| A FLAME in my heart is kindled by the might of the morn’s pure breath; | |
| A passion beyond all passion; a faith that eclipses faith; | |
| A joy that is more than gladness; a hope that outsoars desire; | |
| A love that consumes and quickens; a soul-transfiguring fire. | |
| My life is possessed and mastered: my heart is inspired and filled. | 5 |
| All other visions have faded: all other voices are stilled. | |
| My doubts are vainer than shadows: my fears are idler than dreams: | |
| They vanish like breaking bubbles, those old soul-torturing themes. | |
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| The riddles of life are cancelled, the problems that bred despair: | |
| I cannot guess them or solve them, but I know that they are not there. | 10 |
| They are past, they are all forgotten, the breeze has blown them away; | |
| For life’s inscrutable meaning is clear as the dawn of day. | |
| It is there—the secret of Nature—there in the morning’s glow; | |
| There in the speaking stillness; there in the rose-flushed snow. | |
| It is here in the joy and rapture; here in my pulsing breast: | 15 |
| I feel what has ne’er been spoken: I know what has ne’er been guessed. | |
| |
| The rose-lit clouds of morning; the sun-kissed mountain heights; | |
| The orient streaks and flushes; the mingling shadows and lights; | |
| The flow of the lonely river; the voice of its distant stream; | |
| The mists that rise from the meadows, lit up by the sun’s first beam;— | 20 |
| They mingle and melt as I watch them; melt and mingle and die. | |
| The land is one with the water: the earth is one with the sky. | |
| The parts are as parts no longer: Nature is All and One: | |
| Her life is achieved, completed: her days of waiting are done | |
| |
| I breathe the breath of the morning. I am one with the one World-Soul. | 25 |
| I live my own life no longer, but the life of the living Whole. | |
| I am more than self: I am selfless: I am more than self: I am I. | |
| I have found the springs of my being in the flush of the eastern sky. | |
| I—the true self, the spirit, the self that is born of death— | |
| I have found the flame of my being in the morn’s ambrosial breath. | 30 |
| I lose my life for a season: I lose it beyond recall: | |
| But I find it renewed, rekindled, in the life of the One, the All. | |
| I look not forward or backward: the abysses of time are nought. | |
| From pole to pole of the heavens I pass in a flash of thought. | |
| I clasp the world to my bosom: I feel its pulse in my breast,— | 35 |
| The pulse of measureless motion, the pulse of fathomless rest. | |
| Is it motion or rest that thrills me? Is it lightning or moonlit peace? | |
| Am I freer than waves of ether, or prisoned beyond release? | |
| I know not; but through my spirit, within me, around, above, | |
| The world-wide river is streaming, the river of life and love. | 40 |
| Silent, serene, eternal, passionless, perfect, pure;— | |
| I may not measure its windings, but I know that its aim is sure. | |
| In its purity seethes all passion: in its silence resounds all song: | |
| Its strength is builded of weakness: its right is woven of wrong. | |
| I am borne afar on its bosom; yet its source and its goal are mine, | 45 |
| From the sacred springs of Creation to the ocean of love Divine. | |
| I have ceased to think or to reason: there is nothing to ponder or prove: | |
| I hope, I believe no longer: I am lost in a dream of love. | |
