong.
+Would that my will did sweep full swing with thine!
+Then harmony with every spheric song,
+And conscious power, would give sureness divine.
+Who thinks to thread thy great laws' onward throng,
+Is as a fly that creeps his foolish way
+Athwart an engine's wheels in smooth resistless play.
+
+21.
+
+Thou in my heart hast planted, gardener divine,
+A scion of the tree of life: it grows;
+But not in every wind or weather it blows;
+The leaves fall sometimes from the baby tree,
+And the life-power seems melting into pine;
+Yet still the sap keeps struggling to the shine,
+And the unseen root clings cramplike unto thee.
+
+22.
+
+Do thou, my God, my spirit's weather control;
+And as I do not gloom though the day be dun,
+Let me not gloom when earth-born vapours roll
+Across the infinite zenith of my soul.
+Should sudden brain-frost through the heart's summer run,
+Cold, weary, joyless, waste of air and sun,
+Thou art my south, my summer-wind, my all, my one.
+
+23.
+
+O Life, why dost thou close me up in death?
+O Health, why make me inhabit heaviness?--
+I ask, yet know: the sum of this distress,
+Pang-haunted body, sore-dismayed mind,
+Is but the egg that rounds the winged faith;
+When that its path into the air shall find,
+My heart will follow, high above cold, rain, and wind.
+
+24.
+
+I can no more than lift my weary eyes;
+Therefore I lift my weary eyes--no more.
+But my eyes pull my heart, and that, before
+'Tis well awake, knocks where the conscience lies;
+Conscience runs quick to the spirit's hidden door:
+Straightway, from every sky-ward window, cries
+Up to the Father's listening ears arise.
+
+25.
+
+Not in my fancy now I search to find thee;
+Not in its loftiest forms would shape or bind thee;
+I cry to one whom I can never know,
+Filling me with an infinite overflow;
+Not to a shape that dwells within my heart,
+Clothed in perfections love and truth assigned thee,
+But to the God thou knowest that thou art.
+
+26.
+
+Not, Lord, because I have done well or ill;
+Not that my mind looks up to thee clear-eyed;
+Not that it struggles in fast cerements tied;
+Not that I need thee daily sorer still;
+Not that I wretched, wander from thy will;
+Not now for any cause to thee I cry,
+But this, that thou art thou, and here am I.
+
+27.
+
+Yestereve, Death came, and knocked at my thin door.
+I from my window looked: the thing I saw,
+The shape uncouth, I had not seen before.
+I was disturbed--with fear, in sooth, not awe;
+Whereof ashamed, I instantly did rouse
+My will to seek thee--only to fear the more:
+Alas! I could not find thee in the house.
+
+28.
+
+I was like Peter when he began to sink.
+To thee a new prayer therefore I have got--
+That, when Death comes in earnest to my door,
+Thou wouldst thyself go, when the latch doth clink,
+And lead him to my room, up to my cot;
+Then hold thy child's hand, hold and leave him not,
+Till Death has done with him for evermore.
+
+29.
+
+Till Death has done with him?--Ah, leave me then!
+And Death has done with me, oh, nevermore!
+He comes--and goes--to leave me in thy arms,
+Nearer thy heart, oh, nearer than before!
+To lay thy child, naked, new-born again
+Of mother earth, crept free through many harms,
+Upon thy bosom--still to the very core.
+
+30.
+
+Come to me, Lord: I will not speculate how,
+Nor think at which door I would have thee appear,
+Nor put off calling till my floors be swept,
+But cry, "Come, Lord, come any way, come now."
+Doors, windows, I throw wide; my head I bow,
+And sit like some one who so long has slept
+That he knows nothing till his life draw near.
+
+31.
+
+O Lord, I have been talking to the people;
+Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zone,
+And the recoil of my words' airy ripple
+My heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.
+Therefore I cast myself before thee prone:
+Lay cool hands on my burning brain, and press
+>From my weak heart the swelling emptiness.
+
+
+
+
+
+FEBRUARY.
+
+1.
+
+I TO myself have neither power nor worth,
+Patience nor love, nor anything right good;
+My soul is a poor land, plenteous in dearth--
+Here blades of grass, there a small herb for food--
+A nothing that would be something if it could;
+But if obedience, Lord, in me do grow,
+I shall one day be better than I know.
+
+2.
+
+The worst power of an evil mood is this--
+It makes the bastard self seem in the right,
+Self, self the end, the goal of human bliss.
+But if the Christ-self in us be the might
+Of saving God, why should I spend my force
+With a dark thing to reason of the light--
+Not push it rough aside, and hold obedient course?
+
+3.
+
+Back still it comes to this: there was a man
+Who said, "I am the truth, the life, the way:"--
+Shall I pass on, or shall I stop and hear?--
+"Come to the Father but by me none can:"
+What then is this?--am I not also one
+Of those who live in fatherless dismay?
+I stand, I look, I listen, I draw near.
+
+4.
+
+My Lord, I find that nothing else will do,
+But follow where thou goest, sit at thy feet,
+And where I have thee not, still run to meet.
+Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns,
+Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns,
+If thou, the Truth, do not make them the true:
+Thou art my life, O Christ, and nothing else will do.
+
+5.
+
+Thou art here--in heaven, I know, but not from here--
+Although thy separate self do not appear;
+If I could part the light from out the day,
+There I should have thee! But thou art too near:
+How find thee walking, when thou art the way?
+Oh, present Christ! make my eyes keen as stings,
+To see thee at their heart, the glory even of things.
+
+6.
+
+That thou art nowhere to be found, agree
+Wise men, whose eyes are but for surfaces;
+Men with eyes opened by the second birth,
+To whom the seen, husk of the unseen is,
+Descry thee soul of everything on earth.
+Who know thy ends, thy means and motions see:
+Eyes made for glory soon discover thee.
+
+7.
+
+Thou near then, I draw nearer--to thy feet,
+And sitting in thy shadow, look out on the shine;
+Ready at thy first word to leave my seat--
+Not thee: thou goest too. From every clod
+Into thy footprint flows the indwelling wine;
+And in my daily bread, keen-eyed I greet
+Its being's heart, the very body of God.
+
+8.
+
+Thou wilt interpret life to me, and men,
+Art, nature, yea, my own soul's mysteries--
+Bringing, truth out, clear-joyous, to my ken,
+Fair as the morn trampling the dull night. Then
+The lone hill-side shall hear exultant cries;
+The joyous see me joy, the weeping weep;
+The watching smile, as Death breathes on me his cold sleep.
+
+9.
+
+I search my heart--I search, and find no faith.
+Hidden He may be in its many folds--
+I see him not revealed in all the world
+Duty's firm shape thins to a misty wraith.
+No good seems likely. To and fro I am hurled.
+I have no stay. Only obedience holds:--
+I haste, I rise, I do the thing he saith.
+
+10.
+
+Thou wouldst not have thy man crushed back to clay;
+It must be, God, thou hast a strength to give
+To him that fain would do what thou dost say;
+Else how shall any soul repentant live,
+Old griefs and new fears hurrying on dismay?
+Let pain be what thou wilt, kind and degree,
+Only in pain calm thou my heart with thee.
+
+11.
+
+I will not shift my ground like Moab's king,
+But from this spot whereon I stand, I pray--
+>From this same barren rock to thee I say,
+"Lord, in my commonness, in this very thing
+That haunts my soul with folly--through the clay
+Of this my pitcher, see the lamp's dim flake;
+And hear the blow that would the pitcher break."
+
+12.
+
+Be thou the well by which I lie and rest;
+Be thou my tree of life, my garden ground;
+Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest,
+My book of wisdom, loved of all the best;
+Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found,
+As the eternal days and nights go round!
+Nay, nay--thou art my God, in whom all loves are bound!
+
+13.
+
+Two things at once, thou know'st I cannot think.
+When busy with the work thou givest me,
+I cannot consciously think then of thee.
+Then why, when next thou lookest o'er the brink
+Of my horizon, should my spirit shrink,
+Reproached and fearful, nor to greet thee run?
+Can I be two when I am only one.
+
+14.
+
+My soul must unawares have sunk awry.
+Some care, poor eagerness, ambition of work,
+Some old offence that unforgiving did lurk,
+Or some self-gratulation, soft and sly--
+Something not thy sweet will, not the good part,
+While the home-guard looked out, stirred up the old murk,
+And so I gloomed away from thee, my Heart.
+
+15.
+
+Therefore I make provision, ere I begin
+To do the thing thou givest me to do,
+Praying,--Lord, wake me oftener, lest I sin.
+Amidst my work, open thine eyes on me,
+That I may wake and laugh, and know and see
+Then with healed heart afresh catch up the clue,
+And singing drop into my work anew.
+
+16.
+
+If I should slow diverge, and listless stray
+Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright,
+O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray;
+Let me not perish of the ghastly blight.
+Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light;
+Then merest approach of selfish or impure
+Shall start me up alive, awake, secure.
+
+17.
+
+Lord, I have fallen again--a human clod!
+Selfish I was, and heedless to offend;
+Stood on my rights. Thy own child would not send
+Away his shreds of nothing for the whole God!
+Wretched, to thee who savest, low I bend:
+Give me the power to let my rag-rights go
+In the great wind that from thy gulf doth blow.
+
+18.
+
+Keep me from wrath, let it seem ever so right:
+My wrath will never work thy righteousness.
+Up, up the hill, to the whiter than snow-shine,
+Help me to climb, and dwell in pardon's light.
+I must be pure as thou, or ever less
+Than thy design of me--therefore incline
+My heart to take men's wrongs as thou tak'st mine.
+
+19.
+
+Lord, in thy spirit's hurricane, I pray,
+Strip my soul naked--dress it then thy way.
+Change for me all my rags to cloth of gold.
+Who would not poverty for riches yield?
+A hovel sell to buy a treasure-field?
+Who would a mess of porridge careful hold
+Against the universe's birthright old?
+
+20.
+
+Help me to yield my will, in labour even,
+Nor toil on toil, greedy of doing, heap--
+Fretting I cannot more than me is given;
+That with the finest clay my wheel runs slow,
+Nor lets the lovely thing the shapely grow;
+That memory what thought gives it cannot keep,
+And nightly rimes ere morn like cistus-petals go.
+
+21.
+
+'Tis--shall thy will be done for me?--or mine,
+And I be made a thing not after thine--
+My own, and dear in paltriest details?
+Shall I be born of God, or of mere man?
+Be made like Christ, or on some other plan?--
+I let all run:--set thou and trim my sails;
+Home then my course, let blow whatever gales.
+
+22.
+
+With thee on board, each sailor is a king
+Nor I mere captain of my vessel then,
+But heir of earth and heaven, eternal child;
+Daring all truth, nor fearing anything;
+Mighty in love, the servant of all men;
+Resenting nothing, taking rage and blare
+Into the Godlike silence of a loving care.
+
+23.
+
+I cannot see, my God, a reason why
+>From morn to night I go not gladsome free;
+For, if thou art what my soul thinketh thee,
+There is no burden but should lightly lie,
+No duty but a joy at heart must be:
+Love's perfect will can be nor sore nor small,
+For God is light--in him no darkness is at all.
+
+24.
+
+'Tis something thus to think, and half to trust--
+But, ah! my very heart, God-born, should lie
+Spread to the light, clean, clear of mire and rust,
+And like a sponge drink the divine sunbeams.
+What resolution then, strong, swift, and high!
+What pure devotion, or to live or die!
+And in my sleep, what true, what perfect dreams!
+
+25.
+
+There is a misty twilight of the soul,
+A sickly eclipse, low brooding o'er a man,
+When the poor brain is as an empty bowl,
+And the thought-spirit, weariful and wan,
+Turning from that which yet it loves the best,
+Sinks moveless, with life-poverty opprest:--
+Watch then, O Lord, thy feebly glimmering coal.
+
+26.
+
+I cannot think; in me is but a void;
+I have felt much, and want to feel no more;
+My soul is hungry for some poorer fare--
+Some earthly nectar, gold not unalloyed:--
+The little child that's happy to the core,
+Will leave his mother's lap, run down the stair,
+Play with the servants--is his mother annoyed?
+
+27.
+
+I would not have it so. Weary and worn,
+Why not to thee run straight, and be at rest?
+Motherward, with toy new, or garment torn,
+The child that late forsook her changeless breast,
+Runs to home's heart, the heaven that's heavenliest:
+In joy or sorrow, feebleness or might,
+Peace or commotion, be thou, Father, my delight.
+
+28.
+
+The thing I would say, still comes forth with doubt
+And difference:--is it that thou shap'st my ends?
+Or is it only the necessity
+Of stubborn words, that shift sluggish about,
+Warping my thought as it the sentence bends?--
+Have thou a part in it, O Lord, and I
+Shall say a truth, if not the thing I try.
+
+29.
+
+Gather my broken fragments to a whole,
+As these four quarters make a shining day.
+Into thy basket, for my golden bowl,
+Take up the things that I have cast away
+In vice or indolence or unwise play.
+Let mine be a merry, all-receiving heart,
+But make it a whole, with light in every part.
+
+
+
+
+
+MARCH.
+
+1.
+
+THE song birds that come to me night and morn,
+Fly oft away and vanish if I sleep,
+Nor to my fowling-net will one return:
+Is the thing ever ours we cannot keep?--
+But their souls go not out into the deep.
+What matter if with changed song they come back?
+Old strength nor yet fresh beauty shall they lack.
+
+2.
+
+Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art thou!
+Sunset faints after sunset into the night,
+Splendorously dying from thy window-sill--
+For ever. Sad our poverty doth bow
+Before the riches of thy making might:
+Sweep from thy space thy systems at thy will--
+In thee the sun sets every sunset still.
+
+3.
+
+And in the perfect time, O perfect God,
+When we are in our home, our natal home,
+When joy shall carry every sacred load,
+And from its life and peace no heart shall roam,
+What if thou make us able to make like thee--
+To light with moons, to clothe with greenery,
+To hang gold sunsets o'er a rose and purple sea!
