| ‘THE SELF is Peace; that Self am I. | |
| The Self is Strength; that Self am I.’ | |
| What needs this trembling strife | |
| With phantom threats of Form and Time and Space? | |
| Could once my Life | 5 |
| Be shorn of their illusion, and efface | |
| From its clear heaven that stormful imagery, | |
| My Self were seen | |
| An Essence free, unchanging, strong, serene. | |
| |
| The Self is Peace. How placid dawns | 10 |
| The Summer’s parent hour | |
| Over the dewy maze that drapes the fields, | |
| Each drooped wild flower, | |
| Or where the lordship of the garden shields | |
| Select Court beauties and exclusive lawns! | 15 |
| ’Tis but the show | |
| And fitful dream of Peace the Self can know. | |
| |
| The Self is Strength. Let Nature rave, | |
| And tear her maddened breast, | |
| Now doom the drifting ship, with blackest frown, | 20 |
| Or now, possessed | |
| With rarer frenzy, wreck the quaking town, | |
| And bury quick beneath her earthy wave— | |
| She cannot break | |
| One fibre of that Strength, one atom shake. | 25 |
| |
| The Self is one with the Supreme | |
| Father in fashioning, | |
| Though clothed in perishable weeds that feel | |
| Pain’s mortal sting, | |
| The unlifting care, the wound that will not heal; | 30 |
| Yet these are not the Self—they only seem. | |
| From faintest jar | |
| Of whirring worlds the true Self broods afar. | |
| |
| Afar he whispers to the mind | |
| To rest on the Good Law, | 35 |
| To know that naught can fall without its range, | |
| Nor any flaw | |
| Of Chance disturb its reign, or shadow of Change; | |
| That what can bind the life the Law must bind— | |
| Whatever hand | 40 |
| Dispose the lot, it is by that Command; | |
| |
| To know no suffering can beset | |
| Our lives, that is not due, | |
| That is not forged by our own act and will; | |
| Calmly to view | 45 |
| Whate’er betide of seeming good or ill. | |
| The worst we can conceive but pays some debt | |
| Or breaks some seal, | |
| To free us from the bondage of the Wheel. | |
