Forebodings

What are ye?--Strangers from the Phantom shore?
Lights that precede Funereal Destinies,
Ev'n as the Spectres of the Sun, before
He rises from the dearth of Arctic seas?
What demon presence haunts the haggard air?
What ice-wind checks the blood and lifts the hair?

What are ye?--"Nightmares known not to the sane,
A sick man's sickly dreams"--the Leech replies,
Then prates he much of viscera, spleen, and brain,
And lays the Ghost with Galen;--"To the wise
All things are matter;" well, we would be taught,
Come, Leech, dissect the brain;--Now show me Thought!

Shame!--to the body, must the soul fulfil
A slavery thus subjected and entire?
Must every crevice into light be still
Choked with the clod? Each dread, and each desire
Of things unknown, be track'd unto its germ
In some crazed fibre rotting to the worm?

Trust we the dry philosophies that sneer
Back every guess into the world of spirit,
And what were left the present to revere?
And where would fade the future we inherit?
Try Heaven and Hell by the physician's test,
And men know neither--while they well digest!

What mortal hand the airy line can draw
'Twixt Superstition in its shadowy terror
And still Religion in its starry awe?--
Truth when sublime flows least distinct from error;
Light of itself eludes our human eyes;
Let it take colour, and it spans the skies!

Doubtful Foreshadows, have ye then of yore
Never been prophets, murmuring weal or woe?
Beckoning no Sylla over seas of gore?
Warning no Julius of the fatal blow?
Seen in no mother-guise by that pale son
Who led the Mede, and sleeps in Marathon?

You, the Earth-shakers from whose right hands war
Falls, as from Jove's the thunderbolt, obey;
Gaul's sceptic Caesar had his guardian star,
Stout Cromwell's iron creed its chosen day.
'Tis in proportion as men's lives are great,
That, fates themselves,--they glass the shades of Fate.

The wisest sage the antique wisdom knew,
Gazing into blue space long silent hours,
Would commune with his Genius: as the dew
Recruits the river, so the unseen Powers
Of Nature feed with thoughts spiritual, soul.--
Belief alone links knowledge to The Whole.

Hail, then, each gleam, albeit of angry skies,
Terrible never to the noble sight!
Hail the dread lightning, if it lift the eyes
Up from the dust into the Infinite!
Look through thy grate, thou saddest captive, Doubt,
And thank the flash that shows a Heaven without.