Classic Poem

These, by divine permission, to myself
Such secretly confided, to the end
Which ye ere long shall wot of, presently
Seceded, — yet remained on outward terms
With their unshaken brethren as before,
But oh! the absolute excellence was gone,
The plane of pure perfection broken through;
It was as though some galaxy of stars
Had sunk and left a horrid rent in Heaven,
A ragged flaw athwart the sapphirine floor,
A foul chaotic chasm.

Still further spread
As from some central and impulsive point
In ceaseless radiation, day and night,
Fresh errors, and reiterate wrongs and jars.
In vain I throned myself in judgment hall
Uttering decrees predestined as of yore;
In vain I walked among them, beckoning back
Such as in false society had strayed: —
In vain I warned of evil; shewed them all
How God's exterminating judgments fell
Ever on sin, with woe to whom they came.
The testimony came to all in vain.

The disaffection spread. Oh! still I weep
Recalling that declension, sad and wide! —

By unsuspected frankness, having gained
Free access soon to the imperial Bride
The strangers next their machinations plied
Against the holy guide and nurse divine,
Immortal Wisdom, 'neath whose bounteous care
Had grown those angel sisters, since their birth
In the arcanest Heavens. Her, soon, alas!

The wily wanderers whispered first away,
From wonted inculcation of deep lore
And holy truths, as narrowing down the souls
And marring the free actions and intents
Of the angelic pair; to which base cheat
The elder — not the wiser — won too well
By much and false persuasion, at the last,
Gave in nor rued till after; so mistaught
To gladden at the lack of all restraint
Upon the natural world-commanding will.

Not so the younger, who, with tears profuse,
Grieved at the doom of parting from her guide,
The severance from her holy tutelage,
And losing of the golden words of life
Which her instructress taught her, who instilled
Into her soul the sacred elements
Of universal truth; and gave to taste,
In prelibation of supremest bliss,
The essence of all knowledge.

God, she taught
Himself was truth and justice, good and love,
The infinite reality, the one;
Out of the unknown darkness of the depths
Of His great Being all existence sprang,
In various forms and multitudinous spheres,
Innumerous as the atoms of the light,
Or as the sands Time's mighty year-glass holds
Though it comprise all deserts; that with Him
All nature's vast and elemental limbs
Are but the organs of His will, Himself
Above all bound, above all infinite;
Whose action is all freedom — whose repose
Necessity — whose only word is Fate;
With Him alone, she taught, was peace and bliss
The bliss of Being is the love of God —
And primal beauty and eternal joy,
Whereof the vital music of all orbs
Forms but the faintest echo; and the sign
Minutest of His high celestial will
To harmonize creation, and reduce
The pure perennial war of good and ill,
Into the musical peace which rules in Heaven —
Peace, victress of all war. For so, in Time,
The one and many make themselves the all; —
Beauty the boundless medium, Love the end
Immutable, which renders all things one; —
And though in outer worlds an outward war
There is, yet in the spiritual world,
The secret harmony of good and ill,
Which Being with existence reconciles
In the mid axis of necessity —
Prevails and hallows finally the whole.