Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death and test propositions.
How plenteous! how spiritual! how resumé!
The same old man and soul—the same old aspirations, and the same content.
I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.
Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will measure myself by them,
And now touch'd with the lives of other globes arrived as far along as those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or pass'd on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.
O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.
THOUGHT.
As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing,
To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a wreck at sea,
Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and wafted kisses, and that is the last of them,
Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President,
Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder'd off the Northeast coast and going down—of the steamship Arctic going down,
Of the veil'd tableau—women gathered together on deck, pale, heroic, waiting the moment that draws so close—O the moment!
A huge sob—a few bubbles—the white foam spirting up—and then the women gone,
Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on—and I now pondering, Are those women indeed gone?
Are souls drown'd and destroy'd so?
Is only matter triumphant?
