| SNOWFLAKES downfloating from the void | |
| Upon my face, | |
| Spilth of the silent alchemy employed | |
| In deeps of space | |
| Where viewless everlasting fingers ply | 5 |
| The power whose secret is the mystery | |
| That doth my world encase; | |
| |
| Power that with equal ease outshakes | |
| Yon architrave | |
| Of massy stars in heaven and these frail flakes | 10 |
| Earth’s floor that pave; | |
| Swings the flamed orbs with infinite time for dower | |
| And strews these velvet jewels not an hour | |
| Of sunshine that will brave; | |
| |
| Yet of whose clustered crystals none | 15 |
| But speaks the act | |
| Of the hand that steers each ceaseless-wheeling sun | |
| And to whose tact | |
| Fire-wreath and spangled ice alike respond; | |
| Thoughts from the void frozen to flower and frond, | 20 |
| Divinely all compact; | |
| Snowflakes, of pureness unalloyed, | |
| That in dark space | |
| Are built, and spilt from out the teeming void | |
| With prodigal grace, | 25 |
| Air-quarried temples though you fall scarce-felt | |
| And all your delicate architecture melt | |
| To tears upon my face,— | |
| I too am such encrystalled breath | |
| In the void planned | 30 |
| And bodied forth to surge of life and death; | |
| And as I stand | |
| Beneath this sacramental spilth of snow, | |
| Crumbling, you whisper: ‘Fear thou not to go | |
| Back to the viewless hand; | 35 |
| ‘Thence to be moulded forth again | |
| Through time and space | |
| Till thy imperishable self attain | |
| Such strength and grace | |
| Through endless infinite refinement passed | 40 |
| By the eternal Alchemist that at last | |
| Thou see Him face to face.’ | |
