FullReads

26.

Some say that thou their endless love host won
By deeds for them which I may not believe
Thou ever didst, or ever willedst done:
What matter, so they love thee? They receive
Eternal more than the poor loom and wheel
Of their invention ever wove and spun.–
I love thee for I must, thine all from head to heel.

27.

The love of thee will set all notions right.
Right save by love no thought can be or may;
Only love’s knowledge is the primal light.
Questions keep camp along love’s shining coast–
Challenge my love and would my entrance stay:
Across the buzzing, doubting, challenging host,
I rush to thee, and cling, and cry–Thou know’st.

28.

Oh, let me live in thy realities,
Nor substitute my notions for thy facts,
Notion with notion making leagues and pacts;
They are to truth but as dream-deeds to acts,
And questioned, make me doubt of everything.–
“O Lord, my God,” my heart gets up and cries,
“Come thy own self, and with thee my faith bring.”

29.

O master, my desires to work, to know,
To be aware that I do live and grow–
All restless wish for anything not thee,
I yield, and on thy altar offer me.
Let me no more from out thy presence go,
But keep me waiting watchful for thy will–
Even while I do it, waiting watchful still.

30.

Thou art the Lord of life, the secret thing.
Thou wilt give endless more than I could find,
Even if without thee I could go and seek;
For thou art one, Christ, with my deepest mind,
Duty alive, self-willed, in me dost speak,
And to a deeper purer being sting:
I come to thee, my life, my causing kind.

31.

Nothing is alien in thy world immense–
No look of sky or earth or man or beast;
“In the great hand of God I stand, and thence”
Look out on life, his endless, holy feast.
To try to feel is but to court despair,
To dig for a sun within a garden-fence:
Who does thy will, O God, he lives upon thy air.

AUGUST.

1.

SO shall abundant entrance me be given
Into the truth, my life’s inheritance.
Lo! as the sun shoots straight from out his tomb,
God-floated, casting round a lordly glance
Into the corners of his endless room,
So, through the rent which thou, O Christ, hast riven,
I enter liberty’s divine expanse.

2.

It will be so–ah, so it is not now!
Who seeks thee for a little lazy peace,
Then, like a man all weary of the plough,
That leaves it standing in the furrow’s crease,
Turns from thy presence for a foolish while,
Till comes again the rasp of unrest’s file,
From liberty is distant many a mile.

3.

Like one that stops, and drinks, and turns, and goes
Into a land where never water flows,
There travels on, the dry and thirsty day,
Until the hot night veils the farther way,
Then turns and finds again the bubbling pool–
Here would I build my house, take up my stay,
Nor ever leave my Sychar’s margin cool.

4.

Keep me, Lord, with thee. I call from out the dark–
Hear in thy light, of which I am a spark.
I know not what is mine and what is thine–
Of branch and stem I miss the differing mark–
But if a mere hair’s-breadth me separateth,
That hair’s-breadth is eternal, infinite death.
For sap thy dead branch calls, O living vine!

5.

I have no choice, I must do what I can;
But thou dost me, and all things else as well;
Thou wilt take care thy child shall grow a man.
Rouse thee, my faith; be king; with life be one;
To trust in God is action’s highest kind;
Who trusts in God, his heart with life doth swell;
Faith opens all the windows to God’s wind.