A thousand flashes of uncertain light
  Cleave the thick darkness, driving far athwart
  The up-piled glooms, as lightnings plough their bright
  Fire-furrows through the barren cloud
  They sow with thunders.  Thought on burning thought
  Shatters the doubts and terrors which have bowed
  Weak hearts on weaker leaning in a crowd
  Self-crushing and self-fettering; gleams are caught
  From some far centre set by God to keep
  His brave world spinning, or some drifting isle
  Of swift wildfire shot out by the wide sweep
  Of wings demoniac,
  Far winnowing and black,
  Our cheated souls to ’wilder and beguile. 
  Only the years, the imperturbable,
  Impassionate years, can sheave the scattered rays
  Into one sun, these mingled arrows tell
  Each to its quiver, the divine and fell,
  And life’s lone meteors to their centre trace.

  O Father, let me not die young! 
  Earth’s beauty asks a heart and tongue
  To give true love and praises to her worth;
  Her sins and judgment-sufferings call
  For fearless martyrs to redeem thy Earth
  From her disastrous fall. 
  For though her summer hills and vales might seem
  The fair creation of a poet’s dream,—­
  Ay, of the Highest Poet,
  Whose wordless rhythms are chanted by the gyres
  Of constellate star-choirs,

  That with deep melody flow and overflow it,—­
  The sweet Earth,—­very sweet, despite
  The rank grave-smell forever drifting in
  Among the odors from her censers white
  Of wave-swung lilies and of wind-swung roses,—­
  The Earth sad-sweet is deeply attaint with sin! 
  The pure air, which incloses
  Her and her starry kin,
  Still shudders with the unspent palpitating
  Of a great Curse, that to its utmost shore
  Thrills with a deadly shiver
  Which has not ceased to quiver
  Down all the ages, nathless the strong beating
  Of Angel-wings, and the defiant roar
  Of Earth’s Titanic thunders.

  Fair and sad,
  In sin and beauty, our beloved Earth
  Has need of all her sons to make her glad;
  Has need of martyrs to re-fire the hearth
  Of her quenched altars,—­of heroic men
  With Freedom’s sword, or Truth’s supernal pen,
  To shape the worn-out mould of nobleness again. 
  And she has need of Poets who can string
  Their harps with steel to catch the lightning’s fire,
  And pour her thunders from the clanging wire,
  To cheer the hero, mingling with his cheer,
  Arouse the laggard in the battle’s rear,
  Daunt the stern wicked, and from discord wring
  Prevailing harmony, while the humblest soul
  Who keeps the tune the warder angels sing
  In golden choirs above,
  And only wears, for crown and aureole,
  The glow-worm light of lowliest human love,
  Shall fill with low, sweet undertones the chasms
  Of silence, ’twixt the booming thunder-spasms.