+
+4.
+
+Then to his neighbour one may call out, "Come!
+Brother, come hither--I would show you a thing;"
+And lo, a vision of his imagining,
+Informed of thought which else had rested dumb,
+Before the neighbour's truth-delighted eyes,
+In the great æther of existence rise,
+And two hearts each to each the closer cling!
+
+5.
+
+We make, but thou art the creating core.
+Whatever thing I dream, invent, or feel,
+Thou art the heart of it, the atmosphere.
+Thou art inside all love man ever bore;
+Yea, the love itself, whatever thing be dear.
+Man calls his dog, he follows at his heel,
+Because thou first art love, self-caused, essential, mere.
+
+6.
+
+This day be with me, Lord, when I go forth,
+Be nearer to me than I am able to ask.
+In merriment, in converse, or in task,
+Walking the street, listening to men of worth,
+Or greeting such as only talk and bask,
+Be thy thought still my waiting soul around,
+And if He come, I shall be watching found.
+
+7.
+
+What if, writing, I always seem to leave
+Some better thing, or better way, behind,
+Why should I therefore fret at all, or grieve!
+The worse I drop, that I the better find;
+The best is only in thy perfect mind.
+Fallen threads I will not search for--I will weave.
+Who makes the mill-wheel backward strike to grind!
+
+8.
+
+Be with me, Lord. Keep me beyond all prayers:
+For more than all my prayers my need of thee,
+And thou beyond all need, all unknown cares;
+What the heart's dear imagination dares,
+Thou dost transcend in measureless majesty
+All prayers in one--my God, be unto me
+Thy own eternal self, absolutely.
+
+9.
+
+Where should the unknown treasures of the truth
+Lie, but there whence the truth comes out the most--
+In the Son of man, folded in love and ruth?
+Fair shore we see, fair ocean; but behind
+Lie infinite reaches bathing many a coast--
+The human thought of the eternal mind,
+Pulsed by a living tide, blown by a living wind.
+
+10.
+
+Thou, healthful Father, art the Ancient of Days,
+And Jesus is the eternal youth of thee.
+Our old age is the scorching of the bush
+By life's indwelling, incorruptible blaze.
+O Life, burn at this feeble shell of me,
+Till I the sore singed garment off shall push,
+Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush.
+
+11.
+
+But shall I then rush to thee like a dart?
+Or lie long hours æonian yet betwixt
+This hunger in me, and the Father's heart?--
+It shall be good, how ever, and not ill;
+Of things and thoughts even now thou art my next;
+Sole neighbour, and no space between, thou art--
+And yet art drawing nearer, nearer still.
+
+12.
+
+Therefore, my brothers, therefore, sisters dear,
+However I, troubled or selfish, fail
+In tenderness, or grace, or service clear,
+I every moment draw to you more near;
+God in us from our hearts veil after veil
+Keeps lifting, till we see with his own sight,
+And all together run in unity's delight.
+
+13.
+
+I love thee, Lord, for very greed of love--
+Not of the precious streams that towards me move,
+But of the indwelling, outgoing, fountain store.
+Than mine, oh, many an ignorant heart loves more!
+Therefore the more, with Mary at thy feet,
+I must sit worshipping--that, in my core,
+Thy words may fan to a flame the low primeval heat.
+
+14.
+
+Oh my beloved, gone to heaven from me!
+I would be rich in love to heap you with love;
+I long to love you, sweet ones, perfectly--
+Like God, who sees no spanning vault above,
+No earth below, and feels no circling air--
+Infinitely, no boundary anywhere.
+I am a beast until I love as God doth love.
+
+15.
+
+Ah, say not, 'tis but perfect self I want
+But if it were, that self is fit to live
+Whose perfectness is still itself to scant,
+Which never longs to have, but still to give.
+A self I must have, or not be at all:
+Love, give me a self self-giving--or let me fall
+To endless darkness back, and free me from life's thrall.
+
+16.
+
+"Back," said I! Whither back? How to the dark?
+>From no dark came I, but the depths of light;
+>From the sun-heart I came, of love a spark:
+What should I do but love with all my might?
+To die of love severe and pure and stark,
+Were scarcely loss; to lord a loveless height--
+That were a living death, damnation's positive night.
+
+17.
+
+But love is life. To die of love is then
+The only pass to higher life than this.
+All love is death to loving, living men;
+All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss.
+Our life is the broken current, Lord, of thine,
+Flashing from morn to morn with conscious shine--
+Then first by willing death self-made, then life divine.
+
+18.
+
+I love you, my sweet children, who are gone
+Into another mansion; but I know
+I love you not as I shall love you yet.
+I love you, sweet dead children; there are none
+In the land to which ye vanished to go,
+Whose hearts more truly on your hearts are set--
+Yet should I die of grief to love you only so.
+
+19.
+
+"I am but as a beast before thee, Lord."--
+Great poet-king, I thank thee for the word.--
+Leave not thy son half-made in beastly guise--
+Less than a man, with more than human cries--
+An unshaped thing in which thyself cries out!
+Finish me, Father; now I am but a doubt;
+Oh! make thy moaning thing for joy to leap and shout.
+
+20.
+
+Let my soul talk to thee in ordered words,
+O king of kings, O lord of only lords!--
+When I am thinking thee within my heart,
+>From the broken reflex be not far apart.
+The troubled water, dim with upstirred soil,
+Makes not the image which it yet can spoil:--
+Come nearer, Lord, and smooth the wrinkled coil.
+
+21.
+
+O Lord, when I do think of my departed,
+I think of thee who art the death of parting;
+Of him who crying Father breathed his last,
+Then radiant from the sepulchre upstarted.--
+Even then, I think, thy hands and feet kept smarting:
+With us the bitterness of death is past,
+But by the feet he still doth hold us fast.
+
+22.
+
+Therefore our hands thy feet do hold as fast.
+We pray not to be spared the sorest pang,
+But only--be thou with us to the last.
+Let not our heart be troubled at the clang
+Of hammer and nails, nor dread the spear's keen fang,
+Nor the ghast sickening that comes of pain,
+Nor yet the last clutch of the banished brain.
+
+23.
+
+Lord, pity us: we have no making power;
+Then give us making will, adopting thine.
+Make, make, and make us; temper, and refine.
+Be in us patience--neither to start nor cower.
+Christ, if thou be not with us--not by sign,
+But presence, actual as the wounds that bleed--
+We shall not bear it, but shall die indeed.
+
+24.
+
+O Christ, have pity on all men when they come
+Unto the border haunted of dismay;
+When that they know not draweth very near--
+The other thing, the opposite of day,
+Formless and ghastly, sick, and gaping-dumb,
+Before which even love doth lose his cheer:
+O radiant Christ, remember then thy fear.
+
+25.
+
+Be by me, Lord, this day. Thou know'st I mean--
+Lord, make me mind thee. I herewith forestall
+My own forgetfulness, when I stoop to glean
+The corn of earth--which yet thy hand lets fall.
+Be for me then against myself. Oh lean
+Over me then when I invert my cup;
+Take me, if by the hair, and lift me up.
+
+26.
+
+Lord of essential life, help me to die.
+To will to die is one with highest life,
+The mightiest act that to Will's hand doth lie--
+Born of God's essence, and of man's hard strife:
+God, give me strength my evil self to kill,
+And die into the heaven of thy pure will.--
+Then shall this body's death be very tolerable.
+
+27.
+
+As to our mothers came help in our birth--
+Not lost in lifing us, but saved and blest--
+Self bearing self, although right sorely prest,
+Shall nothing lose, but die and be at rest
+In life eternal, beyond all care and dearth.
+God-born then truly, a man does no more ill,
+Perfectly loves, and has whate'er he will.
+
+28.
+
+As our dear animals do suffer less
+Because their pain spreads neither right nor left,
+Lost in oblivion and foresightlessness--
+Our suffering sore by faith shall be bereft
+Of all dismay, and every weak excess.
+His presence shall be better in our pain,
+Than even self-absence to the weaker brain.
+
+29.
+
+"Father, let this cup pass." He prayed--was heard.
+What cup was it that passed away from him?
+Sure not the death-cup, now filled to the brim!
+There was no quailing in the awful word;
+He still was king of kings, of lords the lord:--
+He feared lest, in the suffering waste and grim,
+His faith might grow too faint and sickly dim.
+
+30.
+
+Thy mind, my master, I will dare explore;
+What we are told, that we are meant to know.
+Into thy soul I search yet more and more,
+Led by the lamp of my desire and woe.
+If thee, my Lord, I may not understand,
+I am a wanderer in a houseless land,
+A weeping thirst by hot winds ever fanned.
+
+31.
+
+Therefore I look again--and think I see
+That, when at last he did cry out, "My God,
+Why hast thou me forsaken?" straight man's rod
+Was turned aside; for, that same moment, he
+Cried "Father!" and gave up will and breath and spirit
+Into his hands whose all he did inherit--
+Delivered, glorified eternally.
+
+
+
+
+
+APRIL.
+
+1.
+
+LORD, I do choose the higher than my will.
+I would be handled by thy nursing arms
+After thy will, not my infant alarms.
+Hurt me thou wilt--but then more loving still,
+If more can be and less, in love's perfect zone!
+My fancy shrinks from least of all thy harms,
+But do thy will with me--I am thine own.
+
+2.
+
+Some things wilt thou not one day turn to dreams?
+Some dreams wilt thou not one day turn to fact?
+The thing that painful, more than should be, seems,
+Shall not thy sliding years with them retract--
+Shall fair realities not counteract?
+The thing that was well dreamed of bliss and joy--
+Wilt thou not breathe thy life into the toy?
+
+3.
+
+I have had dreams of absolute delight,
+Beyond all waking bliss--only of grass,
+Flowers, wind, a peak, a limb of marble white;
+They dwell with me like things half come to pass,
+True prophecies:--when I with thee am right,
+If I pray, waking, for such a joy of sight,
+Thou with the gold, wilt not refuse the brass.
+
+4.
+
+I think I shall not ever pray for such;
+Thy bliss will overflood my heart and brain,
+And I want no unripe things back again.
+Love ever fresher, lovelier than of old--
+How should it want its more exchanged for much?
+Love will not backward sigh, but forward strain,
+On in the tale still telling, never told.
+
+5.
+
+What has been, shall not only be, but is.
+The hues of dreamland, strange and sweet and tender
+Are but hint-shadows of full many a splendour
+Which the high Parent-love will yet unroll
+Before his child's obedient, humble soul.
+Ah, me, my God! in thee lies every bliss
+Whose shadow men go hunting wearily amiss.
+
+6.
+
+Now, ere I sleep, I wonder what I shall dream.
+Some sense of being, utter new, may come
+Into my soul while I am blind and dumb--
+With shapes and airs and scents which dark hours teem,
+Of other sort than those that haunt the day,
+Hinting at precious things, ages away
+In the long tale of us God to himself doth say.
+
+7.
+
+Late, in a dream, an unknown lady I saw
+Stand on a tomb; down she to me stepped thence.
+"They tell me," quoth I, "thou art one of the dead!"
+And scarce believed for gladness the yea she said;
+A strange auroral bliss, an arctic awe,
+A new, outworldish joy awoke intense,
+To think I talked with one that verily was dead.
+
+8.
+
+Thou dost demand our love, holy Lord Christ,
+And batest nothing of thy modesty;--
+Thou know'st no other way to bliss the highest
+Than loving thee, the loving, perfectly.
+Thou lovest perfectly--that is thy bliss:
+We must love like thee, or our being miss--
+So, to love perfectly, love perfect Love, love thee.
+
+9.
+
+Here is my heart, O Christ; thou know'st I love thee.
+But wretched is the thing I call my love.
+O Love divine, rise up in me and move me--
+I follow surely when thou first dost move.
+To love the perfect love, is primal, mere
+Necessity; and he who holds life dear,
+Must love thee every hope and heart above.
+
+10.
+
+Might I but scatter interfering things--
+Questions and doubts, distrusts and anxious pride,
+And in thy garment, as under gathering wings,
+Nestle obedient to thy loving side,
+Easy it were to love thee. But when thou
+Send'st me to think and labour from thee wide,
+Love falls to asking many a why and how.
+
+11.
+
+Easier it were, but poorer were the love.
+Lord, I would have me love thee from the deeps--
+Of troubled thought, of pain, of weariness.
+Through seething wastes below, billows above,
+My soul should rise in eager, hungering leaps;
+Through thorny thicks, through sands unstable press--
+Out of my dream to him who slumbers not nor sleeps.
+
+12.
+
+I do not fear the greatness of thy command--
+To keep heart-open-house to brother men;
+But till in thy God's love perfect I stand,
+My door not wide enough will open. Then
+Each man will be love-awful in my sight;
+And, open to the eternal morning's might,
+Each human face will shine my window for thy light.
+
+13.
+
+Make me all patience and all diligence;
+Patience, that thou mayst have thy time with me;
+Diligence, that I waste not thy expense
+In sending out to bring me home to thee.
+What though thy work in me transcends my sense--
+Too fine, too high, for me to understand--
+I hope entirely. On, Lord, with thy labour grand.
+
+14.
+
+Lest I be humbled at the last, and told
+That my great labour was but for my peace
+That not for love or truth had I been bold,
+But merely for a prisoned heart's release;
+Careful, I humble me now before thy feet:
+Whate'er I be, I cry, and will not cease--
+Let me not perish, though favour be not meet.
+
+15.
+
+For, what I seek thou knowest I must find,
+Or miserably die for lack of love.
+I justify thee: what is in thy mind,
+If it be shame to me, all shame above.
+Thou know'st I choose it--know'st I would not shove
+The hand away that stripped me for the rod--
+If so it pleased my Life, my love-made-angry God.
+
+16.
+
+I see a door, a multitude near by,
+In creed and quarrel, sure disciples all!
+Gladly they would, they say, enter the hall,
+But cannot, the stone threshold is so high.
