Poems, Chiefly Lyrical/The Mystic
THE MYSTIC.
Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones:Ye knew him not: he was not one of ye,Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn:Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,The still serene abstraction: he hath feltThe vanities of after and before;Albeit, his spirit and his secret heartThe stern experiences of converse lives,The linkéd woes of many a fiery changeHad purified, and chastened, and made free. Always there stood before him, night and day,Of wayward varycolored circumstanceThe imperishable presences sereneColossal, without form, or sense, or sound,Dim shadows but unwaning presencesFourfacéd to four corners of the sky:And yet again, three shadows, fronting one,One forward, one respectant, three but one;And yet again, again and evermore,For the two first were not, but only seemed,One shadow in the midst of a great light,One reflex from eternity on time,One mighty countenance of perfect calm,Awful with most invariable eyes.For him the silent congregated hours,Daughters of time, divinely tall, beneathSevere and youthful brows, with shining eyesSmiling a godlike smile (the innocent lightOf earliest youth pierced through and through with allKeen knowledges of low-embowéd eld)Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud Which droops lowhung on either gate of life,Both birth and death: he in the centre fixt,Saw far on each side through the grated gatesMost pale and clear and lovely distances.He often lying broad awake, and yetRemaining from the body, and apartIn intellect and power and will, hath heardTime flowing in the middle of the night,And all things creeping to a day of doom.How could ye know him? Ye were yet withinThe narrower circle; he had wellnigh reachedThe last, which with a region of white flame,Pure without heat, into a larger airUpburning, and an ether of black blue,Investeth and ingirds all other lives.