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! I will show you land; mile upon mile Of ridge and kopje, bush and candid waste, Sun-drowned and empty, tacit as the sea, Belted about with the horizon line, And over all the blank and curving sky. Is it not still? And with the sacred calm Of cool church shadows, where one speaks and moves As though God spied upon one; and all things— Trespassing sunbeams, spiders, swarming motes, The profile of a woman at her prayers, The tang that rules the sermon, one's own thoughts— Go bowed below a dread significance. You know the feeling; but the veldt, my veldt, Is more than any church, more vastly still Than grey cathedrals drowsing down the years, More fraught with solemn meanings and dim dreams, Than any storied hive of shaveling saints. Still, did I say? Well, still it surely is, And yet it hath a voice, its mood of sound, As prophets, meanly meditating, start From torpor into fired utterance. On its occasion it will speak in tones That thundered first of all on Sinai. The voice of all the world and all the sky Poured through the tempest-trumpet, and, between The drum of sullen strength and passion's shrill, Riding above the thunder and the wind, There comes at last the still small voice of God.