Witless alike of will and way divine,
How heaven’s high with earth’s low should intertwine!
Friends I have seen through your eyes: now use mine!
Take the least man of all mankind, as I;
Look at his head and heart, find how and why
He differs from his fellows utterly:
Then, like me, watch when nature by degrees
Grows alive round him, as in Arctic seas
(They said of old) the instinctive water flees
Toward some elected point of central rock,
As though, for its sake only, roamed the flock
Of waves about the waste: awhile they mock
With radiance caught for the occasion,--hues
Of blackest hell now, now such reds and blues
As only heaven could fitly interfuse,--
The mimic monarch of the whirlpool, king
O’ the current for a minute: then they wring
Up by the roots and oversweep the thing,
And hasten off, to play again elsewhere
The same part, choose another peak as bare,
They find and flatter, feast and finish there.
When you see what I tell you,--nature dance
About each man of us, retire, advance,
As though the pageant’s end were to enhance
His worth, and--once the life, his product, gained--
Roll away elsewhere, keep the strife sustained,
And show thus real, a thing the North but feigned--
When you acknowledge that one world could do
All the diverse work, old yet ever new,
Divide us, each from other, me from you,--
Why, what’s the need of Temple, when the wills
O’ the world are that? What use of swells and falls
From Levites’ choir, Priests’ cries, and trumpet-calls?
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.
