ERE yet the dawn
Pushed rosy fingers up the arch of day
And smiled its promise to the voiceless prime,
Love sat and patterns wove at life's great loom.
He flung the suns into the soundless arch,
Appointed them their courses in the deep,
To keep His great time-harmonies, and blaze
As beacons in the ebon fields of night.
Love balanced them and held them firm and true,
Poised 'twixt attractive and repulsive drift
Amid the throngs of heaven. What though this power
Was ever known to us as gravity,
Its first and last celestial name is Love.
Love spake the word omnipotent, and lo!
Upon the distant and mid deep, the earth
Was flung, robed in blue skies and summer lands,
Green-garlanded with leaves and bright with flowers,
While songsters fluttered in the rosy skies.
But sometimes, moaning through the dark-leaved pines,
Or sobbing down the lonely shores of time,
Or wailing in the tempest-arch of night,
Love moved unresting and unsatisfied.
The faces of the hills in beauty smiled,
The night's deep vault blazed with configured stars,
Fair nature throbbed through all her frame of light,
And everywhere was Love's fine energy;
But fields and forests, flowers and firmaments
Had not attained to understand the throb
And thrill of life, so Love made human hearts
That mightily could feel and understand;
Made them his constant home, centre and sweep,
Channel and instrument of life and truth,
The word of God on earth, Love's other self,
The high ambassadors of truth and light;
And Love was free where Life was wholly true.
