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For well, ah well, the darkened vale recalls

A thousand times ten thousand vanished suns; Ten thousand sunsets from whose blackened walls Reflamed the white and living day that runs,

In light which brings all beauty to the birth,
Deathless forever round the ancient earth.

II

O Thou the Lord and Maker of life and light!
Full heavy are the burdens that do weigh
Our spirits earthward, as through twilight gray
We journey to the end and rest of night;
Tho' well we know to the deep inward sight

Darkness is but Thy shadow, and the day
Where Thou art never dies, but sends its ray
Through the wide universe with restless might.
O Lord of Light, steep Thou our souls in Thee!
That when the daylight trembles into shade,
And falls the silence of mortality,

And all is done, we shall not be afraid,

But pass from light to light; from earth's dull gleam Into the very heart and heaven of our dream.

LYRICS

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LYRICS

PART I

ODE

I

I AM the spirit of the morning sea;

I am the awakening and the glad surprise;

I fill the skies

With laughter and with light.

Not tears, but jollity

At birth of day brim the strong man-child's eyes.
Behold the white

Wide threefold beams that from the hidden sun
Rise swift and far-

One where Orion keeps

His armèd watch, and one

That to the midmost starry heaven upleaps;
The third blots out the firm-fixt Northern Star.
I am the wind that shakes the glittering wave,
Hurries the snowy spume along the shore
And dies at last in some far, murmuring cave.
My voice thou hearest in the breaker's roar
That sound which never failed since time began,
And first around the world the shining tumult ran.

II

I light the sea and wake the sleeping land. My footsteps on the hills make music, and my hand Plays like a harper's on the wind-swept pines.

With the wind and the day

I follow round the world away! away!
Wide over lake and plain my sunlight shines
And every wave and every blade of grass
Doth know me as I pass;

And me the western sloping mountains know, and me
The far-off, golden sea.

O sea, whereon the passing sun doth lie!

O man, who watchest by that golden sea!

Grieve not, O, grieve not thou, but lift thine eye

And see me glorious in the sunset sky!

I love not the night

III

Save when the stars are bright,

Or when the moon

Fills the white air with silence like a tune.

Yea, even the night is mine

When the Northern Lights outshine,

And all the wild heavens throb in ecstasy divine;

Yea, mine deep midnight, tho' the black sky lowers,

When the sea burns white and breaks on the shore in starry showers.

IV

I am the laughter of the new-born child
On whose soft-breathing sleep an angel smiled.
And I all sweet first things that are:

First songs of birds, not perfect as at last, —
Broken and incomplete,-

But sweet, O, sweet!

And I the first faint glimmer of a star

To the wreckt ship that tells the storm is past;
The first keen smells and stirrings of the Spring;

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