Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/120

110 Can give no gifts but what they take away;

Yet aye abundant pours the living stream,

And all creation fleets through one fair form,

That in the moulding mind endures, divine

Reason, that passes not, nor on it falls

The shadow of dark death, nor any change

Of nature, and it grows not old with time.

It lights the mortal chamber of the soul.

There comes, as on a stage, the motley world;

There shine great truths, great actions, on one plane;

And all that is fills but a player's scene,

Where time is not, nor place; there, to the soul

The passing world, unfolding like a flower

From unseen roots, that shuts at eventide,

Is but a phantom-bloom and beauty's shade,

Echoing far off divine reality:

Such song the morning-stars together sang,

And at creation's birth praised light unseen."

Then in the Roamer stirred his dreaming youth:

"So once I sang with lifted hands to heaven

The beauty that the dawn hath never clasped,

The peace that falls not with eve's blessèd dew,

The mystery within the seas and stars;

All vision is the woven veil thereof;

There works the secret craft that builds the world;

There shines the ray that puts earth's glory on;