+>From unseen hand, full many a feeding crumb,
+Slow dropping o'er the threshold high doth come:
+They gather and eat, with much disputing hum.
+
+17.
+
+Still and anon, a loud clear voice doth call--
+"Make your feet clean, and enter so the hall."
+They hear, they stoop, they gather each a crumb.
+Oh the deaf people! would they were also dumb!
+Hear how they talk, and lack of Christ deplore,
+Stamping with muddy feet about the door,
+And will not wipe them clean to walk upon his floor!
+
+18.
+
+But see, one comes; he listens to the voice;
+Careful he wipes his weary dusty feet!
+The voice hath spoken--to him is left no choice;
+He hurries to obey--that only is meet.
+Low sinks the threshold, levelled with the ground;
+The man leaps in--to liberty he's bound.
+The rest go talking, walking, picking round.
+
+19.
+
+If I, thus writing, rebuke my neighbour dull,
+And talk, and write, and enter not the door,
+Than all the rest I wrong Christ tenfold more,
+Making his gift of vision void and null.
+Help me this day to be thy humble sheep,
+Eating thy grass, and following, thou before;
+>From wolfish lies my life, O Shepherd, keep.
+
+20.
+
+God, help me, dull of heart, to trust in thee.
+Thou art the father of me--not any mood
+Can part me from the One, the verily Good.
+When fog and failure o'er my being brood.
+When life looks but a glimmering marshy clod,
+No fire out flashing from the living God--
+Then, then, to rest in faith were worthy victory!
+
+21.
+
+To trust is gain and growth, not mere sown seed!
+Faith heaves the world round to the heavenly dawn,
+In whose great light the soul doth spell and read
+Itself high-born, its being derived and drawn
+>From the eternal self-existent fire;
+Then, mazed with joy of its own heavenly breed,
+Exultant-humble falls before its awful sire.
+
+22.
+
+Art thou not, Jesus, busy like to us?
+Thee shall I image as one sitting still,
+Ordering all things in thy potent will,
+Silent, and thinking ever to thy father,
+Whose thought through thee flows multitudinous?
+Or shall I think of thee as journeying, rather,
+Ceaseless through space, because thou everything dost fill?
+
+23.
+
+That all things thou dost fill, I well may think--
+Thy power doth reach me in so many ways.
+Thou who in one the universe dost bind,
+Passest through all the channels of my mind;
+The sun of thought, across the farthest brink
+Of consciousness thou sendest me thy rays;
+Nor drawest them in when lost in sleep I sink.
+
+24.
+
+So common are thy paths, thy coming seems
+Only another phase oft of my me;
+But nearer is my I, O Lord, to thee,
+Than is my I to what itself it deems;
+How better then couldst thou, O master, come,
+Than from thy home across into my home,
+Straight o'er the marches that I cannot see!
+
+25.
+
+Marches?--'Twixt thee and me there's no division,
+Except the meeting of thy will and mine,
+The loves that love, the wills that will the same.
+Where thine meets mine is my life's true condition;
+Yea, only there it burns with any flame.
+Thy will but holds me to my life's fruition.
+O God, I would--I have no mine that is not thine.
+
+26.
+
+I look for thee, and do not see thee come.--
+If I could see thee, 'twere a commoner thing,
+And shallower comfort would thy coming bring.
+Earth, sea, and air lie round me moveless dumb,
+Never a tremble, an expectant hum,
+To tell the Lord of Hearts is drawing near:
+Lo! in the looking eyes, the looked for Lord is here.
+
+27.
+
+I take a comfort from my very badness:
+It is for lack of thee that I am bad.
+How close, how infinitely closer yet
+Must I come to thee, ere I can pay one debt
+Which mere humanity has on me set!
+"How close to thee!"--no wonder, soul, thou art glad!
+Oneness with him is the eternal gladness.
+
+28.
+
+What can there be so close as making and made?
+Nought twinned can be so near; thou art more nigh
+To me, my God, than is this thinking I
+To that I mean when I by me is said;
+Thou art more near me, than is my ready will
+Near to my love, though both one place do fill;--
+Yet, till we are one,--Ah me! the long until!
+
+29.
+
+Then shall my heart behold thee everywhere.
+The vision rises of a speechless thing,
+A perfectness of bliss beyond compare!
+A time when I nor breathe nor think nor move,
+But I do breathe and think and feel thy love,
+The soul of all the songs the saints do sing!--
+And life dies out in bliss, to come again in prayer.
+
+30.
+
+In the great glow of that great love, this death
+Would melt away like a fantastic cloud;
+I should no more shrink from it than from the breath
+That makes in the frosty air a nimbus-shroud;
+Thou, Love, hast conquered death, and I aloud
+Should triumph over him, with thy saintly crowd,
+That where the Lamb goes ever followeth.
+
+
+
+
+
+MAY.
+
+1.
+
+WHAT though my words glance sideways from the thing
+Which I would utter in thine ear, my sire!
+Truth in the inward parts thou dost desire--
+Wise hunger, not a fitness fine of speech:
+The little child that clamouring fails to reach
+With upstretched hand the fringe of her attire,
+Yet meets the mother's hand down hurrying.
+
+2.
+
+Even when their foolish words they turned on him,
+He did not his disciples send away;
+He knew their hearts were foolish, eyes were dim,
+And therefore by his side needs must they stay.
+Thou will not, Lord, send me away from thee.
+When I am foolish, make thy cock crow grim;
+If that is not enough, turn, Lord, and look on me.
+
+3.
+
+Another day of gloom and slanting rain!
+Of closed skies, cold winds, and blight and bane!
+Such not the weather, Lord, which thou art fain
+To give thy chosen, sweet to heart and brain!--
+Until we mourn, thou keep'st the merry tune;
+Thy hand unloved its pleasure must restrain,
+Nor spoil both gift and child by lavishing too soon.
+
+4.
+
+But all things shall be ours! Up, heart, and sing.
+All things were made for us--we are God's heirs--
+Moon, sun, and wildest comets that do trail
+A crowd of small worlds for a swiftness-tail!
+Up from Thy depths in me, my child-heart bring--
+The child alone inherits anything:
+God's little children-gods--all things are theirs!
+
+5.
+
+Thy great deliverance is a greater thing
+Than purest imagination can foregrasp;
+A thing beyond all conscious hungering,
+Beyond all hope that makes the poet sing.
+It takes the clinging world, undoes its clasp,
+Floats it afar upon a mighty sea,
+And leaves us quiet with love and liberty and thee.
+
+6.
+
+Through all the fog, through all earth's wintery sighs,
+I scent Thy spring, I feel the eternal air,
+Warm, soft, and dewy, filled with flowery eyes,
+And gentle, murmuring motions everywhere--
+Of life in heart, and tree, and brook, and moss;
+Thy breath wakes beauty, love, and bliss, and prayer,
+And strength to hang with nails upon thy cross.
+
+7.
+
+If thou hadst closed my life in seed and husk,
+And cast me into soft, warm, damp, dark mould,
+All unaware of light come through the dusk,
+I yet should feel the split of each shelly fold,
+Should feel the growing of my prisoned heart,
+And dully dream of being slow unrolled,
+And in some other vagueness taking part.
+
+8.
+
+And little as the world I should foreknow
+Up into which I was about to rise--
+Its rains, its radiance, airs, and warmth, and skies,
+How it would greet me, how its wind would blow--
+As little, it may be, I do know the good
+Which I for years half darkling have pursued--
+The second birth for which my nature cries.
+
+9.
+
+The life that knows not, patient waits, nor longs:--
+I know, and would be patient, yet would long.
+I can be patient for all coming songs,
+But let me sing my one monotonous song.
+To me the time is slow my mould among;
+To quicker life I fain would spur and start
+The aching growth at my dull-swelling heart.
+
+10.
+
+Christ is the pledge that I shall one day see;
+That one day, still with him, I shall awake,
+And know my God, at one with him and free.
+O lordly essence, come to life in me;
+The will-throb let me feel that doth me make;
+Now have I many a mighty hope in thee,
+Then shall I rest although the universe should quake.
+
+11.
+
+Haste to me, Lord, when this fool-heart of mine
+Begins to gnaw itself with selfish craving;
+Or, like a foul thing scarcely worth the saving,
+Swoln up with wrath, desireth vengeance fine.
+Haste, Lord, to help, when reason favours wrong;
+Haste when thy soul, the high-born thing divine,
+Is torn by passion's raving, maniac throng.
+
+12.
+
+Fair freshness of the God-breathed spirit air,
+Pass through my soul, and make it strong to love;
+Wither with gracious cold what demons dare
+Shoot from my hell into my world above;
+Let them drop down, like leaves the sun doth sear,
+And flutter far into the inane and bare,
+Leaving my middle-earth calm, wise, and clear.
+
+13.
+
+Even thou canst give me neither thought nor thing,
+Were it the priceless pearl hid in the land,
+Which, if I fix thereon a greedy gaze,
+Becomes not poison that doth burn and cling;
+Their own bad look my foolish eyes doth daze,
+They see the gift, see not the giving hand--
+>From the living root the apple dead I wring.
+
+14.
+
+This versing, even the reading of the tale
+That brings my heart its joy unspeakable,
+Sometimes will softly, unsuspectedly hale
+That heart from thee, and all its pulses quell.
+Discovery's pride, joy's bliss, take aback my sail,
+And sweep me from thy presence and my grace,
+Because my eyes dropped from the master's face.
+
+15.
+
+Afresh I seek thee. Lead me--once more I pray--
+Even should it be against my will, thy way.
+Let me not feel thee foreign any hour,
+Or shrink from thee as an estranged power.
+Through doubt, through faith, through bliss, through stark dismay,
+Through sunshine, wind, or snow, or fog, or shower,
+Draw me to thee who art my only day.
+
+16.
+
+I would go near thee--but I cannot press
+Into thy presence--it helps not to presume.
+Thy doors are deeds; the handles are their doing.
+He whose day-life is obedient righteousness,
+Who, after failure, or a poor success,
+Rises up, stronger effort yet renewing--
+He finds thee, Lord, at length, in his own common room.
+
+17.
+
+Lord, thou hast carried me through this evening's duty;
+I am released, weary, and well content.
+O soul, put on the evening dress of beauty,
+Thy sunset-flush, of gold and purple blent!--
+Alas, the moment I turn to my heart,
+Feeling runs out of doors, or stands apart!
+But such as I am, Lord, take me as thou art.
+
+18.
+
+The word he then did speak, fits now as then,
+For the same kind of men doth mock at it.
+God-fools, God-drunkards these do call the men
+Who think the poverty of their all not fit,
+Borne humbly by their art, their voice, their pen,
+Save for its allness, at thy feet to fling,
+For whom all is unfit that is not everything.
+
+19.
+
+O Christ, my life, possess me utterly.
+Take me and make a little Christ of me.
+If I am anything but thy father's son,
+'Tis something not yet from the darkness won.
+Oh, give me light to live with open eyes.
+Oh, give me life to hope above all skies.
+Give me thy spirit to haunt the Father with my cries.
+
+20.
+
+'Tis hard for man to rouse his spirit up--
+It is the human creative agony,
+Though but to hold the heart an empty cup,
+Or tighten on the team the rigid rein.
+Many will rather lie among the slain
+Than creep through narrow ways the light to gain--
+Than wake the will, and be born bitterly.
+
+21.
+
+But he who would be born again indeed,
+Must wake his soul unnumbered times a day,
+And urge himself to life with holy greed;
+Now ope his bosom to the Wind's free play;
+And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still,
+Submiss and ready to the making will,
+Athirst and empty, for God's breath to fill.
+
+22.
+
+All times are thine whose will is our remede.
+Man turns to thee, thou hast not turned away;
+The look he casts, thy labour that did breed--
+It is thy work, thy business all the day:
+That look, not foregone fitness, thou dost heed.
+For duty absolute how be fitter than now?
+Or learn by shunning?--Lord, I come; help thou.
+
+23.
+
+Ever above my coldness and my doubt
+Rises up something, reaching forth a hand:
+This thing I know, but cannot understand.
+Is it the God in me that rises out
+Beyond my self, trailing it up with him,
+Towards the spirit-home, the freedom-land,
+Beyond my conscious ken, my near horizon's brim?
+
+24.
+
+O God of man, my heart would worship all
+My fellow men, the flashes from thy fire;
+Them in good sooth my lofty kindred call,
+Born of the same one heart, the perfect sire;
+Love of my kind alone can set me free;
+Help me to welcome all that come to me,
+Not close my doors and dream solitude liberty!
+
+25.
+
+A loving word may set some door ajar
+Where seemed no door, and that may enter in
+Which lay at the heart of that same loving word.
+In my still chamber dwell thou always, Lord;
+Thy presence there will carriage true afford;
+True words will flow, pure of design to win;
+And to my men my door shall have no bar.
+
+26.
+
+My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
+I think thy answers make me what I am.
+Like weary waves thought follows upon thought,
+But the still depth beneath is all thine own,
+And there thou mov'st in paths to us unknown.
+Out of strange strife thy peace is strangely wrought;
+If the lion in us pray--thou answerest the lamb.
+
+27.
+
+So bound in selfishness am I, so chained,
+I know it must be glorious to be free
+But know not what, full-fraught, the word doth mean.
+By loss on loss I have severely gained
+Wisdom enough my slavery to see;
+But liberty, pure, absolute, serene,
+No freëst-visioned slave has ever seen.
+
+28.
+
+For, that great freedom how should such as I
+Be able to imagine in such a self?
+Less hopeless far the miser man might try
+To image the delight of friend-shared pelf.
+Freedom is to be like thee, face and heart;
+To know it, Lord, I must be as thou art,
+I cannot breed the imagination high.
+
+29.
+
+Yet hints come to me from the realm unknown;
+Airs drift across the twilight border land,
+Odoured with life; and as from some far strand
+Sea-murmured, whispers to my heart are blown
+That fill me with a joy I cannot speak,
+Yea, from whose shadow words drop faint and weak:
+Thee, God, I shadow in that region grand.
+
+30.
