Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/313

 Concords and discords, cadences and cries

That seemed from some world-shrouded soul to rise,

Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage,

Some living sea that burst the bounds of man's brief age.

Then with such blissful trouble and glad care

For growth within unborn as mothers bear,

To the far woods he wandered, listening,

And heard the birds their little stories sing

In notes whose rise and fall seemed melted speech—

Melted with tears, smiles, glances—that can reach

More quickly through our frame's deep-winding night,

And without thought raise thought's best fruit, delight.

Pondering, he sought his home again and heard

The fluctuant changes of the spoken word:

The deep remonstrance and the argued want,

Insistent first in close monotonous chant,

Next leaping upward to defiant stand

Or downward beating like the resolute hand;

The mother's call, the children's answering cry,

The laugh's light cataract tumbling from on high;

The suasive repetitions Jabal taught,

That timid browsing cattle homeward brought;

The clear-winged fugue of echoes vanishing;

And through them all the hammer's rhythmic ring.

Jubal sat lonely, all around was dim,

Yet his face glowed with light revealed to him:

For as the delicate stream of odor wakes

The thought-wed sentience and some image makes

From out the mingled fragments of the past,

Finely compact in wholeness that will last,

So streamed as from the body of each sound

Subtler pulsations, swift as warmth, which found

All prisoned germs and all their powers unbound,

Till thought self-luminous flamed from memory,