Classic Poem

WITHOUT all fear, without presumption, he
Who wrote this work would speak respecting it
A few brief words, and face his friend the world;
Revising, not reversing, what hath been.
Poetry is itself a thing of God;
He made His prophets poets; and the more
We feel of poesie do we become
Like God in love and power, — under-makers.
All great lays, equals to the minds of men,
Deal more or less with the Divine, and have
For end some good of mind or soul of man.
The mind is this world's, but the soul is God's;
The wise man joins them here all in his power.
The high and holy works, amid lesser lays,
Stand up like churches among village cots;
And it is joy to think that in every age,
However much the world was wrong therein,
The greatest works of mind or hand have been
Done unto God. So may they ever be!
It shows the strength of wish we have to be great,
And the sublime humility of might.
True fiction hath in it a higher end
Than fact; it is the possible compared
With what is merely positive, and gives
To the conceptive soul an inner world,
A higher, ampler, Heaven than that wherein
The nations sun themselves. In that bright state
Are met the mental creatures of the men
Whose names are writ highest on the rounded crown
Of Fame's triumphal arch; the shining shapes
Which star the skies of that invisible land,
Which, whosoe'er would enter, let him learn; —
'T is not enough to draw forms fair and lively,
Their conduct likewise must be beautiful;
A hearty holiness must crown the work,
As a gold cross the minster-dome, and show,
Like that instonement of divinity,
That the whole building doth belong to God.
And for the book before us, though it were,
What it is not, supremely little, like
The needled angle of a high church spire,
Its sole end points to God the Father's glory,
From all eternity seen; making clear
His might and love in saving sinful man.
One bard shows God as he deals with states and kings
Another, as He dealt with the first man;
Another, as with Heaven and earth and hell;
Ours, as He loves to order a chance soul
Chosen out of the world, from first to last.
And all along it is the heart of man
Emblemed, created and creative mind.
It is a statued mind and naked heart
Which is struck out. Other bards draw men dressed
In manners, customs, forms, appearances,
Laws, places, times, and countless accidents
Of peace or polity: to him these are not;
He makes no mention, takes no compt of them: —
But shows, however great his doubts, sins, trials,
Whatever earthborn pleasures soil man's soul,
What power soever he may gain of evil,
That still, till death, time is; that God's great Heaven
Stands open day and night to man and spirit;
For all are of the race of God, and have
In themselves good. The life-writ of a heart,
Whose firmest prop and highest meaning was
The hope of serving God as poet-priest,
And the belief that He would not put back
Love-offerings, though brought to Him by hands
Unclean and earthy, e'en as fallen man's
Must be; and most of all, the thankful show
Of His high power and goodness in redeeming
And blessing souls that love Him, spite of sin
And their old earthy strain, — these are the aims.
The doctrines, truths, and staple of the story.
What theme sublimer than soul being saved?
'T is the bard's aim to show the mind-made world
Without, within; how the soul stands with God,
And the unseen realities about us.
It is a view of life spiritual
And earthly. Let all look upon it, then,
In the same light it was drawn and colored in;
In faith, in that the writer too hath faith,
Albeit an effect, and not a cause.
Faith is a higher faculty than reason,
Though of the brightest power of revelation,
As the snow-headed mountain rises o'er
The lightning, and applies itself to Heaven.
We know in day-time there are stars about us,
Just as at night, and name them what and where
By sight of science; so by faith we know,
Although we may not see them till our night,
That spirits are about us, and believe,
That, to a spirit's eye, all Heaven may be
As full of angels as a beam of light
Of motes. As spiritual, it shows all
Classes of life, perhaps, above our kind,
Known to tradition, reason, or God's word,
Whose bright foundations are the heights of Heaven.
As earthly, it embodies most the life
Of youth, its powers, its aims, its deeds, its failings;
And, as a sketch of world-life, it begins
And ends, and rightly, in Heaven and with God;
While Heaven is also in the midst thereof.
