And far away, and far away My heart went out forlorn; 'Mid benizons from far away I felt my soul reborn; And man from every palm-fringed bay And mountain town where sunsets stay, From sounding cities smoking grey Called, called me down the morn ...
O magic of the morning sky! O wonder of the moonlit sea! O life--the vision and the cry Into eternity!-- Eternity beneath, on high, Veiled within cloud and clod, That life in folly would vainly fly Through the nethermost deep, through the uttermost high,-- Life that is God-doomed never to die To the agony of God.
Too long to self my life had given What was for soul alone; To rob the sanctuaries had striven To build a lone love's throne. In vain we prop each little heaven While men's souls turn to stone.
The good in ill let no man scorn; The ill in good let all men find. Our knowledge is the lesser morn; Large night with stars behind Shews most. Of spirit still is born All life, all wonder; it shall bind All hearts in wisdom. Unforlorn He lives in deserts, though he mourn, Who loveth all the Kind ...
With storm gone by, from jeopardy, With loss for gain, and blindness past, Home to divine reality The tides have borne me,--home at last. Time like a silver flower doth blow And blossom o'er a subtler sod, And through the meads of light I go Beneath the golden boughs of God ...
My soul hath won to the city of love With the burnished walls of the dreams' desires; And my life is glad as a glittering dove That coos in the sun upon golden spires; And I welcome the winds of the world, and move To the music of unseen choirs.
Great powers are for us; mighty wings Toward man's proud peril speed. Life nourished at eternal springs, Beats up through star and creed, Till soul, ascendant, fetter-freed, A soaring seraph sings!...
On the rim of the world is a rosy tower Sky-poised above wide sea-foam, Where a beautiful spirit waits hour by hour, Far-eyed 'gainst a dawn like a phantom flower, Till a ghostly lover comes home ...
Ah! love is as lust till it count love lost; The soul is as sin till it weep sin's cost; O, happy is he, though he suffer most, Who wins to the Holy Ghost!
So spake old Ioläus. There That drifting, chant-like monody, Its eerie passion, weird despair, Had wrought on me like wizardry;-- Withál he moved through strange eclipse With God's faint finger at his lips, And with such tense and far surprise, That half uncanny seemed the man With cloudy hair, in human guise, So warped with age, so weirdly wan, Whose dry flesh into spirit ran, And saw with ghostly eyes.