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[First published 1852. Reprinted 1853, ’54, ’57.]
A WANDERER 1 is man from his birth. | |
| He was born in a ship | |
| On the breast of the River of Time. | |
| Brimming with wonder and joy | |
| He spreads out his arms to the light, | 5 |
| Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream. | |
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| As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. | |
| Whether he wakes | |
| Where the snowy mountainous pass | |
| Echoing the screams of the eagles | 10 |
| Hems in its gorges the bed | |
| Of the new-born clear-flowing stream: | |
| Whether he first sees light | |
| Where the river in gleaming rings | |
| Sluggishly winds through the plain: | 15 |
| Whether in sound of the swallowing sea:— | |
| As is the world on the banks | |
| So is the mind of the man. | |
| Vainly does each as he glides | |
| Fable and dream | 20 |
| Of the lands which the River of Time | |
| Had left ere he woke on its breast, | |
| Or shall reach when his eyes have been clos’d. | |
| Only the tract where he sails | |
| He wots of: only the thoughts, | 25 |
| Rais’d by the objects he passes, are his. | |
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| Who can see the green Earth any more | |
| As she was by the sources of Time? | |
| Who imagines her fields as they lay | |
| In the sunshine, unworn by the plough? | 30 |
| Who thinks as they thought, | |
| The tribes who then roam’d 2 on her breast, | |
| Her vigorous primitive sons? | |
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| What girl | |
| Now reads in her bosom as clear | 35 |
| As Rebekah read, when she sate | |
| At eve by the palm-shaded well? | |
| Who guards in her breast | |
| As deep, as pellucid a spring | |
| Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? | 40 |
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| What girl | |
| At the height of his vision, can deem | |
| Of God, of the world, of the soul. | |
| With a plainness as near, | |
| As flashing as Moses felt, | 45 |
| When he lay in the night by his flock | |
| On the starlit Arabian waste? | |
| Can rise and obey | |
| The beck of the Spirit like him? | |
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| This tract which the River of Time | 50 |
| Now flows through with us, is the Plain. | |
| Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. | |
| Border’d by cities and hoarse | |
| With a thousand cries is its stream. | |
| And we on its breast, our minds | 55 |
| Are confus’d as the cries which we hear, | |
| Changing and shot as the sights which we see. | |
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| And we say that repose has fled | |
| For ever the course of the River of Time. | |
| That cities will crowd to its edge | 60 |
| In a blacker incessanter line; | |
| That the din will be more on its banks, | |
| Denser the trade on its stream, | |
| Flatter the plain where it flows, | |
| Fiercer the sun overhead. | 65 |
| That never will those on its breast | |
| See an ennobling sight, | |
| Drink of the feeling of quiet again. | |
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| But what was before us we know not, | |
| And we know not what shall succeed. | 70 |
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| Haply, the River of Time, | |
| As it grows, as the towns on its marge | |
| Fling their wavering lights | |
| On a wider statelier stream— | |
| May acquire, if not the calm | 75 |
| Of its early mountainous shore, | |
| Yet a solemn peace of its own. | |
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| And the width of the waters, the hush | |
| Of the grey expanse where he floats, | |
| Freshening its current and spotted with foam | 80 |
| As it draws to the Ocean, may strike | |
| Peace to the soul of the man on its breast: | |
| As the pale Waste widens around him— | |
| As the banks fade dimmer away— | |
| As the stars come out, and the night-wind | 85 |
| Brings up the stream | |
| Murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea. | |
