sweetness Of certitude of such concreteness, How should I draw the hue and scope Of substances I only hope Or blaze upon a mortal screen The evidence of things not seen? This art of ours but grows and stirs Experience when it registers, And you know well as I know well This autumn of time in which we dwell Is not an age of revelations Solid as once, but intimations That touch us with warm misty fingers Leaving a nameless sense that lingers That sight is blind and Time's a snare And earth less solid than the air And deep below all seeming things There sits a steady king of kings A radiant ageless permanence, A quenchless fount of virtue whence We draw our life; a sense that makes A staunch conviction nothing shakes Of our own immortality. And though, being man, with certain glee I eat and drink, though I suffer pain, And love and hate and love again Well or in mode contemptible, Thus shackled by the body's spell I see through pupils of the beast Though it be faint and blurred with mist A Star that travels in the East. I see what I can, not what I will In things that move, things that are still, Thin motion, even cloudier rest, I see the symbols God hath drest The moveless trees, the trees that wave The clouds that heavenly highways have, Horses that run, rocks that are fixt, Streams that have rest and motion mixt, The main with its abiding flux, The wind that up my chimney sucks A mounting waterfall of flame, Sticks, straws, dust, beetles and that same Old blazing sun the Psalmist saw A testifier to the law. Divinely to the heart they speak Saying how they are but weak Wan will o' the wisps o'er the crystal sea; But stays that sea still dark to me. Did I now glibly insolent Chart the ulterior firmament, Would you not know my words were lies, Where not my testimonial eyes Mortal or spiritual lodge, Mere uncorroborated fudge? Praise me, though praise I do not want, Rather, that I have cast much cant, That what I see and feel I write Read what I can in this dim light Granted to me in nether night. And though I am vague and shrink to guess God's everlasting purposes, And never save in perplext dream Have caught the least authentic gleam Of the great kingdom and the throne In the world that lies behind our own, I have not lacked my certainties, I have not haggard moaned the skies, Now waged unnecessary strife Nor scorned nor overvalued life. And though you say my attitude Is questioning, concede my mood Does never bring to tongue or pen Accents of gloomy modern men Who wail or hail the death of God And weigh and measure man the clod, Or say they draw reluctant breath And musically mourn that Death Is a queen omnipotent of woe And Life her lean cicisbeo, Abject and pale, whom vampire-like She playeth with ere she shall strike, And pose sad riddles 

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