The Metempsychosis

I know my own creation was divine. Strewn on the breezy continents I see The veined shells and burnished scales which once Enclosed my being,--husks that had their use; I brood on all the shapes I must attain Before I reach the Perfect, which is God, And dream my dreams and let the rabble go; For I am of the mountains and the sea The deserts, and the caverns in the earth The catacombs and fragments of old worlds.

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I was ere Romulus and Remus were; I was ere Nineveh and Babylon; I was and am, and evermore shall be, Progressing, never reaching to the end. A hundred years I trembled in the grass;

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Under the earth in fragrant glooms I dwelt, There in the veins and sinews of a pine On a lone isle, where ... ... to and fro I swayed, Drawing the sunlight from the stooping clouds. Suns came and went, and many a mystic moon;

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Wild music, and strange shadows floated by Some moaning and some singing. So the years Clustered about me till the hand of God Let down the lightning from a sultry sky, Splintered the pine and split the iron rock; And from my odorous prison house a bird, I in its bosom, darted; so we flew, Turning the brittle edge of one high wave Island and tree and sea-gods left behind!

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A century was a single day. What is a day to an immortal soul? A breath, no more. And yet I hold one hour Beyond all price--that hour when from the sky I circled near and nearer to the earth, Nearer and nearer, till I brushed my wings Against the pointed chestnut trees,... ... and there, Gathering wild flowers in a cool ravine, Wandered a woman more divinely shaped Than any of the creatures of the air, Or river-goddesses, or restless shades Of noble matrons marvellous in their time For beauty and great suffering; and I sung, I charmed her thought, I gave her dreams, and then Down from the dewy atmosphere I stole And nestled in her bosom. There I slept From moon to moon, while in her eyes a thought Grew sweet and sweeter, deepening like the dawn-- A mystical forewarning! When the stream, Breaking through leafless brambles and dead leaves, Piped shriller treble and from chestnut-boughs The fruit dropt noiseless through the autumn night, I gave a low, quick cry as infants do: We weep when we are born, not when we die! So was it destined; and thus came I here, To walk the earth and wear the form of Man, To suffer bravely as becomes my state, One step, one grade, one cycle nearer God.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

From THE FINAL THOUGHT

Which way are my feet set? Through infinite changes yet Shall I go on, Nearer and nearer drawn To thee, God of Eternity. How shall the human grow, By changes fine and slow, To thy perfection from the life-dawn sought: What is the highest thought?

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Love! Faith is born of it! Death is the scorn of it! It fills the earth and thrills the heavens above: And God is love, And life is love and though we heed it not, Love is the final thought.

Maurice Thompson.