The Future

A wanderer is man from his birth.

He was born in a

On the breast of the river of Time;

Brimming with wonder and

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.

Whether he wakes,

Where the snowy mountainous pass,

Echoing the screams of the eagles,

Hems in its gorges the

Of the new-born clear-flowing stream;

Whether he first sees

Where the river in gleaming

Sluggishly winds through the plain;

Whether in sound of the swallowing sea—As is the world on the banks,

So is the mind of the man.    Vainly does each, as he glides,

Fable and

Of the lands which the river of

Had left ere he woke on its breast,

Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed.

Only the tract where he

He wots of; only the thoughts,

Raised by the objects he passes, are his.

Who can see the green earth any

As she was by the sources of Time?

Who imagines her fields as they

In the sunshine, unworn by the plough?

Who thinks as they thought,

The tribes who then roam'd on her breast,

Her vigorous, primitive sons?

What

Now reads in her bosom as

As Rebekah read, when she

At eve by the palm-shaded well?

Who guards in her

As deep, as pellucid a

Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?    What bard,

At the height of his vision, can

Of God, of the world, of the soul,

With a plainness as near,

As flashing as Moses

When he lay in the night by his

On the starlit Arabian waste?

Can rise and

The beck of the Spirit like him?

This tract which the river of

Now flows through with us, is the plain.

Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.

Border'd by cities and

With a thousand cries is its stream.

And we on its breast, our

Are confused as the cries which we hear,

Changing and shot as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has

For ever the course of the river of Time.  That cities will crowd to its

In a blacker, incessanter line;

That the din will be more on its banks,

Denser the trade on its stream,

Flatter the plain where it flows,

Fiercer the sun overhead.

That never will those on its

See an ennobling sight,

Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us we know not,

And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply, the river of Time—As it grows, as the towns on its

Fling their wavering

On a wider, statelier stream—May acquire, if not the

Of its early mountainous shore,

Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the

Of the grey expanse where he floats,

Freshening its current and spotted with

As it draws to the Ocean, may

Peace to the soul of the man on its breast—As the pale waste widens around him,

As the banks fade dimmer away,

As the stars come out, and the

Brings up the

Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.