LITMIR.BIZ

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man was moulded from the original brute.

      A thinking mind had come to lift life’s moods,

      The keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague,

      An intelligence half-witness, half-machine.

      This seeming driver of her wheel of works

      Missioned to motive and record her drift

      And fix its law on her inconstant powers,

      This master-spring of a delicate enginery,

      Aspired to enlighten its user and refine

      Lifting to a vision of the indwelling Power

      The absorbed mechanic’s crude initiative:

      He raised his eyes; Heaven-light mirrored a Face.

      Amazed at the works wrought in her mystic sleep,

      She looked upon the world that she had made:

      Wondering now seized the great automaton;

      She paused to understand her self and aim,

      Pondering she learned to act by conscious rule,

      A visioned measure guided her rhythmic steps;

      Thought bordered her instincts with a frame of will

      And lit with the idea her blinded urge.

      On her mass of impulses, her reflex acts,

      On the Inconscient’s pushed or guided drift

      And mystery of unthinking accurate steps

      She stuck the specious image of a self,

      A living idol of disfigured spirit;

      On Matter’s acts she imposed a patterned law;

      She made a thinking body from chemic cells

      And moulded a being out of a driven force.

      To be what she was not inflamed her hope:

      She turned her dream towards some high Unknown;

      A breath was felt below of One supreme.

      An opening looked up to spheres above

      And coloured shadows limned on mortal ground

      The passing figures of immortal things;

      A quick celestial flash could sometimes come:

      The illumined soul-ray fell on heart and flesh

      And touched with semblances of ideal light

      The stuff of which our earthly dreams are made.

      A fragile human love that could not last,

      Ego’s moth-wings to lift the seraph soul,

      Appeared, a surface glamour of brief date

      Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;

      Joy that forgot mortality for a while

      Came, a rare visitor who left betimes,

      And made all things seem beautiful for an hour,

      Hopes that soon fade to drab realities

      And passions that crumble to ashes while they blaze

      Kindled the common earth with their brief flame.

      A creature insignificant and small

      Visited, uplifted by an unknown Power,

      Man laboured on his little patch of earth

      For means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and die.

      A spirit that perished not with the body and breath

      Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest

      And stood behind the little personal form

      But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment.

      Assenting to Nature’s long slow-moving toil,

      Watching the works of his own Ignorance,

      Unknown, unfelt the mighty Witness lives

      And nothing shows the Glory that is here.

      A Wisdom governing the mystic world,

      A Silence listening to the cry of Life,

      It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream

      Towards the still greatness of a distant hour.

      This huge world unintelligibly turns

      In the shadow of a mused Inconscience;

      It hides a key to inner meanings missed,

      It locks in our hearts a voice we cannot hear.

      An enigmatic labour of the spirit,

      An exact machine of which none knows the use,

      An art and ingenuity without sense,

      This minute elaborate orchestrated life

      For ever plays its motiveless symphonies.

      The mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth;

      It studies surface laws by surface thought,

      Life’s steps surveys and Nature’s process sees,

      Not seeing for what she acts or why we live;

      It marks her tireless care of just device,

      Her patient intricacy of fine detail,

      The ingenious spirit’s brave inventive plan

      In her great futile mass of endless works,

      Adds purposeful figures to her purposeless sum,

      Its gabled storeys piles, its climbing roofs

      On the close-carved foundations she has laid,

      Imagined citadels reared in mythic air

      Or mounts a stair of dream to a mystic moon:

      Transient creations point and hit the sky:

      A world-conjecture’s scheme is laboured out

      On the dim floor of mind’s incertitude,

      Or painfully built a fragmentary whole.

      Impenetrable, a mystery recondite

      Is the vast plan of which we are a part;

      Its harmonies are discords to our view

      Because we know not the great theme they serve.

      Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies.

      Only the fringe of a wide surge we see;

      Our instruments have not that greater light,

      Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,

      Our heart’s sight is too blind and passionate.

      Impotent to share in Nature’s mystic tact,

      Inapt to feel the pulse and core of things,

      Our reason cannot sound life’s mighty sea

      And only counts its waves and scans its foam;

      It knows not whence these motions touch and pass,

      It sees not whither sweeps the hurrying flood:

      Only it strives to canalise its powers

      And hopes to turn its course to human ends:

      But all its means come from the Inconscient’s store.

      Unseen here act dim huge world-energies

      And only trickles and currents are our share.

      Our

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