Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/206

POEMS OF OCCASION The soul's fine instrument,

Of pains and raptures blent,

Replied to these clear voices, tone for tone,

Their cadence answering

With tuneful sounds that wing

The upper air a few perchance have known,

The stormless empyrean, where

In strength and joy a few move unaware.

Ah, even thus the thrill

Of life beyond life's ill

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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