The Secret of fitness and beauty
In everything modestly lurks,
And happy for Man is the duty
Of searching out God in His works;
He showeth Himself in the creature,
And nature sun-shadows Him thus,
Discovering, feature by feature,
The face of Jehovah to us!

By worlds, without number or measure,
How glorious His smile on the skies,-
By air-bubbles, peopled with pleasure,
How gracious His glance and how wise!
To the stages that lead to perfection
Each delicate work He hath brought;
Nor ever will crush in rejection
One atom His fingers have wrought!

That traceried ice on the casement,
This crystallized snow from the sky,
Compel an adoring amazement
As miracles born but to die;
Yet, though the flakes melt, their star-clusters
Still live as fair types ever true,
Repeating these forms and these lustres
Eternally fashioned anew.

The bud in such tenderness folded,
The tesseraed palates of snails,
The mosses so daintily moulded,
The dragonfly's lace-latten sails,-
The grandeurs of cloudland and ocean,
The tints of each garden and grove,
The marvels of music and motion,
The wonders around and above,-

Should all this Creation be shatter'd,
This poem of God be as nought,
As if forsooth lightly it matter'd
He fail'd in the thing that He wrought?
Shall all be capriciously broken,
As children are wont with a toy,
Nor serve, through His fiat once spoken,
For drops of His river of joy?

Yes! death is but change of condition,
And change treadeth ever on change,
Whilst all things in happier fruition
Through ceaseless diversity range;
For nothing shall utterly perish
Which God hath created and made;
Each child of His love will He cherish
For age upon age undecay'd!

From angels who blaze in their station
To monads that breed in the dark,
With man in this midway relation
And all that have teem'd from his Ark,
Dependent, sustain'd, in connection
As links of one bright jewelled chain,
Creation grows on to perfection,
And all things for ever Remain!