At hidden heart of truth,
  In forms of age and youth 290
  Transformed and transient ever; masked and crowned,
  From all bonds loosened and with all bonds bound,
  Diverse and one with all things; love and hate,
  Earth, and the starry state
  Of heaven immeasurable, and years that flee
  As clouds and winds and rays across the sea.

  But higher than stars and deeper than the waves
  Of day and night and morrow [Ant. 8. 
  That roll for all time, sorrow
  Keeps ageless watch over perpetual graves. 300
  From dawn to morning of the soul in flower,
  Through toils and dreams and visions, to that hour
  When all the deeps were opened, and one doom
  Took two sweet lives to embrace them and entomb,
  The strong song plies its wing
  That makes the darkness ring
  And the deep light reverberate sound as deep;
  Song soft as flowers or grass more soft than sleep,
  Song bright as heaven above the mounting bird,
  Song like a God’s tears heard 310
  Falling, fulfilled of life and death and light,
  And all the stars and all the shadow of night.

        Till, when its flight hath past [Ep. 8. 
        Time’s loftiest mark and last,
    The goal where good kills evil with a kiss,
        And Darkness in God’s sight
        Grows as his brother Light,
    And heaven and hell one heart whence all the abyss
      Throbs with love’s music; from his trance
Love waking leads it home to her who stayed in France. 320

  But now from all the world-old winds of the air [Str. 9. 
  One blast of record rings
  As from time’s hidden springs
  With roar of rushing wings and fires that bear
  Toward north and south sonorous, east and west,
  Forth of the dark wherein its records rest,
  The story told of the ages, writ nor sung
  By man’s hand ever nor by mortal tongue
  Till, godlike with desire,
  One tongue of man took fire, 330
  One hand laid hold upon the lightning, one
  Rose up to bear time witness what the sun
  Had seen, and what the moon and stars of night
  Beholding lost not light: 
  From dawn to dusk what ways man wandering trod
  Even through the twilight of the gods to God.

  From dawn of man and woman twain and one [Ant. 9. 
  When the earliest dews impearled
  The front of all the world
  Ringed with aurorean aureole of the sun, 340
  To days that saw Christ’s tears and hallowing breath
  Put life for love’s sake in the lips of death,
  And years as waves whose brine was fire, whose foam
  Blood, and the ravage of Neronian Rome;