Page:Poems, now first collected, Stedman, 1897.djvu/129

CORDA CONCORDIA To feel betimes our envious selves are fain,—

Seeing that, as birds in night

Wind-driven against the light

Whose unseen armor mocks their stress and pain,

Most men fall baffled in the surge

That to their cry responds but with a dirge.

Where broods the Absolute,

Or shuns our long pursuit

By fiery utmost pathways out of ken?

Fleeter than sunbeams, lo,

Our passionate spirits go,

And traverse immemorial space, and then

Look off, and look in vain, to find

The master-clew to all they left behind.

White orbs like angels pass

Before the triple glass,

That men may scan the record of each flame,—

Of spectral line and line

The legendry divine,—

Finding their mould the same, and aye the same,

The atoms that we knew before

Of which ourselves are made,—dust, and no more.

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