| |
| FOR them, O God, who only worship Thee | |
| In fanes whose fretted roofs shut out the heavens, | |
| Let organs breathe, and chorded psalteries sound: | |
| But let my voice rise with the mingled noise | |
| Of winds and waters;—winds that in the sedge, | 5 |
| And grass, and ripening grain, while nature sleeps, | |
| Practise, in whispered music, soft and low, | |
| Their sweet inventions, and then sing them loud | |
| In caves, and on the hills, and in the woods, | |
| —A moving anthem, that along the air | 10 |
| Dying, then swelling forth in fitful gusts, | |
| Like a full choir of bodiless voices, sweeps,— | |
| Yea, of the great earth that make an instrument, | |
| Awakening with their touch, itself not mute, | |
| Each different thing to difference of tone, | 15 |
| Long, harp-like shrillings, or soft gush of sounds;— | |
| Waters,—to earth, as to the air the winds, | |
| Motion and utterance, and that begin | |
| Even at their source the gently murmured hymn, | |
| Rise with the river, with the torrent swell, | 20 |
| And at the cataract’s dizzy, headlong leap, | |
| Break forth in solemn and deep bursts of song. | |
| Yet what is all this deep, perpetual sound,— | |
| These voices of the earth, and sea, and air, | |
| That make it seem to us, as if our Earth, | 25 |
| Into the silent and unruffled deep | |
| Led forth, with thunder-step, the choir of worlds? | |
| All these,—what are they?—in the boundless void, | |
| An insect’s whisper in the ear of night, | |
| A voice in that of death,—in thine, O God, | 30 |
| A faint symphony to Heaven ascending | |
| Amid ten thousand, thousand songs of praise. | |
| |
| Break forth, ye Winds! | |
| That in the impalpable deep caves of air, | |
| Moving your silent plumes, in dreams of flight, | 35 |
| Tumultuous lie, and from your half-stretched wings | |
| Beat the faint zephyrs that disturb the air;— | |
| Break forth, ye fiercer harmonies, ye Storms | |
| That in the cavernous and unquiet sea | |
| Lie pent, and like imprisoned thunders beat | 40 |
| Your azure confines, making endless moan;— | |
| All sounds, all harmonies, break forth! and be | |
| To these my thoughts and aspirations, voice;— | |
| Rise, rise, not bearing, but upborne by them,— | |
| Rise through the golden gates uplift and wide! | 45 |
| In, through the everlasting doors! and join | |
| The multitude of multitudes whose praise | |
| With mighty burst of full accordant sound | |
| Moves Heaven’s whole fabric vast, as move the clouds | |
| That from their swinging censers upward pour, | 50 |
| By wings of hovering seraphim disturbed,— | |
| A sound so deep and loud, that at its might | |
| The pillared heavens would fail, and all their frame | |
| Of ancient strength and grandeur sink at once, | |
| But for its soul of sweetness that supports, | 55 |
| And mightier harmony that builds them still:— | |
| Ye Winds! ye Storms! all sounds and harmonies, | |
| O thither rise! be heard amidst the throng; | |
| Let them that dwell within the gates of light, | |
| And them that sit on thrones—let seraphs hear,— | 60 |
| Let laurelled saints, and let all angels hear,— | |
| A human soul knows and adores its God! | |
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