Littell's Living Age/Volume 160/Issue 2069/Thoughts at Sunrise

The summer night is waning, and the morn
Breaks over steaming streams and silent fields,
With dim, far voices of the early dawn.
God and his world are now at peace; this calm,
Even now, might deepen to eternity.
Oh, break it not! oh, stain it not! O God,
Stay thou that rising sun, nor let him rise
Once more upon the weary sin and strife,
And cries that curse him thro' the burning blue!
Come hither, O ye sons of men! and kneel, —
Pray to a God ye never prayed to yet,
Who in his wide and wistful tenderness
Maketh each day the self-same dawn that broke
On Eden, — that, remembering what ye were,
The Dawn's sweet innocence might call ye back, —
An awful, mute appeal to turn again.
Nay, but he suffers in that Heaven of heavens.
About him are the deeps, Space, with her sounds,
The Heaven, with all her dreams of star and sun,
The singing of a thousand worlds; to him,
Serene, immortal beings bow them low.
All these are perfect, yet he hears afar,
In that dim, little planet that he loves,
Man jarring ever on his harmonies.
Aye, yearning in his cold and perfect worlds
For man who might have sympathy with him,
Move with conceptions vast and burning thoughts
From beauty unto beauty, peopling worlds,
He grieves, though not the less a God for grief.
Man is all out of tune with his design,
Who might have shared in that first splendid thought,
Conception striving with an utter space,
Sound with eternal still that knew her not,
And light with the vague dark, till at the last
He struck his vast conception into bounds.
Still makes he for mankind the innocent dawn,
Noon, twilight, and the night, that makes the heart
Break into singing at her shining stars.
Yet is man but a trembling worshipper,
Who heeds not that world-cry from Calvary —
A God appealing to the love of man,
Laying aside all terror and all power —
That should have echoed in him, made the world
One fearless Heaven, without a thought of Hell, —
Man, who can learn not through defeat and death
Sorrow's last gift, a sympathy with God.