+
+O Christ, who didst appear in Judah land,
+Thence by the cross go back to God's right hand,
+Plain history, and things our sense beyond,
+In thee together come and correspond:
+How rulest thou from the undiscovered bourne
+The world-wise world that laughs thee still to scorn?
+Please, Lord, let thy disciple understand.
+
+31.
+
+'Tis heart on heart thou rulest. Thou art the same
+At God's right hand as here exposed to shame,
+And therefore workest now as thou didst then--
+Feeding the faint divine in humble men.
+Through all thy realms from thee goes out heart-power,
+Working the holy, satisfying hour,
+When all shall love, and all be loved again.
+
+
+
+
+
+JUNE.
+
+1.
+
+FROM thine, as then, the healing virtue goes
+Into our hearts--that is the Father's plan.
+>From heart to heart it sinks, it steals, it flows,
+>From these that know thee still infecting those.
+Here is my heart--from thine, Lord, fill it up,
+That I may offer it as the holy cup
+Of thy communion to my every man.
+
+2.
+
+When thou dost send out whirlwinds on thy seas,
+Alternatest thy lightning with its roar,
+Thy night with morning, and thy clouds with stars
+Or, mightier force unseen in midst of these,
+Orderest the life in every airy pore;
+Guidest men's efforts, rul'st mishaps and jars,--
+'Tis only for their hearts, and nothing more.
+
+3.
+
+This, this alone thy father careth for--
+That men should live hearted throughout with thee--
+Because the simple, only life thou art,
+Of the very truth of living, the pure heart.
+For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea,
+Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor
+Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.
+
+4.
+
+But, like a virtuous medicine, self-diffused
+Through all men's hearts thy love shall sink and float;
+Till every feeling false, and thought unwise,
+Selfish, and seeking, shall, sternly disused,
+Wither, and die, and shrivel up to nought;
+And Christ, whom they did hang 'twixt earth and skies,
+Up in the inner world of men arise.
+
+5.
+
+Make me a fellow worker with thee, Christ;
+Nought else befits a God-born energy;
+Of all that's lovely, only lives the highest,
+Lifing the rest that it shall never die.
+Up I would be to help thee--for thou liest
+Not, linen-swathed in Joseph's garden-tomb,
+But walkest crowned, creation's heart and bloom.
+
+6.
+
+My God, when I would lift my heart to thee,
+Imagination instantly doth set
+A cloudy something, thin, and vast, and vague,
+To stand for him who is the fact of me;
+Then up the Will, and doth her weakness plague
+To pay the heart her duty and her debt,
+Showing the face that hearkeneth to the plea.
+
+7.
+
+And hence it comes that thou at times dost seem
+To fade into an image of my mind;
+I, dreamer, cover, hide thee up with dream,--
+Thee, primal, individual entity!--
+No likeness will I seek to frame or find,
+But cry to that which thou dost choose to be,
+To that which is my sight, therefore I cannot see.
+
+8.
+
+No likeness? Lo, the Christ! Oh, large Enough!
+I see, yet fathom not the face he wore.
+He is--and out of him there is no stuff
+To make a man. Let fail me every spark
+Of blissful vision on my pathway rough,
+I have seen much, and trust the perfect more,
+While to his feet my faith crosses the wayless dark.
+
+9.
+
+Faith is the human shadow of thy might.
+Thou art the one self-perfect life, and we
+Who trust thy life, therein join on to thee,
+Taking our part in self-creating light.
+To trust is to step forward out of the night--
+To be--to share in the outgoing Will
+That lives and is, because outgoing still.
+
+10.
+
+I am lost before thee, Father! yet I will
+Claim of thee my birthright ineffable.
+Thou lay'st it on me, son, to claim thee, sire;
+To that which thou hast made me, I aspire;
+To thee, the sun, upflames thy kindled fire.
+No man presumes in that to which he was born;
+Less than the gift to claim, would be the giver to scorn.
+
+11.
+
+Henceforth all things thy dealings are with me
+For out of thee is nothing, or can be,
+And all things are to draw us home to thee.
+What matter that the knowers scoffing say,
+"This is old folly, plain to the new day"?--
+If thou be such as thou, and they as they,
+Unto thy Let there be, they still must answer Nay.
+
+12.
+
+They will not, therefore cannot, do not know him.
+Nothing they could know, could be God. In sooth,
+Unto the true alone exists the truth.
+They say well, saying Nature doth not show him:
+Truly she shows not what she cannot show;
+And they deny the thing they cannot know.
+Who sees a glory, towards it will go.
+
+13.
+
+Faster no step moves God because the fool
+Shouts to the universe God there is none;
+The blindest man will not preach out the sun,
+Though on his darkness he should found a school.
+It may be, when he finds he is not dead,
+Though world and body, sight and sound are fled,
+Some eyes may open in his foolish head.
+
+14.
+
+When I am very weary with hard thought,
+And yet the question burns and is not quenched,
+My heart grows cool when to remembrance wrought
+That thou who know'st the light-born answer sought
+Know'st too the dark where the doubt lies entrenched--
+Know'st with what seemings I am sore perplexed,
+And that with thee I wait, nor needs my soul be vexed.
+
+15.
+
+Who sets himself not sternly to be good,
+Is but a fool, who judgment of true things
+Has none, however oft the claim renewed.
+And he who thinks, in his great plenitude,
+To right himself, and set his spirit free,
+Without the might of higher communings,
+Is foolish also--save he willed himself to be.
+
+16.
+
+How many helps thou giv'st to those would learn!
+To some sore pain, to others a sinking heart;
+To some a weariness worse than any smart;
+To some a haunting, fearing, blind concern;
+Madness to some; to some the shaking dart
+Of hideous death still following as they turn;
+To some a hunger that will not depart.
+
+17.
+
+To some thou giv'st a deep unrest--a scorn
+Of all they are or see upon the earth;
+A gaze, at dusky night and clearing morn,
+As on a land of emptiness and dearth;
+To some a bitter sorrow; to some the sting
+Of love misprized--of sick abandoning;
+To some a frozen heart, oh, worse than anything!
+
+18.
+
+To some a mocking demon, that doth set
+The poor foiled will to scoff at the ideal,
+But loathsome makes to them their life of jar.
+The messengers of Satan think to mar,
+But make--driving the soul from false to feal--
+To thee, the reconciler, the one real,
+In whom alone the would be and the is are met.
+
+19.
+
+Me thou hast given an infinite unrest,
+A hunger--not at first after known good,
+But something vague I knew not, and yet would--
+The veiled Isis, thy will not understood;
+A conscience tossing ever in my breast;
+And something deeper, that will not be expressed,
+Save as the Spirit thinking in the Spirit's brood.
+
+20.
+
+But now the Spirit and I are one in this--
+My hunger now is after righteousness;
+My spirit hopes in God to set me free
+>From the low self loathed of the higher me.
+Great elder brother of my second birth,
+Dear o'er all names but one, in heaven or earth,
+Teach me all day to love eternally.
+
+21.
+
+Lo, Lord, thou know'st, I would not anything
+That in the heart of God holds not its root;
+Nor falsely deem there is any life at all
+That doth in him nor sleep nor shine nor sing;
+I know the plants that bear the noisome fruit
+Of burning and of ashes and of gall--
+>From God's heart torn, rootless to man's they cling.
+
+22.
+
+Life-giving love rots to devouring fire;
+Justice corrupts to despicable revenge;
+Motherhood chokes in the dam's jealous mire;
+Hunger for growth turns fluctuating change;
+Love's anger grand grows spiteful human wrath,
+Hunting men out of conscience' holy path;
+And human kindness takes the tattler's range.
+
+23.
+
+Nothing can draw the heart of man but good;
+Low good it is that draws him from the higher--
+So evil--poison uncreate from food.
+Never a foul thing, with temptation dire,
+Tempts hellward force created to aspire,
+But walks in wronged strength of imprisoned Truth,
+Whose mantle also oft the Shame indu'th.
+
+24.
+
+Love in the prime not yet I understand--
+Scarce know the love that loveth at first hand:
+Help me my selfishness to scatter and scout;
+Blow on me till my love loves burningly;
+Then the great love will burn the mean self out,
+And I, in glorious simplicity,
+Living by love, shall love unspeakably.
+
+25.
+
+Oh, make my anger pure--let no worst wrong
+Rouse in me the old niggard selfishness.
+Give me thine indignation--which is love
+Turned on the evil that would part love's throng;
+Thy anger scathes because it needs must bless,
+Gathering into union calm and strong
+All things on earth, and under, and above.
+
+26.
+
+Make my forgiveness downright--such as I
+Should perish if I did not have from thee;
+I let the wrong go, withered up and dry,
+Cursed with divine forgetfulness in me.
+'Tis but self-pity, pleasant, mean, and sly,
+Low whispering bids the paltry memory live:--
+What am I brother for, but to forgive!
+
+27.
+
+"Thou art my father's child--come to my heart:"
+Thus must I say, or Thou must say, "Depart;"
+Thus I would say--I would be as thou art;
+Thus I must say, or still I work athwart
+The absolute necessity and law
+That dwells in me, and will me asunder draw,
+If in obedience I leave any flaw.
+
+28.
+
+Lord, I forgive--and step in unto thee.
+If I have enemies, Christ deal with them:
+He hath forgiven me and Jerusalem.
+Lord, set me from self-inspiration free,
+And let me live and think from thee, not me--
+Rather, from deepest me then think and feel,
+At centre of thought's swift-revolving wheel.
+
+29.
+
+I sit o'ercanopied with Beauty's tent,
+Through which flies many a golden-winged dove,
+Well watched of Fancy's tender eyes up bent;
+A hundred Powers wait on me, ministering;
+A thousand treasures Art and Knowledge bring;
+Will, Conscience, Reason tower the rest above;
+But in the midst, alone, I gladness am and love.
+
+30.
+
+'Tis but a vision, Lord; I do not mean
+That thus I am, or have one moment been--
+'Tis but a picture hung upon my wall,
+To measure dull contentment therewithal,
+And know behind the human how I fall;--
+A vision true, of what one day shall be,
+When thou hast had thy very will with me.
+
+
+
+
+
+JULY.
+
+1.
+
+ALAS, my tent! see through it a whirlwind sweep!
+Moaning, poor Fancy's doves are swept away.
+I sit alone, a sorrow half asleep,
+My consciousness the blackness all astir.
+No pilgrim I, a homeless wanderer--
+For how canst Thou be in the darkness deep,
+Who dwellest only in the living day?
+
+2.
+
+It must be, somewhere in my fluttering tent,
+Strange creatures, half tamed only yet, are pent--
+Dragons, lop-winged birds, and large-eyed snakes!
+Hark! through the storm the saddest howling breaks!
+Or are they loose, roaming about the bent,
+The darkness dire deepening with moan and scream?--
+My Morning, rise, and all shall be a dream.
+
+3.
+
+Not thine, my Lord, the darkness all is mine--
+Save that, as mine, my darkness too is thine:
+All things are thine to save or to destroy--
+Destroy my darkness, rise my perfect joy;
+Love primal, the live coal of every night,
+Flame out, scare the ill things with radiant fright,
+And fill my tent with laughing morn's delight.
+
+4.
+
+Master, thou workest with such common things--
+Low souls, weak hearts, I mean--and hast to use,
+Therefore, such common means and rescuings,
+That hard we find it, as we sit and muse,
+To think thou workest in us verily:
+Bad sea-boats we, and manned with wretched crews--
+That doubt the captain, watch the storm-spray flee.
+
+5.
+
+Thou art hampered in thy natural working then
+When beings designed on freedom's holy plan
+Will not be free: with thy poor, foolish men,
+Thou therefore hast to work just like a man.
+But when, tangling thyself in their sore need,
+Thou hast to freedom fashioned them indeed,
+Then wilt thou grandly move, and Godlike speed.
+
+6.
+
+Will this not then show grandest fact of all--
+In thy creation victory most renowned--
+That thou hast wrought thy will by slow and small,
+And made men like thee, though thy making bound
+By that which they were not, and could not be
+Until thou mad'st them make along with thee?--
+Master, the tardiness is but in me.
+
+7.
+
+Hence come thy checks--because I still would run
+My head into the sand, nor flutter aloft
+Towards thy home, with thy wind under me.
+'Tis because I am mean, thy ways so oft
+Look mean to me; my rise is low begun;
+But scarce thy will doth grasp me, ere I see,
+For my arrest and rise, its stern necessity.
+
+8.
+
+Like clogs upon the pinions of thy plan
+We hang--like captives on thy chariot-wheels,
+Who should climb up and ride with Death's conqueror;
+Therefore thy train along the world's highway steals
+So slow to the peace of heart-reluctant man.
+What shall we do to spread the wing and soar,
+Nor straiten thy deliverance any more?
+
+9.
+
+The sole way to put flight into the wing,
+To preen its feathers, and to make them grow,
+Is to heed humbly every smallest thing
+With which the Christ in us has aught to do.
+So will the Christ from child to manhood go,
+Obedient to the father Christ, and so
+Sweet holy change will turn all our old things to new.
+
+10.
+
+Creation thou dost work by faint degrees,
+By shade and shadow from unseen beginning;
+Far, far apart, in unthought mysteries
+Of thy own dark, unfathomable seas,
+Thou will'st thy will; and thence, upon the earth--
+Slow travelling, his way through centuries winning--
+A child at length arrives at never ending birth.
+
+11.
+
+Well mayst thou then work on indocile hearts
+By small successes, disappointments small;
+By nature, weather, failure, or sore fall;
+By shame, anxiety, bitterness, and smarts;
+By loneliness, by weary loss of zest:--
+The rags, the husks, the swine, the hunger-quest,
+Drive home the wanderer to the father's breast.
+
+12.
+
+How suddenly some rapid turn of thought
+May throw the life-machine all out of gear,
+Clouding the windows with the steam of doubt,
+Filling the eyes with dust, with noise the ear!
+Who knows not then where dwells the engineer,
+Rushes aghast into the pathless night,
+And wanders in a land of dreary fright.
