Nor learn of the place whence he journeyed,
Nor guess whereunto he must go?
Alas! after nights spent in searching,
After days and years, what can he tell,—
What imagine of mysteries higher
Than heaven, and deeper than hell?
At end of the difficult journey,
With restless inquiries so rife,
He knows what his spirit discovered
At the shadowy threshold of life;
He feels what the tenderness beaming
From eyes bending, wistful, above,
Revealed to his heart when an infant,—
The care, unforgetting, of love!
The hawk toward the south her wings stretcheth,
The eagle ascendeth the sky;
They know not the guide who conducts them,
Yet onward, unerring, they fly:
In the desert the dew falleth gently,—
In the desert where no man is;
And the herb wisteth not who hath sent it,
