Out of the North great Seer rose to scan
The genesis and destiny of man,
The shrewd geometries of earth and star,
Of atoms swinging in their voids, so far
Apart as sun from circling sun - to find,
In the vast frame of nature, laws that wind
In widening spirals, up from living clod,
Till the last immensity of God.
He saw Man sitting on Central Throne,
The shadows of Him over the Kosmos blown;
Quickened by Heaven, his listening spirit heard
the far flung echoes of the Primal Word,
Bright harmonies that fall from sphere to sphere,
Telling the heart that God is ever near -
That all our world of mysteries and laws
Glasses a deeper world, the World of Cause -
That nature is woven and let down to be
The Time-veil of the husht Eternity.
They called him "visionary clad in
mist,"
And yet he stood earth's iron realist.
Surveying Earth and Heaven in reverent awe,
He found that all is mercy hid in law;
Behold men moving on their fateful roads
Toward their self-chosen, far, unseen abodes;
Behold men, in their reason or their whim,
Moving Toward the Heavens or Hells beyond the rim,
Where - whether friend, philosopher or fool -
The deep, interior love comes forth to rule.
And so he saw the unbreakable thread
That binds the living ever to the dead.
He heard God calling out of every need,
And saw life's deeper worship in a deed;
Could find no power in all the worlds to loose
A soul to freedom but a life of use;
Could find no rest on any unseen shore
But in the Love that was our rest before.
Back in the abyss of theologic night
He was the one man that beheld the Light;
His eyes were the eye on the front of that dark age
Which read the truth upon the judgment page.
And this guest of the angelic spheres
Let out a gleam of Heaven upon the years!