+
+13.
+
+Amazed at sightless whirring of their wheels,
+Confounded with the recklessness and strife,
+Distract with fears of what may next ensue,
+Some break rude exit from the house of life,
+And plunge into a silence out of view--
+Whence not a cry, no wafture once reveals
+What door they have broke open with the knife.
+
+14.
+
+Help me, my Father, in whatever dismay,
+Whatever terror in whatever shape,
+To hold the faster by thy garment's hem;
+When my heart sinks, oh, lift it up, I pray;
+Thy child should never fear though hell should gape,
+Not blench though all the ills that men affray
+Stood round him like the Roman round Jerusalem.
+
+15.
+
+Too eager I must not be to understand.
+How should the work the master goes about
+Fit the vague sketch my compasses have planned?
+I am his house--for him to go in and out.
+He builds me now--and if I cannot see
+At any time what he is doing with me,
+'Tis that he makes the house for me too grand.
+
+16.
+
+The house is not for me--it is for him.
+His royal thoughts require many a stair,
+Many a tower, many an outlook fair,
+Of which I have no thought, and need no care.
+Where I am most perplexed, it may be there
+Thou mak'st a secret chamber, holy-dim,
+Where thou wilt come to help my deepest prayer.
+
+17.
+
+I cannot tell why this day I am ill;
+But I am well because it is thy will--
+Which is to make me pure and right like thee.
+Not yet I need escape--'tis bearable
+Because thou knowest. And when harder things
+Shall rise and gather, and overshadow me,
+I shall have comfort in thy strengthenings.
+
+18.
+
+How do I live when thou art far away?--
+When I am sunk, and lost, and dead in sleep,
+Or in some dream with no sense in its play?
+When weary-dull, or drowned in study deep?--
+O Lord, I live so utterly on thee,
+I live when I forget thee utterly--
+Not that thou thinkest of, but thinkest me.
+
+19.
+
+Thou far!--that word the holy truth doth blur.
+Doth the great ocean from the small fish run
+When it sleeps fast in its low weedy bower?
+Is the sun far from any smallest flower,
+That lives by his dear presence every hour?
+Are they not one in oneness without stir--
+The flower the flower because the sun the sun?
+
+20.
+
+"Dear presence every hour"!--what of the night,
+When crumpled daisies shut gold sadness in;
+And some do hang the head for lack of light,
+Sick almost unto death with absence-blight?--
+Thy memory then, warm-lingering in the ground,
+Mourned dewy in the air, keeps their hearts sound,
+Till fresh with day their lapsed life begin.
+
+21.
+
+All things are shadows of the shining true:
+Sun, sea, and air--close, potent, hurtless fire--
+Flowers from their mother's prison--dove, and dew--
+Every thing holds a slender guiding clue
+Back to the mighty oneness:--hearts of faith
+Know thee than light, than heat, endlessly nigher,
+Our life's life, carpenter of Nazareth.
+
+22.
+
+Sometimes, perhaps, the spiritual blood runs slow,
+And soft along the veins of will doth flow,
+Seeking God's arteries from which it came.
+Or does the etherial, creative flame
+Turn back upon itself, and latent grow?--
+It matters not what figure or what name,
+If thou art in me, and I am not to blame.
+
+23.
+
+In such God-silence, the soul's nest, so long
+As all is still, no flutter and no song,
+Is safe. But if my soul begin to act
+Without some waking to the eternal fact
+That my dear life is hid with Christ in God--
+I think and move a creature of earth's clod,
+Stand on the finite, act upon the wrong.
+
+24.
+
+My soul this sermon hence for itself prepares:--
+"Then is there nothing vile thou mayst not do,
+Buffeted in a tumult of low cares,
+And treacheries of the old man 'gainst the new."--
+Lord, in my spirit let thy spirit move,
+Warning, that it may not have to reprove:--
+In my dead moments, master, stir the prayers.
+
+25.
+
+Lord, let my soul o'erburdened then feel thee
+Thrilling through all its brain's stupidity.
+If I must slumber, heedless of ill harms,
+Let it not be but in my Father's arms;
+Outside the shelter of his garment's fold,
+All is a waste, a terror-haunted wold.--
+Lord, keep me. 'Tis thy child that cries. Behold.
+
+26.
+
+Some say that thou their endless love host won
+By deeds for them which I may not believe
+Thou ever didst, or ever willedst done:
+What matter, so they love thee? They receive
+Eternal more than the poor loom and wheel
+Of their invention ever wove and spun.--
+I love thee for I must, thine all from head to heel.
+
+27.
+
+The love of thee will set all notions right.
+Right save by love no thought can be or may;
+Only love's knowledge is the primal light.
+Questions keep camp along love's shining coast--
+Challenge my love and would my entrance stay:
+Across the buzzing, doubting, challenging host,
+I rush to thee, and cling, and cry--Thou know'st.
+
+28.
+
+Oh, let me live in thy realities,
+Nor substitute my notions for thy facts,
+Notion with notion making leagues and pacts;
+They are to truth but as dream-deeds to acts,
+And questioned, make me doubt of everything.--
+"O Lord, my God," my heart gets up and cries,
+"Come thy own self, and with thee my faith bring."
+
+29.
+
+O master, my desires to work, to know,
+To be aware that I do live and grow--
+All restless wish for anything not thee,
+I yield, and on thy altar offer me.
+Let me no more from out thy presence go,
+But keep me waiting watchful for thy will--
+Even while I do it, waiting watchful still.
+
+30.
+
+Thou art the Lord of life, the secret thing.
+Thou wilt give endless more than I could find,
+Even if without thee I could go and seek;
+For thou art one, Christ, with my deepest mind,
+Duty alive, self-willed, in me dost speak,
+And to a deeper purer being sting:
+I come to thee, my life, my causing kind.
+
+31.
+
+Nothing is alien in thy world immense--
+No look of sky or earth or man or beast;
+"In the great hand of God I stand, and thence"
+Look out on life, his endless, holy feast.
+To try to feel is but to court despair,
+To dig for a sun within a garden-fence:
+Who does thy will, O God, he lives upon thy air.
+
+
+
+
+
+AUGUST.
+
+1.
+
+SO shall abundant entrance me be given
+Into the truth, my life's inheritance.
+Lo! as the sun shoots straight from out his tomb,
+God-floated, casting round a lordly glance
+Into the corners of his endless room,
+So, through the rent which thou, O Christ, hast riven,
+I enter liberty's divine expanse.
+
+2.
+
+It will be so--ah, so it is not now!
+Who seeks thee for a little lazy peace,
+Then, like a man all weary of the plough,
+That leaves it standing in the furrow's crease,
+Turns from thy presence for a foolish while,
+Till comes again the rasp of unrest's file,
+>From liberty is distant many a mile.
+
+3.
+
+Like one that stops, and drinks, and turns, and goes
+Into a land where never water flows,
+There travels on, the dry and thirsty day,
+Until the hot night veils the farther way,
+Then turns and finds again the bubbling pool--
+Here would I build my house, take up my stay,
+Nor ever leave my Sychar's margin cool.
+
+4.
+
+Keep me, Lord, with thee. I call from out the dark--
+Hear in thy light, of which I am a spark.
+I know not what is mine and what is thine--
+Of branch and stem I miss the differing mark--
+But if a mere hair's-breadth me separateth,
+That hair's-breadth is eternal, infinite death.
+For sap thy dead branch calls, O living vine!
+
+5.
+
+I have no choice, I must do what I can;
+But thou dost me, and all things else as well;
+Thou wilt take care thy child shall grow a man.
+Rouse thee, my faith; be king; with life be one;
+To trust in God is action's highest kind;
+Who trusts in God, his heart with life doth swell;
+Faith opens all the windows to God's wind.
+
+6.
+
+O Father, thou art my eternity.
+Not on the clasp Of consciousness--on thee
+My life depends; and I can well afford
+All to forget, so thou remember, Lord.
+In thee I rest; in sleep thou dost me fold;
+In thee I labour; still in thee, grow old;
+And dying, shall I not in thee, my Life, be bold?
+
+7.
+
+In holy things may be unholy greed.
+Thou giv'st a glimpse of many a lovely thing,
+Not to be stored for use in any mind,
+But only for the present spiritual need.
+The holiest bread, if hoarded, soon will breed
+The mammon-moth, the having-pride, I find.
+'Tis momently thy heart gives out heart-quickening.
+
+8.
+
+It is thyself, and neither this nor that,
+Nor anything, told, taught, or dreamed of thee,
+That keeps us live. The holy maid who sat
+Low at thy feet, choosing the better part,
+Rising, bore with her--what a memory!
+Yet, brooding only on that treasure, she
+Had soon been roused by conscious loss of heart.
+
+9.
+
+I am a fool when I would stop and think,
+And lest I lose my thoughts, from duty shrink.
+It is but avarice in another shape.
+'Tis as the vine-branch were to hoard the grape,
+Nor trust the living root beneath the sod.
+What trouble is that child to thee, my God,
+Who sips thy gracious cup, and will not drink!
+
+10.
+
+True, faithful action only is the life,
+The grapes for which we feel the pruning knife.
+Thoughts are but leaves; they fall and feed the ground.
+The holy seasons, swift and slow, go round;
+The ministering leaves return, fresh, large, and rife--
+But fresher, larger, more thoughts to the brain:--
+Farewell, my dove!--come back, hope-laden, through the rain.
+
+11.
+
+Well may this body poorer, feebler grow!
+It is undressing for its last sweet bed;
+But why should the soul, which death shall never know,
+Authority, and power, and memory shed?
+It is that love with absolute faith would wed;
+God takes the inmost garments off his child,
+To have him in his arms, naked and undefiled.
+
+12.
+
+Thou art my knowledge and my memory,
+No less than my real, deeper life, my love.
+I will not fool, degrade myself to trust
+In less than that which maketh me say Me,
+In less than that causing itself to be.
+Then art within me, behind, beneath, above--
+I will be thine because I may and must.
+
+13.
+
+Thou art the truth, the life. Thou, Lord, wilt see
+To every question that perplexes me.
+I am thy being; and my dignity
+Is written with my name down in thy book;
+Thou wilt care for it. Never shall I think
+Of anything that thou mightst overlook:--
+In faith-born triumph at thy feet I sink.
+
+14.
+
+Thou carest more for that which I call mine,
+In same sort--better manner than I could,
+Even if I knew creation's ends divine,
+Rousing in me this vague desire of good.
+Thou art more to me than my desires' whole brood;
+Thou art the only person, and I cry
+Unto the father I of this my I.
+
+15.
+
+Thou who inspirest prayer, then bend'st thine ear;
+It, crying with love's grand respect to hear!
+I cannot give myself to thee aright--
+With the triumphant uttermost of gift;
+That cannot be till I am full of light--
+To perfect deed a perfect will must lift:--
+Inspire, possess, compel me, first of every might.
+
+16.
+
+I do not wonder men can ill believe
+Who make poor claims upon thee, perfect Lord;
+Then most I trust when most I would receive.
+I wonder not that such do pray and grieve--
+The God they think, to be God is not fit.
+Then only in thy glory I seem to sit,
+When my heart claims from thine an infinite accord.
+
+17.
+
+More life I need ere I myself can be.
+Sometimes, when the eternal tide ebbs low,
+A moment weary of my life I grow--
+Weary of my existence' self, I mean,
+Not of its plodding, not its wind and snow
+Then to thy knee trusting I turn, and lean:
+Thou will'st I live, and I do will with thee.
+
+18.
+
+Dost thou mean sometimes that we should forget thee,
+Dropping the veil of things 'twixt thee and us?--
+Ah, not that we should lose thee and regret thee!
+But that, we turning from our windows thus,
+The frost-fixed God should vanish from the pane,
+Sun-melted, and a moment, Father, let thee
+Look like thyself straight into heart and brain.
+
+19.
+
+For sometimes when I am busy among men,
+With heart and brain an open thoroughfare
+For faces, words, and thoughts other than mine,
+And a pause comes at length--oh, sudden then,
+Back throbs the tide with rush exultant rare;
+And for a gentle moment I divine
+Thy dawning presence flush my tremulous air.
+
+20.
+
+If I have to forget thee, do thou see
+It be a good, not bad forgetfulness;
+That all its mellow, truthful air be free
+>From dusty noes, and soft with many a yes;
+That as thy breath my life, my life may be
+Man's breath. So when thou com'st at hour unknown,
+Thou shalt find nothing in me but thine own.
+
+21.
+
+Thou being in me, in my deepest me,
+Through all the time I do not think of thee,
+Shall I not grow at last so true within
+As to forget thee and yet never sin?
+Shall I not walk the loud world's busy way,
+Yet in thy palace-porch sit all the day?
+Not conscious think of thee, yet never from thee stray?
+
+22.
+
+Forget!--Oh, must it be?--Would it were rather
+That every sense was so filled with my father
+That not in anything could I forget him,
+But deepest, highest must in all things set him!--
+Yet if thou think in me, God, what great matter
+Though my poor thought to former break and latter--
+As now my best thoughts; break, before thee foiled, and scatter!
+
+23.
+
+Some way there must be of my not forgetting,
+And thither thou art leading me, my God.
+The child that, weary of his mother's petting,
+Runs out the moment that his feet are shod,
+May see her face in every flower he sees,
+And she, although beyond the window sitting,
+Be nearer him than when he sat upon her knees.
+
+24.
+
+What if, when I at last, at the long last,
+Shall see thy face, my Lord, my life's delight,
+It should not be the face that hath been glassed
+In poor imagination's mirror slight!
+Will my soul sink, and shall I stand aghast,
+Beggared of hope, my heart a conscious blight,
+Amazed and lost--death's bitterness come and not passed?
+
+25.
+
+Ah, no! for from thy heart the love will press,
+And shining from thy perfect human face,
+Will sink into me like the father's kiss;
+And deepening wide the gulf of consciousness
+Beyond imagination's lowest abyss,
+Will, with the potency of creative grace,
+Lord it throughout the larger thinking place.
