Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/96

Whose names, heard in my brain, bred mighty forms,
Like tall angelic spirits of the spheres
On balanced planets rushing, fiery orbs;
Athene, Rome, Albion, America
Whirled forward, kindling time. How should man fail?
And ever from the deep sprang destiny,
And to fresh ages gave another morn.
I served because I believed,—a single man
Among the phantom nations. Long I believed;
For when I brooded once the wrack of time,
A fire arose within my living bones,
And rapt me, prophet-wise, out of that flesh
Which yet engarbs my thought, models my words,
Into the thoughtless, wordless infinite,
Where truth abides; great radiance entered in
The temple of my being, that shook and flamed
With silent thunders of another world,
Heard in the soul,—and, heard, they died away;
And often, gazing on a fragile flower,
Or little acts of mute, unconscious love,
Or listening to dim stories of old wars,
I grew aware of some transcendent sphere,
Of which these were the brief, decaying forms;
And, grown a man, seized in the mystic sweep

Of that which comes and goes without a name,