Page:A channel passage and other poems (IA channelpassageot00swinrich).pdf/55

Yet haply or surely, if vision were surer than theirs who
rejoiced that they saw,
Man might not but see, through the darkness of godhead,
the light that is surety and law.
On the stone that the close-drawn cloud which veils it
awhile makes cloudlike stands
The word of the truth everlasting, unspoken of tongues
and unwritten of hands.
By the sunbeams and storms of the centuries engraven,
and approved of the soul as it reads,
It endures as a token dividing the light from the darkness
of dreams and of deeds.
The faces of gods on the face of it carven, or gleaming
behind and above,
Star-glorified Uranus, thunderous Jehovah, for terror or
worship or love,
Change, wither, and brighten as flowers that the wind of
eternity sheds upon time,
All radiant and transient and awful and mortal, and leave
it unmarred and sublime.