To Whom all depths and distances are known;
And in the latter day
The tissue of the centuries that we
In part survey
But lose there where it falls
Beyond the world's horizons and the walls
And parapets of sense,
That panorama'd tapestry in all magnificence
One day all souls shall see
Perfected, from their stand in immortality.
4.
Inscrutable Love, how Thy millennial plan
Escapes the momentary glimpse of man
That in the span
Of Thy o'erarching care such havoc finds a place!
'Tis past believing
That Thy beneficent ends
So great a holocaust can yet embrace.
Surely Thy thought transcends
All our aghast conceiving
If it have guerdons that can make amends
For such terrestrial cataclysm;
Indifferent to the wrack of worlds, and schism
In the set frame of things,
The extinction of the suns, and systems' vanishings.
What unimagined solace waits the sons of men
Flung from the wheel of time to fall on sleep
In green oblivious coverts past our ken
Far from the roar of suns and heaven's azure steep.
What realms of colour, what demesnes of rainbow-light,
What vista'd slopes purpureal and shimmering to their gaze,
What gauze-like prospects rare, what irised cloud-lands bright,
Shall make atonement for the outrageous days.
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