THE EARTH.
Reading edition
———
BY R. H. STODDARD.
———
As one who walks with eyes upon the ground,
Arrested slow beside a dusty mound,
Where swarms of ants are bustling in the sand,
As if they had a Universe on hand,
Surveys their nothings with a quiet smile,
And stops to muse and meditate a while—
Even so the sage with philosophic mind
Looks down upon the earth and all mankind!
And yet withal this little orb is grand,
With its circumference of sea and land:
The Ocean girds it with a belt immense,
Heaving in billowy magnificence
Round Continents with all their subject lands,
A thousand sceptres in their giant hands!—
And mountains loom majestical on high,
And lift their foreheads in the blank of sky,
Bathed in its brightness, while their robes of snow
Trail o’er the tallest pines, and far below,
Poured from their urns, the streams divide the plain
And bear their tributes to the sounding main.
And the round hills and verdant solitudes
That slumber in the heart of trackless woods;
The broad champain, the hollow vale and mead,
And the green pastures where the cattle feed
Deep in the daisies; and the silver brooks,
And the long winding lanes, and grassy nooks,
All, all, are clothed in loveliness and light,
The various beauty of the day and night,
While the great Earth, as when its flight begun,
Wheels like a mighty eagle round the Sun!
Yes! Earth is beautiful in every phase,
Covered with glory and perpetual bays;—
What pomps and pageants fill the glowing east,
Hung like a palace on a bridal feast,
When clouds of purple standards are unrolled,
And morning lifts its diadem of gold!
What streams of radiance flood the azure field,
When the Noon marches with his shining shield
And scales the eternal steep of Heaven alone,
And looks o’er Nature from his burning throne!
What dreamy softness in the melting west
When Evening sinks in holiness to rest,
And the young crescent moon, an argent barque,
Drifts up the starry ocean of the dark!
And how sublime the black tempestuous cloud,
Where thunders shout their prophecies aloud
With tongues of fire, that flash from sphere to sphere,
While congregated nations quake in fear!
How glorious all! how changeless and serene
Where generations vanish from the scene.
Yet what is Earth in Nature’s wondrous whole,
Which mirrors dimly its Creative Soul?
Less than ant-hill, even the smallest one,
Whose gates thrown back exclude the summer sun.
A single grain of sand from out the sea,
The deep of Chaos and Eternity,
Whose bubbles are The Ages dim and vast,
Melting into the dark abysmal Past!
A mote in the cerulean space of air,
One of the innumerous myriads floating there,
Wafted of old from God’s eternal seat,
Where stars and suns lie thick as dust around his feet!