Beyond The Farthest Horizon

We have dreamed dreams beyond our comprehending, Visions too beautiful to be untrue; We have seen mysteries that yield no clue, And sought our goals on ways that have no ending. We, creatures of the earth, The lowly born, the mortal, the foredoomed To spend our fleeting moments on the spot Wherein to-morrow we shall be entombed, And hideously rot,-- We have seen loveliness that shall not pass; We have beheld immortal destinies; We have seen Heaven and Hell and joined their strife; Ay, we whose flesh shall perish as the grass Have flung the passion of the heart that dies Into the hope of everlasting life.

Oh, miracle of human sight! That leaps beyond our earthly prison bars To wander in the pathways of the stars Across the lone abysses of the night. Oh, miracle of thought! that still outsweeps Our vision, and beyond its range surveys The vistas of interminable ways, The chasms of unfathomable deeps, Renewed forevermore, until at last The endless and the ended alike seem Impossible, and all becomes a dream; And from their crazy watch-tower in the vast Those wild-winged thoughts again to earth descend To hide from the unfathomed and unknown, And seek the shelter love has made our own On homely paths that in a graveyard end. Oh, miracles of sight and thought and dream! You do but lead us to a farther gate, A higher window in the prison wall That bounds our mortal state: However far you lift us we must fall. But lo! remains the miracle supreme,-- That we, whom Death and Change have shown our fate, We, the chance progeny of Earth and Time, Should ask for more than Earth and Time create, And, goalless and without the strength to climb, Should dare to climb where we were born to grope; That we the lowly could conceive the great, Dream in our dust of destinies sublime, And link our moments to immortal hope.

No lesson of the brain can teach the soul That ’twas not born to share A nobler purpose, a sublimer care Than those which end in paths without a goal; No disenchantment turn it from the quest Of something unfulfilled and unpossessed O’er which no waters of oblivion roll. But not in flight of thought beyond the stars Can we escape our mortal prison bars: There the unfathomable depths remain Blind alleys of the brain: The sources of those sudden gleams of light That merge our finite in the infinite, We look for there in vain; For not upon the pathways that are barred But those left open,--not where the unknown quest Dismays the soul, but where it offers rest, Are set those lights that point us heavenward.

So, let us turn to the unfinished task That earth demands, strive for one hour to keep A watch with God, nor watching fall asleep, Before immortal destinies we ask. Before we seek to share A larger purpose, a sublimer care, Let us o’ercome the bondage of our fears, And fit ourselves to bear The burden of our few and sinful years. Ere we would claim a right to comprehend The meaning of the life that has no end Let us be faithful to our passing hours, And read their beauty, and that light pursue Which gives the dawn its rose, the noon its blue, And tells its secret to the wayside flowers.

Our eyes that roam the heavens are too dim, Our faithless hearts too cumbered with our cares To reach that light; but whoso sees and dares To follow, we must also follow him. Our heroes have beheld it and our seers, Who in the darkest hours foretold the dawn. It flashes on the sword for freedom drawn: It makes a rainbow of a people’s tears. The vast, the infinite, no more appal Him who on homely ways has seen it fall: He trusts the far, he dowers the unknown With all the love that Earth has made our own, And all the beauty that his dreams recall: For him the loneliest deeps of night it cheers; It gathers in its fold the countless spheres, And makes a constant homelight for them all.