God, or all good, the evil of the world,
And man, wherein are both, are each displayed.
The mortal is the model of all men.
The foibles, follies, trials, sufferings —
And manifest and manifold are they —
Of a young, hot, unworld-schooled heart that has
Had its own way in life, and wherein all
May see some likeness of their own, — 't is these
Attract, unite, and, sunlike, concentrate
The ever-moving system of our feelings.
The hero is the world-man, in whose heart
One passion stands for all, the most indulged.
The scenes wherein he plays his part are life,
A sphere whose centre is co-heavenly
With its divine original and end.
Like life, too, as a whole, the story hath
A moral, and each scene one, as in life, —
One universal and peculiar truth —
Shining upon it like the quiet moon,
Illustrating the obscure unequal earth; —
And though these scenes may seem to careless eyes
Irregular and rough and unconnected,
Like to the stones at Stonehenge, — though convolved,
And in primeval mystery, — still an use,
A meaning, and a purpose may be marked
Among them of a temple reared to God: —
The meaning alway dwelling in the word,
In secret sanctity, like a golden toy
Mid Beauty's orbed bosom. Scenes of earth
And Heaven are mixed, as flesh and soul in man.
Now, the religion of the book is this,
Followed out from the book God writ of old.
All creatures being faulty by their nature,
And by God made all liable to sin,
God only could stone — and unto none
Except himself — for universal sin.
It is thus that God did sacrifice to God,
Himself unto Himself, in the great way
Of Triune mystery. His death, as man,
Was real as our own; and as, except
In the destruction of all life, there could
Be no atonement for its sin, while life
Doth necessarily result from God,
As thought and outward action from ourselves,
So the atonement must be to and by Him;
Which makes it justice equally with love;
For all His powers and attributes are equal,
And must make one in any act of His;
And every not of God is infinite.
He acts through all in all: the truth we know,
He doth Himself inbreathe; the ill we do,
He hath atoned for; and the Scriptures show
That God doth suffer for the sins of those
Whom He hath made, that are liable to sin.
In all of us He hath His agony;
We are the cross, and death of God, and grave.
Him love then all the more, and worship Him
Who lived and died, and rose from death for us,
And is and reigns forever God in all.
Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.
Many who read the word of life, much doubt
Whether salvation be of grace or faith,
Election, or repentance, or good works,
Or God's high will: reconcile all of them.
Each of the persons of the Triune God
Hath had His dispensation, hath it now;
The Father by His prophets, and the Son
In His own days, by His own deeds; and now
The Spirit, by the ministry of Christ;
And thus, by law, by gospel, and by grace,
The scheme of God's salvation is complete.
Salvation, then, is God-like, threefold; or
That under one or other, all may come;
By will of God alone, by faith in Christ,
And by repentance, and good works, and grace.
So there is one salvation of the Father,
One of the Son, another of the Spirit;
Each, the salvation of the Three in One.
The mortal in this lay is saved of will,
In manner as this hymn unfolds, which hath
Just warranty for every word from God's.
O God! Thou wondrous One in Three,
As mortals must Thee deem;
Thou only canst be said to be,
We but at best to seem.
For Thou dost save, and Thon may'st slay,
Canst make a mortal soul
In Thee eternal; in a day
Wilt bring to nought the whole.
Thou bardenest, and Thou openest hearts,
As in Thy Word is shown;
Thou savest and destroyest parts,
By Thy right will alone.
Let down Thy grace, then, Lord! on all
Whom Thou wilt save to live;
Oh! if they stumble, stop their fall!
Oh! if they fall, forgive!
They are forgiven from the first,
They are predestined Thine;
And though in sin they were the worst,
In Thee they are divine.
They are, and were, and will be, Lord!
In one, in Heaven, in Thee,
Yea with the Spirit, and the Word,
One God in Trinity.

