The Story
of Saville
And she fretted oft at the noble verse of The Book—“There shall be no night”—
For what were a day everlasting, garishly, brazenly bright,
To this tablature soft and Egyptian, charactered over with light,
Where the mind in the giant science trained, the lore of the terrible stars,
Swings confident past the asteroids slight, past neighboring Venus and Mars,
Out where each diamond grain of dust is a throbbing and thousand-fold world,
And the intellect, steady and poised at first, is faster and faster whirled
’Till it staggers and swoons in the awful void, and trembling and over-awed
Flies as a child to its father to the tenderer thought of God.
And partly she worshiped the night because she was liker her husband then,—
More than himself, she scarce could see,—the star-seed, and now and again
A lamp in a cottage, a Stygian boat, and ever the refluent line
Of the little sad waves that followed them, seeming to murmur and pine
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