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Once more, you savage heavens, I ask of you—
- I, looking up to those relentless eyes
- That, now the greater lamp is gone below,
- Begin to muster in the listening skies;
- In all the shining circuits you have gone
- About this theatre of human woe,
- What greater sorrow have you gazed upon
- Than down this narrow chink you witness still;
- And which, did you yourselves not fore-devise,
- You registered for others to fulfil!
- Thus then what I for misadventure blamed,
- Directly draws me where my wishes aim'd.
- You and the world who have surnamed me "Sage"
- Know that I owe that title, if my due,
- To my long meditation on the book
- Which ever lying open overhead—
- The book of heaven, I mean—so few have read.
- For, sure and certain prophets as the stars,
- Although they err not, he who reads them may.
- The curtain is undrawn,
- And each must play his part out manfully,
- Leaving the rest to heaven.
- Why, now I think on't, I have read of such
- A silver-hair'd magician with a wand,
- Who in a moment, with a wave of it,
- Turn'd rags to jewels, clowns to emperors,
- By some benigner magic than the stars
- Spirited poor good people out of hand
- From all their woes; in some enchanted sleep
- Carried them off on cloud or dragon-back
- Over the mountains, over the wide Deep,
- And set them down to wake in Fairyland.
- Oh, those stars,
- Those stars, that too far up from human blame
- To clear themselves, or careless of the charge,
- Still bear upon their shining shoulders all
- The guilt men shift upon them!
- Like sire, like son.
- What some precocious warmth may spill,
- May not an early frost as surely kill?
- Beware! Beware!
- Subdue the kindled Tiger in your eye!
- Ay—wondrous how
- Imagination in a sleeping brain
- Out of the uncontingent senses draws
- Sensations strong as from the real touch;
- That we not only laugh aloud, and drench
- With tears our pillow; but in the agony
- Of some imaginary conflict, fight
- And struggle—ev'n as you did; some, 'tis thought,
- Under the dreamt-of stroke of death have died.
- By the false spirits' nice contrivance thus
- A little truth oft leavens all the false,
- The better to delude us.
- Imagination, once lit up within
- And unconditional of time and space,
- Can pour infinities.
- Once the dreamer begins to dream he dreams,
- His foot is on the very verge of waking.
- Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul.
- And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,
- Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,
- How if our waking life, like that of sleep,
- Be all a dream in that eternal life
- To which we wake not till we sleep in death?
- One man—like this—but only so much longer
- As life is longer than a summer's day,
- Believed himself a king upon his throne,
- And play'd at hazard with his fellows' lives,
- Who cheaply dream'd away their lives to him.
- The sailor dream'd of tossing on the flood:
- The soldier of his laurels grown in blood:
- The lover of the beauty that he knew
- Must yet dissolve to dusty residue:
- The merchant and the miser of his bags
- Of finger'd gold; the beggar of his rags:
- And all this stage of earth on which we seem
- Such busy actors, and the parts we play'd,
- Substantial as the shadow of a shade,
- And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!
- Was it not said, sir,
- By some philosopher as yet unborn,
- That any chimney-sweep who for twelve hours
- Dreams himself king is happy as the king
- Who dreams himself twelve hours a chimney-sweep?
- What odds, when Fate is one's antagonist!
- Whether wake or dreaming, this I know,
- How dream-wise human glories come and go;
- Whose momentary tenure not to break,
- Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,
- So fairly carry the full cup, so well
- Disorder'd insolence and passion quell,
- That there be nothing after to upbraid
- Dreamer or doer in the part he play'd,
- Whether To-morrow's dawn shall break the spell,
- Or the Last Trumpet of the eternal Day,
- When Dreaming with the Night shall pass away.
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