Who needs God most? That man whose pulses play With fullest life-blood; he whose foot dare climb To Joy’s high limit, solitude sublime Under a sky whose splendour sure must slay If Godless; he who owns the sovereign sway Of that small inner voice and still, what time His whole life urges toward one blissful crime, And Hell confuses Heaven, and night, the day. It is he whose faithfulness of love puts by Time’s anodyne, and that gross palliative, A Stoic pride, and bears all humanly; He whose soul grows one long desire to give Measureless gifts; ah! let _him_ quickly die Unless he lift frail hands to God and live.
I said “I will find God,” and forth I went To seek Him in the clearness of the sky, But over me stood unendurably Only a pitiless, sapphire firmament Ringing the world,--blank splendour; yet intent Still to find God, “I will go and seek,” said I, “His way upon the waters,” and drew nigh An ocean marge weed-strewn and foam-besprent; And the waves dashed on idle sand and stone, And very vacant was the long, blue sea; But in the evening as I sat alone, My window open to the vanishing day, Dear God! I could not choose but kneel and pray And it sufficed that I was found of Thee.
High instincts, dim previsions, sacred fears, --Whence issuing? Are they but the brain’s amassed Tradition, shapings of a barbarous past, Remoulded ever by the younger years, Mixed with fresh clay, and kneaded with new tears? No more? The dead chief’s ghost a shadow cast Across the roving clan, and thence at last Comes God, who in the soul His law uprears? Is this the whole? Has not the Future powers To match the Past,--attractions, pulsings, tides, And voices for purged ears? Is all our light The glow of ancient sunsets and lost hours? Advance no banners up heaven’s eastern sides? Trembles the margin with no portent bright?
With brain o’erworn, with heart a summer clod, With eye so practised in each form around,-- And all forms mean,--to glance above the ground Irks it, each day of many days we plod, Tongue-tied and deaf, along life’s common road. But suddenly, we know not how, a sound Of living streams, an odour, a flower crowned With dew, a lark upspringing from the sod, And we awake. O joy and deep amaze! Beneath the everlasting hills we stand, We hear the voices of the morning seas, And earnest prophesyings in the land, While from the open heaven leans forth at gaze The encompassing great cloud of witnesses.