'Strange Power! mysterious Destiny!
Thou who dost love to sit, alone,
With moveless lip, and brooding eye,
Close beside the' eternal throne;
When from the Godhead's forming hand
The globe leapt forth, He gave command
That Thou shouldst guard the circling sphere,
And guide, and balance, and control
The mighty mass, the breathing soul,
And heed the vast machinery roll
Through Time's immortal year.
'Or may it be, as some have thought,
That from the very birth of Time,
While yet this whirling globe was not,
Thy primal spirit ruled sublime;
That, when the mighty Being came
To forge this world's ænigma-frame,
He felt thy power no less than We;
But learned how Thou the Good and Ill
Hadst doomed in endless course to wheel,
And curbed e'en his wide-shadowing will
Reluctantly to Thee?
'Before or since, effect or cause,
Or limiting, or limited,
Yet say, oh! whence those dooming laws,
Or His or Thine, so dark—so dread.
In anger was it, or in mirth,
Ye bade Oppression walk the earth,
Torturing the race with scourge and chain?
Why flaunts yon despot on a throne
By treachery reared and blood-bestrown,
While Kosciusko's dungeon-groan
Ascends to Heaven in vain?
'Hath virtue then no saving force,
Hath justice no prevailing might
To stay that scythed chariot's course,
Dark as eclipse and swift as light?
Inwoven in one eternal chain,
Evil and good, and bliss and pain,
Are all the links alike to Thee?
Brute forms that breathe, high souls that feel,
Matter inert and human will,
Stamped all with one portentous seal
To work one blind decree?
'Man sinks in musing wonder lost!
Meanwhile his bark, with shattered sail,
Fast verging to some unknown coast,
Hurries adown the unslackening gale.
Amid thy gathering mysteries
In vain for glimpse of light he tries
To trace his course—to read his doom;
He fears the sea, he dreads the shore,
And darkness thickening more and more,
Till hope, and fear, and suffering o'er,
Thou wreck'st him on the tomb.'
By one, through many a change of grief
Full sorely tried, these words were spoken;
But Heaven in pity sent relief
To troubled brain and heart half-broken.
The self-same star, to Syrian land
That led, of old, the Magi-band,
Uplit for him that night of pain;
And beamed on that despairing sight,
With the first flush of morning light,
A clasping haven, calmly bright,
Beyond Life's stormy main.
