Ere yet the dawn
Pushed rosy fingers up the arch of day
And smiled its promise to the voiceless prime,
Love sat and patterns wove at life's swift loom.
He flung the suns into the soundless arch,
Appointed them their courses in the deep,
To keep His great time-harmonies and blaze
As beacons in the ebon fields of night.
Love balanced them and held them firm and true,
Poised 'twixt attractive and repulsive drift
Amid the throngs of heaven. What though this power
Was ever known to us as gravity,
Its first and last celestial name is Love.
Love spake the word omnipotent, and lo!
Upon the distant and mid deep the earth
Was flung, robed in blue skies and summer lands,
Green-garlanded with leaves and bright with flowers,
While songsters fluttered in the rosy light.
But sometimes moaning through the dark-leaved pines,
Or wailing in the tempest-arch of night,
Or sobbing down the lonely shores of time,
Love moved unresting and unsatisfied.
The faces of the hills in beauty smiled,
The night's deep vault blazed with configured stars,
Fair nature throbbed through all her frame of light
And everywhere was Love's fine energy;
But fields and forests, flowers and firmaments
Had not attained to full perception of
Reality, so Love made human hearts.
That mightily could feel and understand.
Made them His word on earth. His other self,
The high ambassadors of truth and light;
And Love was free where Life was wholly true.
Love tenanted in earth and made it fair,
In brain and nerve and heart, and made them man,
Incarnated in him the Brahmic bliss,
And reached in him the central peak of life,
Swept from the dark abyss of base desire
Up to the glory of the formless good.
Love gave the light of life, the crowning grace,
The universal peace, the mighty calm,
With strength and freedom of the cosmic soul
That swept all barriers down.
Of all the dreams
That found in earthly form, in rose-fringed cloud,
Or billowy light, expression of their life,
None was so perfect, passing speech and thought,
As that which gleamed in the fair human face,
The noblest form of earth that Love e'er knew,
The unexampled glory of His heart.
Each soul's love-hunger was some time appeased
By tributary from another soul.
These onward moved serene, and deep, and strong
As mighty streams that, blended into one,
Concurrent now, pour all their wealth of shower
And storm down one resistless course
Till both are merged into the common sea
Whose billows dash on every surf-worn shore
Beneath the stars.
But oft with vision dim,
Ere love had reached to life's meridian day,
Or man had plumbed the deeps of cosmic joy,
He worshipped at the shrine of fleshly form;
Adored alone the soul's rare tent of clay,
Mistook the empty channel for the stream;
In God's cloud-veiled pavilion, found not God;
Perceived not that the human face, though fair,
Is but the holy grail, the cup of life,
That to his lips brought Love's sweet sacrament.
The ministry of death had shown that form
Is evanescent,—only Love and light
Remain. Thus men had come by ways of death,
Into the open fields of life. At last
The filmy veil of forms was drawn aside,
And on the soul, life's splendid meaning burst,
Revealing forms as but containers rude,
That God had used and Love had glorified.
The soul had learned at last truth's final word:
That Love eternal is forever one,
Whether in crystal or the Soul of Christ.
No longer now were love-thrilled souls apart;
Star-distances might lie untracked between,
But never could transcend their love divine.
O'er all the space between them billows rolled
Elusive as those beams that make one day
Throughout the fields of heaven.
All human hearts
In one sublime communion now were joined,
Knew themselves one, and one with very God
By unity with all that perfect is.
Stern duty was transformed to joy of Love,
And all the lands were gardens of delight;
The song-bird nested safe among the hills,
The children laughed and played amid the flowers.
The man of honour now disdained to take
What all might not with equal service have;
All leisure was to high use consecrate,
And luxury no more debased the heart.
Love crowned each soul with some inspired art,
And into every life wealth richly flowed,
For Love was king, and rule of Love was law.
Then paled Orion and his mighty orbs
For, throbbing with a vibrant energy,
Love's far diviner billows swept in joy,
Through every fibre of the cosmic frame;
Life then was cloudless in its constant faith
And souls were all aglow with perfect love.
On swept the ages till the suns decayed,
Till bleached and bare, the dead bones of the worlds
Lay in the fields of heaven, till Mazzaroth
No longer flamed the zodiac with light
But strewed with cosmic slag, ashes of stars,
The lonely waysides of eternity.
Then old, at word of Love, gave place to new,
And ancient fear and night no longer reigned;
On earth no more was doubt, nor death, nor dark;
But Love made fairer realms, with nobler suns
And bluer skies and brighter firmaments,
And robed Himself in vesture of pure light.
So life was vibrant with all harmonies,
Each word was music, every pulse a prayer.
Then throbbing up the skies came silent chords
Writ in the angel's score, and human hearts,
Filled now with vital strength and poise, lived love
And practised truth with far intenser glow,
Yet with heroic magnanimity.
The ceaseless shuttle blends the fibres bright,
Weaving the purpose of Love's changeless heart,
The substance of His high enduring hope,
Into the fabric of the perfect whole;
Love's form, the Universe; His method, life;
His home, eternity.