There is no certainty, “my bosom’s guest,”
No proving for the things whereof ye wot;
For, like the dead to sight unmanifest,
They are, and
they are not.
But surely as they are, for God is truth,
And as they are not, for we saw them die,
So surely from the heaven drops light for youth,
If youth will
walk thereby.
And can I see this light? It may be so;
“But see it thus and thus,”
my fathers said.
The living do not rule this world; ah no!
It is the dead,
the dead.
Shall I be slave to every noble soul,
Study the dead, and to their spirits bend;
Or learn to read my own heart’s folded scroll,
And make self-rule
my end?
Thought from without—O shall I take
on trust,
And life from others modelled steal or
win;
Or shall I heave to light, and clear of rust
My true life from
within?
O, let me be myself! But where, O where,
Under this heap of precedent, this mound
Of customs, modes, and maxims, cumbrance rare,
Shall the Myself
be found?
O thou Myself, thy fathers thee debarred
None of their wisdom, but their folly
came
Therewith; they smoothed thy path, but made it hard
For thee to quit
the same.
With glosses they obscured God’s natural truth,
And with tradition tarnished His revealed;
With vain protections they endangered youth,
With layings bare
they sealed.
What aileth thee, myself? Alas! thy hands
Are tied with old opinions—heir
and son,
Thou hast inherited thy father’s lands
And all his debts
thereon.
O that some power would give me Adam’s eyes!
O for the straight simplicity of Eve!
For I see nought, or grow, poor fool, too wise
With seeing to
believe.
Exemplars may be heaped until they hide
The rules that they were made to render
plain;
Love may be watched, her nature to decide,
Until love’s
self doth wane.
Ah me! and when forgotten and foregone
We leave the learning of departed days,
And cease the generations past to con,
Their wisdom and
their ways,—
When fain to learn we lean into the dark,
And grope to feel the floor of the abyss,
Or find the secret boundary lines which mark
Where soul and
matter kiss—
Fair world! these puzzled souls of ours grow weak
With beating their bruised wings against
the rim
That bounds their utmost flying, when they seek
The distant and
the dim.
We pant, we strain like birds against their wires;
Are sick to reach the vast and the beyond;—
And what avails, if still to our desires
Those far-off
gulfs respond?
Contentment comes not therefore; still there lies
An outer distance when the first is hailed,
And still forever yawns before our eyes
An utmost—that
is veiled.