You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you
novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside--we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not--we love you--there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
_NIGHT AND DEATH._
1.
Night on the prairies.
The supper is over--the fire on the ground burns low;
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapped in their blankets;
I walk by myself--I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never
realised before.
Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death, and test propositions.
How plenteous! How spiritual! How _resume_!
The same Old Man and Soul--the same old aspirations, and the same content.
2.
I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not day
exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around
me myriads of other globes.
Now, while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me, I will measure
myself by them:
And now, touched with the lives of other globes, arrived as far along as
those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or passed on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.
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