The Lost Soul

Look! look there!Send your eyes across the grayBy my finger-point awayThrough the vaporous, fumy air.Beyond the air, you see the dark?Beyond the dark, the dawning day?On its horizon, pray you, markSomething like a ruined heapOf worlds half-uncreated, that go back:Down all the grades through which they roseUp to harmonious life and law's repose,Back, slow, to the awful deepOf nothingness, mere being's lack:On its surface, lone and bare,Shapeless as a dumb despair,Formless, nameless, something lies:Can the vision in your eyesIts idea recognize?

'Tis a poor lost soul, alack!--Half he lived some ages back;But, with hardly opened eyes,Thinking him already wise,Down he sat and wrote a book;Drew his life into a nook;Out of it would not ariseTo peruse the letters dim,Graven dark on his own walls;Those, he judged, were chance-led scrawls,Or at best no use to him.A lamp was there for reading these;This he trimmed, sitting at ease,For its aid to write his book,Never at his walls to look--Trimmed and trimmed to one faint sparkWhich went out, and left him dark.--I will try if he can hearSpirit words with spirit ear!

Motionless thing! who once,Like him who cries to thee,Hadst thy place with thy shining peers,Thy changeful place in the changeless danceIssuing ever in radianceFrom the doors of the far eternity,With feet that glitter and glide and glanceTo the music-law that binds the free,And sets the captive at liberty--To the clang of the crystal spheres!O heart for love! O thirst to drinkFrom the wells that feed the sea!O hands of truth, a human link'Twixt mine and the Father's knee!O eyes to see! O soul to think!O life, the brother of me!Has Infinitude sucked back allThe individual life it gave?Boots it nothing to cry and call?Is thy form an empty grave?

It heareth not, brothers, the terrible thing!Sounds no sense to its ear will bring!Let us away, 'tis no use to tarry;Love no light to its heart will carry!Sting it with words, it will never shrink;It will not repent, it cannot think!Hath God forgotten it, alas!Lost in eternity's lumber-room?Will the wind of his breathing never passOver it through the insensate gloom?Like a frost-killed bud on a tombstone curled,Crumbling it lies on its crumbling world,Sightless and deaf, with never a cry,In the hell of its own vacuity!

See, see yon angel crossing our flightWhere the thunder vapours loom,From his upcast pinions flashing the lightOf some outbreaking doom!Up, brothers! away! a storm is nigh!Smite we the wing up a steeper sky!What matters the hail or the clashing winds,The thunder that buffets, the lightning that blinds!We know by the tempest we do not lieDead in the pits of eternity!