celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot), Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass, And the low hum of living breeze—and in the midst God’s beautiful eternal right hand, Thee, holiest minister of Heaven—thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all, Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call’d life, Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.
On the Same Picture
Intended for first stanza of “Death’s Valley”
Aye, well I know ’tis ghastly to descend that valley: Preachers, musicians, poets, painters, always render it, Philosophs exploit—the battlefield, the ship at sea, the myriad beds, all lands, All, all the past have enter’d, the ancientest humanity we know, Syria’s, India’s, Egypt’s, Greece’s, Rome’s; Till now for us under our very eyes spreading the same to-day, Grim, ready, the same to-day, for entrance, yours and mine, Here, here ’tis limn’d.
A Thought of Columbus
The mystery of mysteries, the crude and hurried ceaseless flame, spontaneous, bearing on itself. The bubble and the huge, round, concrete orb! A breath of Deity, as thence the bulging universe unfolding! The many issuing cycles from their precedent minute! The eras of the soul incepting in an hour, Haply the widest, farthest evolutions of the world and man.
Thousands and thousands of miles hence, and now four centuries back, A mortal impulse thrilling its brain cell, Reck’d or unreck’d, the birth can no longer be postpon’d: A phantom of the moment, mystic, stalking, sudden, Only a silent thought, yet toppling down of more than walls of