+
+26.
+
+Thus God-possessed, new born, ah, not for long
+Should I the sight behold, beatified,
+Know it creating in me, feel the throng
+Of speechless hopes out-throbbing like a tide,
+And my heart rushing, borne aloft the flood,
+To offer at his feet its living blood--
+Ere, glory-hid, the other face I spied.
+
+27.
+
+For out imagination is, in small,
+And with the making-difference that must be,
+Mirror of God's creating mirror; all
+That shows itself therein, that formeth he,
+And there is Christ, no bodiless vanity,
+Though, face to face, the mighty perfectness
+With glory blurs the dim-reflected less.
+
+28.
+
+I clasp thy feet, O father of the living!
+Thou wilt not let my fluttering hopes be more,
+Or lovelier, or greater, than thy giving!
+Surely thy ships will bring to my poor shore,
+Of gold and peacocks such a shining store
+As will laugh all the dreams to holy scorn,
+Of love and sorrow that were ever born.
+
+29.
+
+Sometimes it seems pure natural to trust,
+And trust right largely, grandly, infinitely,
+Daring the splendour of the giver's part;
+At other times, the whole earth is but dust,
+The sky is dust, yea, dust the human heart;
+Then art thou nowhere, there is no room for thee
+In the great dust-heap of eternity.
+
+30.
+
+But why should it be possible to mistrust--
+Nor possible only, but its opposite hard?
+Why should not man believe because he must--
+By sight's compulsion? Why should he be scarred
+With conflict? worn with doubting fine and long?--
+No man is fit for heaven's musician throng
+Who has not tuned an instrument all shook and jarred.
+
+31.
+
+Therefore, O Lord, when all things common seem,
+When all is dust, and self the centre clod,
+When grandeur is a hopeless, foolish dream,
+And anxious care more reasonable than God,--
+Out of the ashes I will call to thee--
+In spite of dead distrust call earnestly:--
+Oh thou who livest, call, then answer dying me.
+
+
+
+
+
+SEPTEMBER.
+
+1.
+
+WE are a shadow and a shining, we!
+One moment nothing seems but what we see,
+Nor aught to rule but common circumstance--
+Nought is to seek but praise, to shun but chance;
+A moment more, and God is all in all,
+And not a sparrow from its nest can fall
+But from the ground its chirp goes up into his hall.
+
+2.
+
+I know at least which is the better mood.
+When on a heap of cares I sit and brood,
+Like Job upon his ashes, sorely vext,
+I feel a lower thing than when I stood
+The world's true heir, fearless as, on its stalk,
+A lily meeting Jesus in his walk:
+I am not all mood--I can judge betwixt.
+
+3.
+
+Such differing moods can scarce to one belong;
+Shall the same fountain sweet and bitter yield?
+Shall what bore late the dust-mood, think and brood
+Till it bring forth the great believing mood?
+Or that which bore the grand mood, bald and peeled,
+Sit down to croon the shabby sensual song,
+To hug itself, and sink from wrong to meaner wrong?
+
+4.
+
+In the low mood, the mere man acts alone,
+Moved by impulses which, if from within,
+Yet far outside the centre man begin;
+But in the grand mood, every softest tone
+Comes from the living God at very heart--
+>From thee who infinite core of being art,
+Thee who didst call our names ere ever we could sin.
+
+5.
+
+There is a coward sparing in the heart,
+Offspring of penury and low-born fear:--
+Prayer must take heed nor overdo its part,
+Asking too much of him with open ear!
+Sinners must wait, not seek the very best,
+Cry out for peace, and be of middling cheer:--
+False heart! thou cheatest God, and dost thy life molest.
+
+6.
+
+Thou hungerest not, thou thirstest not enough.
+Thou art a temporizing thing, mean heart.
+Down-drawn, thou pick'st up straws and wretched stuff,
+Stooping as if the world's floor were the chart
+Of the long way thy lazy feet must tread.
+Thou dreamest of the crown hung o'er thy head--
+But that is safe--thou gatherest hairs and fluff!
+
+7.
+
+Man's highest action is to reach up higher,
+Stir up himself to take hold of his sire.
+Then best I love you, dearest, when I go
+And cry to love's life I may love you so
+As to content the yearning, making love,
+That perfects strength divine in weakness' fire,
+And from the broken pots calls out the silver dove.
+
+8.
+
+Poor am I, God knows, poor as withered leaf;
+Poorer or richer than, I dare not ask.
+To love aright, for me were hopeless task,
+Eternities too high to comprehend.
+But shall I tear my heart in hopeless grief,
+Or rise and climb, and run and kneel, and bend,
+And drink the primal love--so love in chief?
+
+9.
+
+Then love shall wake and be its own high life.
+Then shall I know 'tis I that love indeed--
+Ready, without a moment's questioning strife,
+To be forgot, like bursting water-bead,
+For the high good of the eternal dear;
+All hope, all claim, resting, with spirit clear,
+Upon the living love that every love doth breed.
+
+10.
+
+Ever seem to fail in utterance.
+Sometimes amid the swift melodious dance
+Of fluttering words--as if it had not been,
+The thought has melted, vanished into night;
+Sometimes I say a thing I did not mean,
+And lo! 'tis better, by thy ordered chance,
+Than what eluded me, floating too feathery light.
+
+11.
+
+If thou wouldst have me speak, Lord, give me speech.
+So many cries are uttered now-a-days,
+That scarce a song, however clear and true,
+Will thread the jostling tumult safe, and reach
+The ears of men buz-filled with poor denays:
+Barb thou my words with light, make my song new,
+And men will hear, or when I sing or preach.
+
+12.
+
+Can anything go wrong with me? I ask--
+And the same moment, at a sudden pain,
+Stand trembling. Up from the great river's brim
+Comes a cold breath; the farther bank is dim;
+The heaven is black with clouds and coming rain;
+High soaring faith is grown a heavy task,
+And all is wrong with weary heart and brain.
+
+13.
+
+"Things do go wrong. I know grief, pain, and fear.
+I see them lord it sore and wide around."
+>From her fair twilight answers Truth, star-crowned,
+"Things wrong are needful where wrong things abound.
+Things go not wrong; but Pain, with dog and spear,
+False faith from human hearts will hunt and hound.
+The earth shall quake 'neath them that trust the solid ground."
+
+14.
+
+Things go not wrong when sudden I fall prone,
+But when I snatch my upheld hand from thine,
+And, proud or careless, think to walk alone.
+Then things go wrong, when I, poor, silly sheep,
+To shelves and pits from the good pasture creep;
+Not when the shepherd leaves the ninety and nine,
+And to the mountains goes, after the foolish one.
+
+15.
+
+Lo! now thy swift dogs, over stone and bush,
+After me, straying sheep, loud barking, rush.
+There's Fear, and Shame, and Empty-heart, and Lack,
+And Lost-love, and a thousand at their back!
+I see thee not, but know thou hound'st them on,
+And I am lost indeed--escape is none.
+See! there they come, down streaming on my track!
+
+16.
+
+I rise and run, staggering--double and run.--
+But whither?--whither?--whither for escape?
+The sea lies all about this long-necked cape--
+There come the dogs, straight for me every one--
+Me, live despair, live centre of alarms!--
+Ah! lo! 'twixt me and all his barking harms,
+The shepherd, lo!--I run--fall folded in his arms.
+
+17.
+
+There let the dogs yelp, let them growl and leap;
+It is no matter--I will go to sleep.
+Like a spent cloud pass pain and grief and fear,
+Out from behind it unchanged love shines clear.--
+Oh, save me, Christ!--I know not what I am,
+I was thy stupid, self-willed, greedy lamb,
+Would be thy honest and obedient sheep.
+
+18.
+
+Why is it that so often I return
+>From social converse with a spirit worn,
+A lack, a disappointment--even a sting
+Of shame, as for some low, unworthy thing?--
+Because I have not, careful, first of all,
+Set my door open wide, back to the wall,
+Ere I at others' doors did knock and call.
+
+19.
+
+Yet more and more of me thou dost demand;
+My faith and hope in God alone shall stand,
+The life of law--not trust the rain and sun
+To draw the golden harvest o'er the land.
+I must not say--"This too will pass and die,"
+"The wind will change," "Round will the seasons run."
+Law is the body of will, of conscious harmony.
+
+20.
+
+Who trusts a law, might worship a god of wood;
+Half his soul slumbers, if it be not dead.
+He is a live thing shut in chaos crude,
+Hemmed in with dragons--a remorseless head
+Still hanging over its uplifted eyes.
+No; God is all in all, and nowhere dies--
+The present heart and thinking will of good.
+
+21.
+
+Law is our schoolmaster. Our master, Christ,
+Lived under all our laws, yet always prayed--
+So walked the water when the storm was highest.--
+Law is Thy father's; thou hast it obeyed,
+And it thereby subject to thee hast made--
+To rule it, master, for thy brethren's sakes:--
+Well may he guide the law by whom law's maker makes.
+
+22.
+
+Death haunts our souls with dissolution's strife;
+Soaks them with unrest; makes our every breath
+A throe, not action; from God's purest gift
+Wipes off the bloom; and on the harp of faith
+Its fretted strings doth slacken still and shift:
+Life everywhere, perfect, and always life,
+Is sole redemption from this haunting death.
+
+23.
+
+God, thou from death dost lift me. As I rise,
+Its Lethe from my garment drips and flows.
+Ere long I shall be safe in upper air,
+With thee, my life--with thee, my answered prayer
+Where thou art God in every wind that blows,
+And self alone, and ever, softly dies,
+There shall my being blossom, and I know it fair.
+
+24.
+
+I would dig, Master, in no field but thine,
+Would build my house only upon thy rock,
+Yet am but a dull day, with a sea-sheen!
+Why should I wonder then that they should mock,
+Who, in the limbo of things heard and seen,
+Hither and thither blowing, lose the shine
+Of every light that hangs in the firmament divine.
+
+25.
+
+Lord, loosen in me the hold of visible things;
+Help me to walk by faith and not by sight;
+I would, through thickest veils and coverings,
+See into the chambers of the living light.
+Lord, in the land of things that swell and seem,
+Help me to walk by the other light supreme,
+Which shows thy facts behind man's vaguely hinting dream.
+
+26.
+
+I see a little child whose eager hands
+Search the thick stream that drains the crowded street
+For possible things hid in its current slow.
+Near by, behind him, a great palace stands,
+Where kings might welcome nobles to their feet.
+Soft sounds, sweet scents, fair sights there only go--
+There the child's father lives, but the child does not know.
+
+27.
+
+On, eager, hungry, busy-seeking child,
+Rise up, turn round, run in, run up the stair.
+Far in a chamber from rude noise exiled,
+Thy father sits, pondering how thou dost fare.
+The mighty man will clasp thee to his breast:
+Will kiss thee, stroke the tangles of thy hair,
+And lap thee warm in fold on fold of lovely rest.
+
+28.
+
+The prince of this world came, and nothing found
+In thee, O master; but, ah, woe is me!
+He cannot pass me, on other business bound,
+But, spying in me things familiar, he
+Casts over me the shadow of his flight,
+And straight I moan in darkness--and the fight
+Begins afresh betwixt the world and thee.
+
+29.
+
+In my own heart, O master, in my thought,
+Betwixt the woolly sheep and hairy goat
+Not clearly I distinguish; but I think
+Thou knowest that I fight upon thy side.
+The how I am ashamed of; for I shrink
+>From many a blow--am borne on the battle-tide,
+When I should rush to the front, and take thy foe by the throat.
+
+30.
+
+The enemy still hath many things in me;
+Yea, many an evil nest with open hole
+Gapes out to him, at which he enters free.
+But, like the impact of a burning coal,
+His presence mere straight rouses the garrison,
+And all are up in arms, and down on knee,
+Fighting and praying till the foe is gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+OCTOBER.
+
+1.
+
+REMEMBER, Lord, thou hast not made me good.
+Or if thou didst, it was so long ago
+I have forgotten--and never understood,
+I humbly think. At best it was a crude,
+A rough-hewn goodness, that did need this woe,
+This sin, these harms of all kinds fierce and rude,
+To shape it out, making it live and grow.
+
+2.
+
+But thou art making me, I thank thee, sire.
+What thou hast done and doest thou know'st well,
+And I will help thee:--gently in thy fire
+I will lie burning; on thy potter's-wheel
+I will whirl patient, though my brain should reel;
+Thy grace shall be enough the grief to quell,
+And growing strength perfect through weakness dire.
+
+3.
+
+I have not knowledge, wisdom, insight, thought,
+Nor understanding, fit to justify
+Thee in thy work, O Perfect. Thou hast brought
+Me up to this--and, lo! what thou hast wrought,
+I cannot call it good. But I can cry--
+"O enemy, the maker hath not done;
+One day thou shalt behold, and from the sight wilt run."
+
+4.
+
+The faith I will, aside is easily bent;
+But of thy love, my God, one glimpse alone
+Can make me absolutely confident--
+With faith, hope, joy, in love responsive blent.
+My soul then, in the vision mighty grown,
+Its father and its fate securely known,
+Falls on thy bosom with exultant moan.
+
+5.
+
+Thou workest perfectly. And if it seem
+Some things are not so well, 'tis but because
+They are too loving-deep, too lofty-wise,
+For me, poor child, to understand their laws:
+My highest wisdom half is but a dream;
+My love runs helpless like a falling stream:
+Thy good embraces ill, and lo! its illness dies!
+
+6.
+
+>From sleep I wake, and wake to think of thee.
+But wherefore not with sudden glorious glee?
+Why burst not gracious on me heaven and earth
+In all the splendour of a new-day-birth?
+Why hangs a cloud betwixt my lord and me?
+The moment that my eyes the morning greet,
+My soul should panting rush to clasp thy father-feet.
+
+7.
+
+Is it because it is not thou I see,
+But only my poor, blotted fancy of thee?
