Page:The torrent and The night before.djvu/41

 No, I have not your backward faith to shrink Lone-faring from the doorway of God’s home, To find Him in the names of buried men; Nor your ingenious recreance to think We cherish, in the life that is to come, The scattered features of dead friends again.

until our souls are strong enough To plunge into the crater of the Scheme— Triumphant in the flash there to redeem Love’s handsel and for evermore to slough, Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough And reptile skins of us whereon we set The stigma of scared years—are we to get Where atoms and the ages are one stuff.

Nor ever shall we know the cursed waste Of life in the beneficence divine Of starlight and of sunlight and soul-shine That we have squandered in sin's frail distress, Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste, The mead of Thought’s prophetic endlessness.

WALT WHITMAN master-songs are ended, and the man That sang them is name. And so is God A name; and so is love, and life, and death, And everything.—But we, who are too blind To read what we have written, or what faith Has written for us, do not understand: We only blink, and wonder.

Last night it was the song that was the man, But now it is the man that is the song. We do not hear him very much to-day;— His piercing and eternal cadence rings Too pure for us—too powerfully pure,