These principles and doctrines pending not
Upon the action of the poem here,
But over and above it, influencing
Nevertheless the story, as the course
Of stars enwoven with our system, earth,
Vary the view of this life's hemisphere,
And mingle it more palpably with Heaven,
And with its changeless, ceaseless, boundless God.
It is thus that by creating to and from
Eternity, and multiplying ever
His own one Being through the universe,
He doth eternize happiness, and make
Good infinite by making all in Him.
There is but one great right and good; and ill
And wrong are shades thereof, not substances.
Nothing can be antagonist to God.
Necessity, like electricity,
Is in ourselves and all things, and no more
Without us than within us, and we live,
We of this mortal mixture, in the same law
As the pure colorless intelligence
Which dwells in Heaven, and the dead Hadian shades.
We will and act and talk of liberty;
And all our wills and all our doings both
Are limited within this little life.
Free-will is but necessity in play, —
The clattering of the golden reins which guide
The thunder-footed coursers of the sun.
The ship which goes to sea informed with fire, —
Obeying only Its own iron force,
Beckless of adverse tide, breeze dead, or weak
As infant'e parting breath, too faint to stir
The feather held before it, — is as much
The appointed thrall of all the elements,
As the white-bosomed bark which wooes the wind,
And when it dies desists. And thus with man;
However contrary he set his heart
To God, he is but working out His will;
And, at an infinite angle, more or less
Obeying his own soul's necessity.
He only hath freewill whose will is fate.
Evil and good are God's right hand and left.
By ministry of evil good is clear,
And by temptation virtue; as of yore
Out of the grave rose God. Let this be deemed
Enough to justify the portion weighed
To the great spirit Evil, named herein.
If evil seem the most, yet good most is:
As water may be deep and pure below
Although the face be filmy for a time.
And if the spirit of evil seem more in
The work than God, it is but to work His will,
Who therefore is all that the other seems.
And evil is in almost every scene
Of life more or less forward. Above all
The mystery of the Trinity is held,
Whose mystery is its reasonableness.
All that is said of Deity is said
In love and reverence. Be it so conceived
What comes before and after the great world, —
Deep in the secretest abyss of Light,
And Being's most reserved immensity —
God alone knows eternally, who rends
The mantling Heavens with his hands; but with
The present is communion creatural:
He liveth in the sacrament of life.
And for the soul of man delineate here —
The outline half invisible — is shown
The self-sought grace, the self-aspiring truth
And natural religion of the heart
Contrasting Godhood with humanity
Ever; whereas the Spirit aye unites.
Temptation, and its workings in the heart
Whose faint and false resistance but assists, —
Ambition, thirst of secret lore, joy, love —
Riverlike, doubling sometimes on itself —
Adventure, pleasure, travel heavenly
And earthly, friendship, passion, poesie,
Viewed ever in their spiritual end —
And power, celestial happiness and earth's
Millennial foretaste, ill annihilate,
The restoration of the angels lost,
And one salvation universal given
To all create, — all these, related, form,
With much beside, the body of the work: —
The islands, seas, and mainland of its orb.
Thus much then for this book. It aims to mark
The various beliefs as well as doubts
Which hold or search by turns the mind of youth
Unresting anywhere. Its heresies,
If such they be, are charitable ones; —
For they who read not in the blest bellef
That all souls may be saved, read to no end.
We were made to be saved. We are of God.
Nor bates the book one tittle of the truth,
To smoothe its way to favor with the fearful.
All rests with those who read. A work or thought
Is what each makes it to himself, and may
Be full of great dark meanings, like the sea,
With shoals of life rushing; or like the air,
Benighted with the wing of the wild dove,
Sweeping miles broad o'er the far western woods,
With mighty glimpses of the central light —
Or may be nothing — bodiless, spiritless.
Now therefore to his work and to the world
The writer bids, God speed! It matters not
If they agree or differ. Each perchance
May bear true witness to another end.
Let then what hath been, be. It boots not here
To palliate misdoings. 'T were less toil
To build Colossus than to hew a hill
Into a statue. Hail and farewell, all!