Classic Poem

The world is beautiful and all the brood
It nurses on its mother-breast, of things
That move and know and forms that seem to be
But for the sake of loveliness alone.
Than this, what deeper knowledge need there be
To round the sum of all-desired content?

O hapless he, who seeks by devious ways,
In mines and deep-sea caverns, and the vault
Where swing those pendulums of Time, the stars,
Or in the corridors of his own brain,
The ultimate and perfect truth, which found
Might prove the secret of pure happiness!
He is a snail that crawls a summer day
Beside a brook, where every leaf and stone
Is but a bar to his obscure advance.
His eyes and thoughts take note of littleness;
And not for him the glory of the sky,
Where burns the sun, nor the near perfect scene
Of woods and streams and hills that spreads around.

Once I had zeal to learn the ways of God;
O I did yearn to read, with these dim eyes,
The dark and incommunicative past,
On stony pages of the underworld,
Or in the wheeling maze of distant spheres;
And to forecast the destined path which I
And all my momentary kind should tread!
Some gleams misled me; I did hope to hold
Within the compass of my little brain,
The scope and bulk of all eternity.
And as I walked the darkness grew apace,
And all things looming out of shadow, seemed
The monstrous part of some more monstrous whole.
And then came madness—madness of despair;
I lifted up my hands and cried aloud,
“Lo! this is all! there is no truth but this!”
And pausing there, I sat me down and wept.

Then death became a horror and a crime.
And life the infinite of nothingness;
And all the ills of life the torture play,
Remorseless, of sarcastic destiny;
While thus I sat in bitterness profound,
Lo! through the midnight gloom above my head
A single star shone out, a small clear light
That tranced my dreary gaze and held it fast,
Till in my soul, I knew not why, nor know,
As on its beam a still, sweet ray of peace
Was born, and lighting all my inner night,
Did banish my despair with rich content.
Then back I fared. till on the noonday walk
Of common life I viewed the outer world
With clearer eyes that saw and loved it all.

And now the sweet uprising of the dawn,
The mellow noon with all its insect joy,
The blossom-tinted sunset and the night
With its mysterious ecstacy of stars;
The clouds, the storms and winter's darkest frown,
The hills and hollow places and the streams,
The face of man, these seem the perfect truth—
These do I deem the all-sufficient cause—
If cause need be—and the accomplished end.