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      Stood there, a race of young keen-visioned gods,

      King-children born on Wisdom’s early plane,

      Taught in her school world-making’s mystic play.

      Archmasons of the eternal Thaumaturge,

      Moulders and measurers of fragmented Space,

      They have made their plan of the concealed and known

      A dwelling-house for the invisible king.

      Obeying the Eternal’s deep command

      They have built in the material front of things

      This wide world-kindergarten of young souls

      Where the infant spirit learns through mind and sense

      To read the letters of the cosmic script

      And study the body of the cosmic self

      And search for the secret meaning of the whole.

      To all that Spirit conceives they give a mould;

      Persuading Nature into visible moods

      They lend a finite shape to infinite things.

      Each power that leaps from the Unmanifest

      Leaving the largeness of the Eternal’s peace

      They seized and held by their precisian eye

      And made a figurante in the cosmic dance.

      Its free caprice they bound by rhythmic laws

      And compelled to accept its posture and its line

      In the wizardry of an ordered universe.

      The All-containing was contained in form,

      Oneness was carved into units measurable,

      The limitless built into a cosmic sum:

      Unending Space was beaten into a curve,

      Indivisible Time into small minutes cut,

      The infinitesimal massed to keep secure

      The mystery of the Formless cast into form.

      Invincibly their craft devised for use

      The magic of sequent number and sign’s spell,

      Design’s miraculous potency was caught

      Laden with beauty and significance

      And by the determining mandate of their gaze

      Figure and quality equating joined

      In an inextricable identity.

      On each event they stamped its curves of law

      And its trust and charge of burdened circumstance;

      A free and divine incident no more

      At each moment willed or adventure of the soul,

      It lengthened a fate-bound mysterious chain,

      A line foreseen of an immutable plan,

      One step more in Necessity’s long march.

      A term was set for every eager Power

      Restraining its will to monopolise the world,

      A groove of bronze prescribed for force and act

      And shown to each moment its appointed place

      Forewilled inalterably in the spiral

      Huge Time-loop fugitive from eternity.

      Inevitable their thoughts like links of Fate

      Imposed on the leap and lightning race of mind

      And on the frail fortuitous flux of life

      And on the liberty of atomic things

      Immutable cause and adamant consequence.

      Idea gave up the plastic infinity

      To which it was born and now traced out instead

      Small separate steps of chain-work in a plot:

      Immortal once, now tied to birth and end,

      Torn from its immediacy of errorless sight,

      Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference

      Into a fixed body flasque and perishable;

      Thus bound it grew, but could not last and broke

      And to a new thinking’s body left its place.

      A cage for the Infinite’s great-eyed seraphim Thoughts

      Was closed with a criss-cross of world-laws for bars

      And hedged into a curt horizon’s arc

      The irised vision of the Ineffable.

      A timeless Spirit was made the slave of the hours;

      The Unbound was cast into a prison of birth

      To make a world that Mind could grasp and rule.

      On an earth which looked towards a thousand suns,

      That the created might grow Nature’s lord

      And Matter’s depths be illumined with a soul

      They tied to date and norm and finite scope

      The million-mysteried movement of the One.

      Above stood ranked a subtle archangel race

      With larger lids and looks that searched the unseen.

      A light of liberating knowledge shone

      Across the gulfs of silence in their eyes;

      They lived in the mind and knew truth from within;

      A sight withdrawn in the concentrated heart

      Could pierce behind the screen of Time’s results

      And the rigid cast and shape of visible things.

      All that escaped conception’s narrow noose

      Vision descried and gripped; their seeing thoughts

      Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense.

      High architects of possibility

      And engineers of the impossible,

      Mathematicians of the infinitudes

      And theoricians of unknowable truths,

      They formulate enigma’s postulates

      And join the unknown to the apparent worlds.

      Acolytes they wait upon the timeless Power,

      The cycle of her works investigate;

      Passing her fence of wordless privacy

      Their mind could penetrate her occult mind

      And draw the diagram of her secret thoughts;

      They read the codes and ciphers she had sealed,

      Copies they made of all her guarded plans,

      For every turn of her mysterious course

      Assigned a reason and unchanging rule.

      The unseen grew visible to student eyes,

      Explained was the immense Inconscient’s scheme,

      Audacious lines were traced upon the Void;

      The Infinite was reduced to square and cube.

      Arranging symbol and significance,

      Tracing the curve of a transcendent Power,

      They framed the cabbala of the cosmic Law,

      The

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