| William Wilfred Campbell, comp. The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. 1913. | | | | Lines, On a Re-reading of Parts of the Old Testament | | By William Wilfred Campbell (1861–1918) |
| | | SUBLIMITY! Sublimity! I lay thee down; | |
| Great Volume of the ages! older far | |
| Than Cheops’ Pyramid or the Parthenon; | |
| And yet as new as yester-even’s star, | |
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| That came and burned so bright and pure, across | 5 |
| The world’s great weariness and day’s decline. | |
| What are all earth’s ambitions, gain and loss, | |
| Her hopes ephemeral; when thou art mine? | |
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| Thou stand’st, a crystal well of water pure, | |
| Amid those fevered fonts of heathen wine, | 10 |
| Graven in truth’s deep rock that shall endure, | |
| So greatly human, yet so all divine! | |
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| This age doth press upon me like a vast, | |
| Grim adamantine wall of evil doom; | |
| But when I drink thy living draught, I cast | 15 |
| Aside this vesture of material gloom; | |
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| These curtains of mortality fall apart; | |
| And out, and up, beyond, eternally, | |
| Those stairways of God’s ages; and man’s part | |
| In all that greatness, gone, and yet to be! | 20 | | | |
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