The Missing Leaf

BY chance, in the dusty old library foraging,
Seeking some food for my fancy, I drew
From its shelf a stout volume, entitled The Origin
And End of Creation (a sort of review
Of the Works of the Lord, by a confident critic).
“ Now here should be something,” I said, “ that’s worth saving,—
Profound, philosophical, learned, analytic,” —
Just what my insatiable soul had been craving.

I bore the rich prize to a nook by the window,
And revelled straightway in the lore of the ages, —
Chinese, Persian, Roman, Greek, Hebrew, and Hindoo,
With modern research to its ultimate stages :
All which, to what followed, was but the musician’s
Light touches to see if his strings were in tune, a verse
Used by the wizard to conjure his visions:
Then opened the writer’s grand scheme of the universe.

He held the round world in his hand like a watch,
With the sun and the stars for the chain and the seal;
Showed the cases of gold and of crystal, the notch
Where the thing was wound up, pivot, main-spring, and wheel,
And — in short, you’d have fancied, his knowledge was such,
He could take it to pieces and put it together,
And set it agoing again with a touch
Of just the right oil from his erudite feather !

I read and read on, by divine curiosity
Fired, in pursuit of one still missing page,
One leaf, to redeem this portentous verbosity,
Then— Well, I just flung down the book in a rage;
Through the window, out into the garden I sprung,
Put screens of red roses and jasmines between us,
And cooled my hot brow and my anger among
The dear little illiterate pinks and verbenas.

The martins that flew to their summer-house door,
The voluble finches their little ones feeding,
The snail with his pack on his back, taught me more
Than all the pedantic sad stuff I’d been reading.
The river moved by without ripple or swirl,
The world in its bosom, a wondrous illusion !
And even the slow kitchen smoke’s upward curl
Hinted beauties beyond my great author’s solution.

A spider was weaving his net by the stream ;
And in the thin gossamer’s light agitation
I saw my philosopher flaunting his scheme
Before the vast, mystical web of creation !
I watched the still swan on the water afloat,
The sisterly birches bowed over the glass,
Their white limbs reflected, the boys in their boat,
The colts on the bank, fetlock-deep in the grass ;

I heard, over hay-fields and clover-lots wafted,
The lowing of kine ; and so cool was the kiss
Of the breeze on my temples, — the air, as I quaffed it,
So sweet to my sense, — that mere breathing was bliss!
And I cried, “ Who can say bow this life has its being ;
How landscape and sky with delight overfill me ;
Why sound should enchant ; how these eyes have their seeing ;
How passion and rapture enkindle and thrill me ?

“ I prize the least pebble your science can bring,
Or whispering shell, from the shore of life’s ocean ;
No word the true prophet or poet may sing,
But deep in my heart stirs responsive emotion :
Yet who can tell aught of this afternoon glory,
This light and this ether, this wave and this clover ?
Not a syllable lisped, of the marvellous story,
In all your nine hundred dull pages and over !

“ What moulds to my likeness these limbs and these features,
This tangible form to the form hid within it ?
Bright robe renewed daily and nightly by Nature’s
Invisible spindles, that ceaselessly spin it,
Marble-firm fibre and milky-fine filament:
The pulse’s soft shuttle mysteriously weaving
From dust and corruption a living habiliment:
Oldest of miracles, still past believing !

“ And you — did you fancy that you could infold it,
And label it, fast in your tissue of fallacies ?
While firm in the grasp of your reason you hold it,
It flies, it defies your most subtile analysis !
There’s something that will not be measured and weighed
And brought to the test of your last sublimation ;
And this is the little mistake that you made,
That you left it quite out of your grand calculation.

“ Though other than bigots have deemed, the Creator
Is not the blind physical force you believe him ;
Not less, O, be sure, but unspeakably greater,
Than creeds have proclaimed, or than sages conceive him !
This sky-enclosed world was all built by his law ;
Yet only from perfect foreknowledge and plan
The crystalline marvel arose without flaw,
And life through all forms circled upward to man.

“ Though in their beginning all things be one essence,
Through all, over all, flows the formative Soul ;
In each particle thrills the Divine Omnipresence,
As gravity binds and embraces the whole.
Of nothing comes nothing : springs rise not above
Their source in the far-hidden heart of the mountains :
Whence then have descended the Wisdom and Love
That in man leap to light in intelligent fountains ? ”

So, bathed in the sunset, I stood by the stream,
With a heart full of joy and devout adoration,
Enwrapped in my mystery, dreaming my dream,
Till my soul seemed dissolved in the Soul of Creation.
I looked, and saw wonder on wonder without,
And, looking within, beheld wonder on wonder,
And trembled between, like the swan floating out,
With one sky arched above and one sky imaged under !