I

Light and night, whose clouds and glories change and mingle and
divide,
Veil the truth whereof they witness, show the truth of things
they hide.
Through the darkness and the splendour of the centuries, loud or
dumb,
Shines and wanes and shines the spirit, lit with love of life to
come.
Man, the soul made flesh, that knows not death from life, and
fain would know,
Sees the face of time change colour as its tides recoil and flow.
All his hope and fear and faith and doubt, if aught at all they
be,
Live the life of clouds and sunbeams, born of heaven or earth or
sea.
All are buoyed and blown and brightened by their hour's evasive
breath:
All subside and quail and darken when their hour is done to
death.
Yet, ere faith, a wandering water, froze and curdled into creeds,
Earth, elate as heaven, adored the light that quickens dreams to
deeds.

Invisible: eye hath not seen it, and ear hath not heard as the
spirit hath heard
From the shrine that is lit not of sunlight or starlight the sound
of a limitless word.
And visible: none that hath eyes to behold what the spirit must
perish or see
Can choose but behold it and worship: a shrine that if light were
as darkness would be.
Of cloud and of change is the form of the fashion that man may
behold of it wrought:
Of iron and truth is the mystic mid altar, where worship is none
but of thought.
No prayer may go up to it, climbing as incense of gladness or
sorrow may climb:
No rapture of music may ruffle the silence that guards it, and
hears not of time.
As the winds of the wild blind ages alternate in passion of light
and of cloud,
So changes the shape of the veil that enshrouds it with darkness
and light for a shroud.
And the winds and the clouds and the suns fall silent, and fade out
of hearing or sight,
And the shrine stands fast and is changed not, whose likeness was
changed as a cloud in the night.

All the storms of time, and wrath of many winds, may carve no
trace
On the viewless altar, though the veil bear many a name and face:
Many a live God's likeness woven, many a scripture dark with awe,
Bids the veil seem verier iron than the word of life's own law.
Till the might of change hath rent it with a rushing wind in
twain,
Stone or steel it seems, whereon the wrath of chance is wreaked
in vain:
Stone or steel, and all behind it or beyond its lifted sign
Cloud and vapour, no subsistence of a change-unstricken shrine.
God by god flits past in thunder, till his glories turn to
shades:
God to god bears wondering witness how his gospel flames and
fades.
More was each of these, while yet they were, than man their
servant seemed:
Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he
dreamed.

Yet haply or surely, if vision were surer than theirs who rejoiced
that they saw,
Man might not but see, through the darkness of godhead, the light
that is surety and law.
On the stone that the close-drawn cloud which veils it awhile makes
cloudlike stands
The word of the truth everlasting, unspoken of tongues and
unwritten of hands.
By the sunbeams and storms of the centuries engraven, and approved
of the soul as it reads,
It endures as a token dividing the light from the darkness of
dreams and of deeds.
The faces of gods on the face of it carven, or gleaming behind and
above,
Star-glorified Uranus, thunderous Jehovah, for terror or worship or
love,
Change, wither, and brighten as flowers that the wind of eternity
sheds upon time,
All radiant and transient and awful and mortal, and leave it
unmarred and sublime.
As the tides that return and recede are the fears and the hopes of
the centuries that roll,
Requenched and rekindled: but strong as the sun is the sense of it
shrined in the soul.