+Oh! never till thyself reveal thy face,
+Shall I be flooded with life's vital grace.
+Oh make my mirror-heart thy shining-place,
+And then my soul, awaking with the morn,
+Shall be a waking joy, eternally new-born.
+
+8.
+
+Lord, in my silver is much metal base,
+Else should my being by this time have shown
+Thee thy own self therein. Therefore do I
+Wake in the furnace. I know thou sittest by,
+Refining--look, keep looking in to try
+Thy silver; master, look and see thy face,
+Else here I lie for ever, blank as any stone.
+
+9.
+
+But when in the dim silver thou dost look,
+I do behold thy face, though blurred and faint.
+Oh joy! no flaw in me thy grace will brook,
+But still refine: slow shall the silver pass
+>From bright to brighter, till, sans spot or taint,
+Love, well content, shall see no speck of brass,
+And I his perfect face shall hold as in a glass.
+
+10.
+
+With every morn my life afresh must break
+The crust of self, gathered about me fresh;
+That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shake
+The darkness out of me, and rend the mesh
+The spider-devils spin out of the flesh--
+Eager to net the soul before it wake,
+That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake.
+
+11.
+
+'Tis that I am not good--that is enough;
+I pry no farther--that is not the way.
+Here, O my potter, is thy making stuff!
+Set thy wheel going; let it whir and play.
+The chips in me, the stones, the straws, the sand,
+Cast them out with fine separating hand,
+And make a vessel of thy yielding clay.
+
+12.
+
+What if it take a thousand years to make me,
+So me he leave not, angry, on the floor!--
+Nay, thou art never angry!--that would break me!
+Would I tried never thy dear patience sore,
+But were as good as thou couldst well expect me,
+Whilst thou dost make, I mar, and thou correct me!
+Then were I now content, waiting for something more.
+
+13.
+
+Only, my God, see thou that I content thee--
+Oh, take thy own content upon me, God!
+Ah, never, never, sure, wilt thou repent thee,
+That thou hast called thy Adam from the clod!
+Yet must I mourn that thou shouldst ever find me
+One moment sluggish, needing more of the rod
+Than thou didst think when thy desire designed me.
+
+14.
+
+My God, it troubles me I am not better.
+More help, I pray, still more. Thy perfect debtor
+I shall be when thy perfect child I am grown.
+My Father, help me--am I not thine own?
+Lo, other lords have had dominion o'er me,
+But now thy will alone I set before me:
+Thy own heart's life--Lord, thou wilt not abhor me!
+
+15.
+
+In youth, when once again I had set out
+To find thee, Lord, my life, my liberty,
+A window now and then, clouds all about,
+Would open into heaven: my heart forlorn
+First all would tremble with a solemn glee,
+Then, whelmed in peace, rest like a man outworn,
+That sees the dawn slow part the closed lids of the morn.
+
+16.
+
+Now I grow old, and the soft-gathered years
+Have calmed, yea dulled the heart's swift fluttering beat;
+But a quiet hope that keeps its household seat
+Is better than recurrent glories fleet.
+To know thee, Lord, is worth a many tears;
+And when this mildew, age, has dried away,
+My heart will beat again as young and strong and gay.
+
+17.
+
+Stronger and gayer tenfold!--but, O friends,
+Not for itself, nor any hoarded bliss.
+I see but vaguely whither my being tends,
+All vaguely spy a glory shadow-blent,
+Vaguely desire the "individual kiss;"
+But when I think of God, a large content
+Fills the dull air of my gray cloudy tent.
+
+18.
+
+Father of me, thou art my bliss secure.
+Make of me, maker, whatsoe'er thou wilt.
+Let fancy's wings hang moulting, hope grow poor,
+And doubt steam up from where a joy was spilt--
+I lose no time to reason it plain and clear,
+But fly to thee, my life's perfection dear:--
+Not what I think, but what thou art, makes sure.
+
+19.
+
+This utterance of spirit through still thought,
+This forming of heart-stuff in moulds of brain,
+Is helpful to the soul by which 'tis wrought,
+The shape reacting on the heart again;
+But when I am quite old, and words are slow,
+Like dying things that keep their holes for woe,
+And memory's withering tendrils clasp with effort vain?
+
+20.
+
+Thou, then as now, no less wilt be my life,
+And I shall know it better than before,
+Praying and trusting, hoping, claiming more.
+>From effort vain, sick foil, and bootless strife,
+I shall, with childness fresh, look up to thee;
+Thou, seeing thy child with age encumbered sore,
+Wilt round him bend thine arm more carefully.
+
+21.
+
+And when grim Death doth take me by the throat,
+Thou wilt have pity on thy handiwork;
+Thou wilt not let him on my suffering gloat,
+But draw my soul out--gladder than man or boy,
+When thy saved creatures from the narrow ark
+Rushed out, and leaped and laughed and cried for joy,
+And the great rainbow strode across the dark.
+
+22.
+
+Against my fears, my doubts, my ignorance,
+I trust in thee, O father of my Lord!
+The world went on in this same broken dance,
+When, worn and mocked, he trusted and adored:
+I too will trust, and gather my poor best
+To face the truth-faced false. So in his nest
+I shall awake at length, a little scarred and scored.
+
+23.
+
+Things cannot look all right so long as I
+Am not all right who see--therefore not right
+Can see. The lamp within sends out the light
+Which shows the things; and if its rays go wry,
+Or are not white, they must part show a lie.
+The man, half-cured, did men not trees conclude,
+Because he moving saw what else had seemed a wood.
+
+24.
+
+Give me, take from me, as thou wilt. I learn--
+Slowly and stubbornly I learn to yield
+With a strange hopefulness. As from the field
+Of hard-fought battle won, the victor chief
+Turns thankfully, although his heart do yearn,
+So from my old things to thy new I turn,
+With sad, thee-trusting heart, and not in grief.
+
+25.
+
+If with my father I did wander free,
+Floating o'er hill and field where'er we would,
+And, lighting on the sward before the door,
+Strange faces through the window-panes should see,
+And strange feet standing where the loved had stood,
+The dear old place theirs all, as ours before--
+Should I be sorrowful, father, having thee?
+
+26.
+
+So, Lord, if thou tak'st from me all the rest,
+Thyself with each resumption drawing nigher,
+It shall but hurt me as the thorn of the briar,
+When I reach to the pale flower in its breast.
+To have thee, Lord, is to have all thy best,
+Holding it by its very life divine--
+To let my friend's hand go, and take his heart in mine.
+
+27.
+
+Take from me leisure, all familiar places;
+Take all the lovely things of earth and air
+Take from me books; take all my precious faces;
+Take words melodious, and their songful linking;
+Take scents, and sounds, and all thy outsides fair;
+Draw nearer, taking, and, to my sober thinking,
+Thou bring'st them nearer all, and ready to my prayer.
+
+28.
+
+No place on earth henceforth I shall count strange,
+For every place belongeth to my Christ.
+I will go calm where'er thou bid'st me range;
+Whoe'er my neighbour, thou art still my nighest.
+Oh my heart's life, my owner, will of my being!
+Into my soul thou every moment diest,
+In thee my life thus evermore decreeing.
+
+29.
+
+What though things change and pass, nor come again!
+Thou, the life-heart of all things, changest never.
+The sun shines on; the fair clouds turn to rain,
+And glad the earth with many a spring and river.
+The hearts that answer change with chill and shiver,
+That mourn the past, sad-sick, with hopeless pain,
+They know not thee, our changeless heart and brain.
+
+30.
+
+My halting words will some day turn to song--
+Some far-off day, in holy other times!
+The melody now prisoned in my rimes
+Will one day break aloft, and from the throng
+Of wrestling thoughts and words spring up the air;
+As from the flower its colour's sweet despair
+Issues in odour, and the sky's low levels climbs.
+
+31.
+
+My surgent thought shoots lark-like up to thee.
+Thou like the heaven art all about the lark.
+Whatever I surmise or know in me,
+Idea, or but symbol on the dark,
+Is living, working, thought-creating power
+In thee, the timeless father of the hour.
+I am thy book, thy song--thy child would be.
+
+
+
+
+
+NOVEMBER
+
+1.
+
+THOU art of this world, Christ. Thou know'st it all;
+Thou know'st our evens, our morns, our red and gray;
+How moons, and hearts, and seasons rise and fall;
+How we grow weary plodding on the way;
+Of future joy how present pain bereaves,
+Rounding us with a dark of mere decay,
+Tossed with a drift Of summer-fallen leaves.
+
+2.
+
+Thou knowest all our weeping, fainting, striving;
+Thou know'st how very hard it is to be;
+How hard to rouse faint will not yet reviving;
+To do the pure thing, trusting all to thee;
+To hold thou art there, for all no face we see;
+How hard to think, through cold and dark and dearth,
+That thou art nearer now than when eye-seen on earth.
+
+3.
+
+Have pity on us for the look of things,
+When blank denial stares us in the face.
+Although the serpent mask have lied before,
+It fascinates the bird that darkling sings,
+And numbs the little prayer-bird's beating wings.
+For how believe thee somewhere in blank space,
+If through the darkness come no knocking to our door?
+
+4.
+
+If we might sit until the darkness go,
+Possess our souls in patience perhaps we might;
+But there is always something to be done,
+And no heart left to do it. To and fro
+The dull thought surges, as the driven waves fight
+In gulfy channels. Oh! victorious one,
+Give strength to rise, go out, and meet thee in the night.
+
+5.
+
+"Wake, thou that sleepest; rise up from the dead,
+And Christ will give thee light." I do not know
+What sleep is, what is death, or what is light;
+But I am waked enough to feel a woe,
+To rise and leave death. Stumbling through the night,
+To my dim lattice, O calling Christ! I go,
+And out into the dark look for thy star-crowned head.
+
+6.
+
+There are who come to me, and write, and send,
+Whom I would love, giving good things to all,
+But friend--that name I cannot on them spend;
+'Tis from the centre of self-love they call
+For cherishing--for which they first must know
+How to be still, and take the seat that's low:
+When, Lord, shall I be fit--when wilt thou call me friend?
+
+7.
+
+Wilt thou not one day, Lord? In all my wrong,
+Self-love and weakness, laziness and fear,
+This one thing I can say: I am content
+To be and have what in thy heart I am meant
+To be and have. In my best times I long
+After thy will, and think it glorious-dear;
+Even in my worst, perforce my will to thine is bent.
+
+8.
+
+My God, I look to thee for tenderness
+Such as I could not seek from any man,
+Or in a human heart fancy or plan--
+A something deepest prayer will not express:
+Lord, with thy breath blow on my being's fires,
+Until, even to the soul with self-love wan,
+I yield the primal love, that no return desires.
+
+9.
+
+Only no word of mine must ever foster
+The self that in a brother's bosom gnaws;
+I may not fondle failing, nor the boaster
+Encourage with the breath of my applause.
+Weakness needs pity, sometimes love's rebuke;
+Strength only sympathy deserves and draws--
+And grows by every faithful loving look.
+
+10.
+
+'Tis but as men draw nigh to thee, my Lord,
+They can draw nigh each other and not hurt.
+Who with the gospel of thy peace are girt,
+The belt from which doth hang the Spirit's sword,
+Shall breathe on dead bones, and the bones shall live,
+Sweet poison to the evil self shall give,
+And, clean themselves, lift men clean from the mire abhorred.
+
+11.
+
+My Lord, I have no clothes to come to thee;
+My shoes are pierced and broken with the road;
+I am torn and weathered, wounded with the goad,
+And soiled with tugging at my weary load:
+The more I need thee! A very prodigal
+I stagger into thy presence, Lord of me:
+One look, my Christ, and at thy feet I fall!
+
+12.
+
+Why should I still hang back, like one in a dream,
+Who vainly strives to clothe himself aright,
+That in great presence he may seemly seem?
+Why call up feeling?--dress me in the faint,
+Worn, faded, cast-off nimbus of some saint?
+Why of old mood bring back a ghostly gleam--
+While there He waits, love's heart and loss's blight!
+
+13.
+
+Son of the Father, elder brother mine,
+See thy poor brother's plight; See how he stands
+Defiled and feeble, hanging down his hands!
+Make me clean, brother, with thy burning shine;
+>From thy rich treasures, householder divine,
+Bring forth fair garments, old and new, I pray,
+And like thy brother dress me, in the old home-bred way.
+
+14.
+
+My prayer-bird was cold--would not away,
+Although I set it on the edge of the nest.
+Then I bethought me of the story old--
+Love-fact or loving fable, thou know'st best--
+How, when the children had made sparrows of clay,
+Thou mad'st them birds, with wings to flutter and fold:
+Take, Lord, my prayer in thy hand, and make it pray.
+
+15.
+
+My poor clay-sparrow seems turned to a stone,
+And from my heart will neither fly nor run.
+I cannot feel as thou and I both would,
+But, Father, I am willing--make me good.
+What art thou father for, but to help thy son?
+Look deep, yet deeper, in my heart, and there,
+Beyond where I can feel, read thou the prayer.
+
+16.
+
+Oh what it were to be right sure of thee!
+Sure that thou art, and the same as thy son, Jesus!
+Oh, faith is deeper, wider than the sea,
+Yea, than the blue of heaven that ever flees us!
+Yet simple as the cry of sore-hurt child,
+Or as his shout, with sudden gladness wild,
+When home from school he runs, till morn set free.
+
+17.
+
+If I were sure thou, Father, verily art,
+True father of the Nazarene as true,
+Sure as I am of my wife's shielding heart,
+Sure as of sunrise in the watching blue,
+Sure as I am that I do eat and drink,
+And have a heart to love and laugh and think,
+Meseems in flame the joy might from my body start.
+
+18.
+
+But I must know thee in a deeper way
+Than any of these ways, or know thee not;
+My heart at peace far loftier proof must lay
+Than if the wind thou me the wave didst roll,
+Than if I lay before thee a sunny spot,
+Or knew thee as the body knows its soul,
+Or even as the part doth know its perfect whole.
+
+19.
