I.

O NATURE! thou whom I have thought to love,
Seeing in thine the reflex of God's face,
A loathed abstraction would usurp thy place,—
While Him they not dethrone, they but disprove.
Weird Nature! can it be that joy is fled,
And bald unmeaning lurks beneath thy smile?
That beauty haunts the dust but to beguile,
And that with Order, Love and Hope are dead?

Pitiless Force, all-moving, all-unmoved,
Dread mother of unfathered worlds, assuage
Thy wrath on us,—be this wild life reproved,
And trampled into nothing in thy rage!
Vain prayer, although the last of human kind,—
Force is not wrath,—but only deaf and blind.
II.

Dread Force, in whom of old we loved to see
A nursing mother, clothing with her life
The seeds of Love divine,—with what sore strife
We hold or yield our thoughts of Love and thee!
Thou art not 'calm,' but restless as the ocean,
Filling with aimless toil the endless years—
Stumbling on thought, and throwing off the spheres,
Churning the Universe with mindless motion.

Dull fount of joy, unhallowed source of tears,
Cold motor of our fervid faith and song,
Dead, but engendering life, love, pangs, and fears,
Thou crownedst thy wild work with foulest wrong
When first thou lightedst on a seeming goal,
And darkly blundered on man's suffering soul.
III.

Blind Cyclops, hurling stones of destiny,
And not in fury!—working bootless ill,
In mere vacuity of mind and will—
Man's soul revolts against thy work and thee!
Slaves of a despot, conscienceless and nil,
Slaves, by mad chance befooled to think them free,
We still might rise, and with one heart agree
To mar the ruthless grinding of thy mill!

Dead tyrant, tho' our cries and groans pass by thee,
Man, cutting off from each new 'tree of life'
Himself, its fatal flower, could still defy thee,
In waging on thy work eternal strife,—
The races come and coming evermore,
Heaping with hecatombs thy dead-sea shore.
IV.

If we be fools of chance, indeed, and tend
No whither, then the blinder fools in this:
That, loving good, we live, in scorn of bliss,
Its wageless servants to the evil end.
If, at the last, man's thirst for higher things
Be quenched in dust, the giver of his life,
Why press with growing zeal a hopeless strife,—
Why—born for creeping—should he dream of wings?

O Mother Dust! thou hast one law so mild
We call it sacred—all thy creatures own it—
The tie which binds the parent and the child,—
Why has man's loving heart alone outgrown it?
Why hast thou travailed so to be denied,
So trampled by a would-be matricide?