+
+There is no word to tell how I must know thee;
+No wind clasped ever a low meadow-flower
+So close that as to nearness it could show thee;
+No rainbow so makes one the sun and shower.
+A something with thee, I am a nothing fro' thee.
+Because I am not save as I am in thee,
+My soul is ever setting out to win thee.
+
+20.
+
+I know not how--for that I first must know thee.
+I know I know thee not as I would know thee,
+For my heart burns like theirs that did not know him,
+Till he broke bread, and therein they must know him.
+I know thee, knowing that I do not know thee,
+Nor ever shall till one with me I know thee--
+Even as thy son, the eternal man, doth know thee.
+
+21.
+
+Creation under me, in, and above,
+Slopes upward from the base, a pyramid,
+On whose point I shall stand at last, and love.
+>From the first rush of vapour at thy will,
+To the last poet-word that darkness chid,
+Thou hast been sending up creation's hill,
+To lift thy souls aloft in faithful Godhead free.
+
+22.
+
+I think my thought, and fancy I think thee.--
+Lord, wake me up; rend swift my coffin-planks;
+I pray thee, let me live--alive and free.
+My soul will break forth in melodious thanks,
+Aware at last what thou wouldst have it be,
+When thy life shall be light in me, and when
+My life to thine is answer and amen.
+
+23.
+
+How oft I say the same things in these lines!
+Even as a man, buried in during dark,
+Turns ever where the edge of twilight shines,
+Prays ever towards the vague eternal mark;
+Or as the sleeper, having dreamed he drinks,
+Back straightway into thirstful dreaming sinks,
+So turns my will to thee, for thee still longs, still pines.
+
+24.
+
+The mortal man, all careful, wise, and troubled,
+The eternal child in the nursery doth keep.
+To-morrow on to-day the man heaps doubled;
+The child laughs, hopeful, even in his sleep.
+The man rebukes the child for foolish trust;
+The child replies, "Thy care is for poor dust;
+Be still, and let me wake that thou mayst sleep."
+
+25.
+
+Till I am one, with oneness manifold,
+I must breed contradiction, strife, and doubt;
+Things tread Thy court--look real--take proving hold--
+My Christ is not yet grown to cast them out;
+Alas! to me, false-judging 'twixt the twain,
+The Unseen oft fancy seems, while, all about,
+The Seen doth lord it with a mighty train.
+
+26.
+
+But when the Will hath learned obedience royal,
+He straight will set the child upon the throne;
+To whom the seen things all, grown instant loyal,
+Will gather to his feet, in homage prone--
+The child their master they have ever known;
+Then shall the visible fabric plainly lean
+On a Reality that never can be seen.
+
+27.
+
+Thy ways are wonderful, maker of men!
+Thou gavest me a child, and I have fed
+And clothed and loved her, many a growing year;
+Lo! now a friend of months draws gently near,
+And claims her future--all beyond his ken--
+There he hath never loved her nor hath led:
+She weeps and moans, but turns, and leaves her home so dear.
+
+28.
+
+She leaves, but not forsakes. Oft in the night,
+Oft at mid-day when all is still around,
+Sudden will rise, in dim pathetic light,
+Some childish memory of household bliss,
+Or sorrow by love's service robed and crowned;
+Rich in his love, she yet will sometimes miss
+The mother's folding arms, the mother's sealing kiss.
+
+29.
+
+Then first, I think, our eldest-born, although
+Loving, devoted, tender, watchful, dear,
+The innermost of home-bred love shall know!
+Yea, when at last the janitor draws near,
+A still, pale joy will through the darkness go,
+At thought of lying in those arms again,
+Which once were heaven enough for any pain.
+
+30.
+
+By love doth love grow mighty in its love:
+Once thou shalt love us, child, as we love thee.
+Father of loves, is it not thy decree
+That, by our long, far-wandering remove
+>From thee, our life, our home, our being blest,
+We learn at last to love thee true and best,
+And rush with all our loves back to thy infinite rest?
+
+
+
+
+
+DECEMBER.
+
+1.
+
+I AM a little weary of my life--
+Not thy life, blessed Father! Or the blood
+Too slowly laves the coral shores of thought,
+Or I am weary of weariness and strife.
+Open my soul-gates to thy living flood;
+I ask not larger heart-throbs, vigour-fraught,
+I pray thy presence, with strong patience rife.
+
+2.
+
+I will what thou will'st--only keep me sure
+That thou art willing; call to me now and then.
+So, ceasing to enjoy, I shall endure
+With perfect patience--willing beyond my ken
+Beyond my love, beyond my thinking scope;
+Willing to be because thy will is pure;
+Willing thy will beyond all bounds of hope.
+
+3.
+
+This weariness of mine, may it not come
+>From something that doth need no setting right?
+Shall fruit be blamed if it hang wearily
+A day before it perfected drop plumb
+To the sad earth from off its nursing tree?
+Ripeness must always come with loss of might.
+The weary evening fall before the resting night.
+
+4.
+
+Hither if I have come through earth and air,
+Through fire and water--I am not of them;
+Born in the darkness, what fair-flashing gem
+Would to the earth go back and nestle there?
+Not of this world, this world my life doth hem;
+What if I weary, then, and look to the door,
+Because my unknown life is swelling at the core?
+
+5.
+
+All winged things came from the waters first;
+Airward still many a one from the water springs
+In dens and caves wind-loving things are nursed:--
+I lie like unhatched bird, upfolded, dumb,
+While all the air is trembling with the hum
+Of songs and beating hearts and whirring wings,
+That call my slumbering life to wake to happy things.
+
+6.
+
+I lay last night and knew not why I was sad.
+"'Tis well with God," I said, "and he is the truth;
+Let that content me."--'Tis not strength, nor youth,
+Nor buoyant health, nor a heart merry-mad,
+That makes the fact of things wherein men live:
+He is the life, and doth my life outgive;
+In him there is no gloom, but all is solemn-glad,
+
+7.
+
+I said to myself, "Lo, I lie in a dream
+Of separation, where there comes no sign;
+My waking life is hid with Christ in God,
+Where all is true and potent--fact divine."
+I will not heed the thing that doth but seem;
+I will be quiet as lark upon the sod;
+God's will, the seed, shall rest in me the pod.
+
+8.
+
+And when that will shall blossom--then, my God,
+There will be jubilation in a world!
+The glad lark, soaring heavenward from the sod,
+Up the swift spiral of its own song whirled,
+Never such jubilation wild out-poured
+As from my soul will break at thy feet, Lord,
+Like a great tide from sea-heart shoreward hurled.
+
+9.
+
+For then thou wilt be able, then at last,
+To glad me as thou hungerest to do;
+Then shall thy life my heart all open find,
+A thoroughfare to thy great spirit-wind;
+Then shall I rest within thy holy vast,
+One with the bliss of the eternal mind;
+And all creation rise in me created new.
+
+10.
+
+What makes thy being a bliss shall then make mind
+For I shall love as thou, and love in thee;
+Then shall I have whatever I desire,
+My every faintest wish being all divine;
+Power thou wilt give me to work mightily,
+Even as my Lord, leading thy low men nigher,
+With dance and song to cast their best upon thy fire.
+
+11.
+
+Then shall I live such an essential life
+That a mere flower will then to me unfold
+More bliss than now grandest orchestral strife--
+By love made and obedience humble-bold,
+I shall straight through its window God behold.
+God, I shall feed on thee, thy creature blest
+With very being--work at one with sweetest rest.
+
+12.
+
+Give me a world, to part for praise and sunder.
+The brooks be bells; the winds, in caverns dumb,
+Wake fife and flute and flageolet and voice;
+The fire-shook earth itself be the great drum;
+And let the air the region's bass out thunder;
+The firs be violins; the reeds hautboys;
+Rivers, seas, icebergs fill the great score up and under!
+
+13.
+
+But rather dost thou hear the blundered words
+Of breathing creatures; the music-lowing herds
+Of thy great cattle; thy soft-bleating sheep;
+O'erhovered by the trebles of thy birds,
+Whose Christ-praised carelessness song-fills the deep;
+Still rather a child's talk who apart doth hide him,
+And make a tent for God to come and sit beside him.
+
+14.
+
+This is not life; this being is not enough.
+But thou art life, and thou hast life for me.
+Thou mad'st the worm--to cast the wormy slough,
+And fly abroad--a glory flit and flee.
+Thou hast me, statue-like, hewn in the rough,
+Meaning at last to shape me perfectly.
+Lord, thou hast called me fourth, I turn and call on thee.
+
+15.
+
+'Tis thine to make, mine to rejoice in thine.
+As, hungering for his mother's face and eyes,
+The child throws wide the door, back to the wall,
+I run to thee, the refuge from poor lies:
+Lean dogs behind me whimper, yelp, and whine;
+Life lieth ever sick, Death's writhing thrall,
+In slavery endless, hopeless, and supine.
+
+16.
+
+The life that hath not willed itself to be,
+Must clasp the life that willed, and be at peace;
+Or, like a leaf wind-blown, through chaos flee;
+A life-husk into which the demons go,
+And work their will, and drive it to and fro;
+A thing that neither is, nor yet can cease,
+Which uncreation can alone release.
+
+17.
+
+But when I turn and grasp the making hand,
+And will the making will, with confidence
+I ride the crest of the creation-wave,
+Helpless no more, no more existence' slave;
+In the heart of love's creating fire I stand,
+And, love-possessed in heart and soul and sense,
+Take up the making share the making Master gave.
+
+18.
+
+That man alone who does the Father's works
+Can be the Father's son; yea, only he
+Who sonlike can create, can ever be;
+Who with God wills not, is no son, not free.
+O Father, send the demon-doubt that lurks
+Behind the hope, out into the abyss;
+Who trusts in knowledge all its good shall miss.
+
+19.
+
+Thy beasts are sinless, and do live before thee;
+Thy child is sinful, and must run to thee.
+Thy angels sin not and in peace adore thee;
+But I must will, or never more be free.
+I from thy heart came, how can I ignore thee?--
+Back to my home I hurry, haste, and flee;
+There I shall dwell, love-praising evermore thee.
+
+20.
+
+My holy self, thy pure ideal, lies
+Calm in thy bosom, which it cannot leave;
+My self unholy, no ideal, hies
+Hither and thither, gathering store to grieve--
+Not now, O Father! now it mounts, it flies,
+To join the true self in thy heart that waits,
+And, one with it, be one with all the heavenly mates.
+
+21.
+
+Trusting thee, Christ, I kneel, and clasp thy knee;
+Cast myself down, and kiss thy brother-feet--
+One self thou and the Father's thought of thee!
+Ideal son, thou hast left the perfect home,
+Ideal brother, to seek thy brothers come!
+Thou know'st our angels all, God's children sweet,
+And of each two wilt make one holy child complete.
+
+22.
+
+To a slow end I draw these daily words,
+Nor think such words often to write again--
+Rather, as light the power to me affords,
+Christ's new and old would to my friends unbind;
+Through words he spoke help to his thought behind;
+Unveil the heart with which he drew his men;
+Set forth his rule o'er devils, animals, corn, and wind.
+
+23.
+
+I do remember how one time I thought,
+"God must be lonely--oh, so lonely lone!
+I will be very good to him--ah, nought
+Can reach the heart of his great loneliness!
+My whole heart I will bring him, with a moan
+That I may not come nearer; I will lie prone
+Before the awful loveliness in loneliness' excess."
+
+24.
+
+A God must have a God for company.
+And lo! thou hast the Son-God to thy friend.
+Thou honour'st his obedience, he thy law.
+Into thy secret life-will he doth see;
+Thou fold'st him round in live love perfectly--
+One two, without beginning, without end;
+In love, life, strength, and truth, perfect without a flaw.
+
+25.
+
+Thou hast not made, or taught me, Lord, to care
+For times and seasons--but this one glad day
+Is the blue sapphire clasping all the lights
+That flash in the girdle of the year so fair--
+When thou wast born a man, because alway
+Thou wast and art a man, through all the flights
+Of thought, and time, and thousandfold creation's play.
+
+26.
+
+We all are lonely, Maker--each a soul
+Shut in by itself, a sundered atom of thee.
+No two yet loved themselves into a whole;
+Even when we weep together we are two.
+Of two to make one, which yet two shall be,
+Is thy creation's problem, deep, and true,
+To which thou only hold'st the happy, hurting clue.
+
+27.
+
+No less than thou, O Father, do we need
+A God to friend each lonely one of us.
+As touch not in the sack two grains of seed,
+Touch no two hearts in great worlds populous.
+Outside the making God we cannot meet
+Him he has made our brother: homeward, thus,
+To find our kin we first must turn our wandering feet.
+
+28.
+
+It must be possible that the soul made
+Should absolutely meet the soul that makes;
+Then, in that bearing soul, meet every other
+There also born, each sister and each brother.
+Lord, till I meet thee thus, life is delayed;
+I am not I until that morning breaks,
+Not I until my consciousness eternal wakes.
+
+29.
+
+Again I shall behold thee, daughter true;
+The hour will come when I shall hold thee fast
+In God's name, loving thee all through and through.
+Somewhere in his grand thought this waits for us.
+Then shall I see a smile not like thy last--
+For that great thing which came when all was past,
+Was not a smile, but God's peace glorious.
+
+30.
+
+Twilight of the transfiguration-joy,
+Gleam-faced, pure-eyed, strong-willed, high-hearted boy!
+Hardly thy life clear forth of heaven was sent,
+Ere it broke out into a smile, and went.
+So swift thy growth, so true thy goalward bent,
+Thou, child and sage inextricably blent,
+Wilt one day teach thy father in some heavenly tent
+
+31.
+
+Go, my beloved children, live your life.
+Wounded, faint, bleeding, never yield the strife.
+Stunned, fallen-awake, arise, and fight again.
+Before you victory stands, with shining train
+Of hopes not credible until they are.
+Beyond morass and mountain swells the star
+Of perfect love--the home of longing heart and brain
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext The Diary of an Old Soul, by MacDonald
+
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