Development

MILLIONS of years ago, within a lair
Gorgeous and rank with monstrous leaf and bloom,
A shape inhuman, yet with eyes aglare
With human gleams, escaped the lightning’s doom.

Long shudders shook the huge and hairy form,
Spurned from the lightning’s beauty-blasting path;
And dumb with fear it cowered, until the storm
Thrilled in remoter thunder-throbs of wrath.

Then, as once more the rainbow robed the earth
In radiant gossamer of dew and fire,
The creature slumbered, and its brain gave birth
To dreams of strange prevision and desire.

’Mid shadows of unconsciousness there grew
The gradual inkling of a shape to be,
Whose brows were blessed with the sweet light whereto
Men give the name of immortality.

The dull brute stirred : through his lethargic blood
Life for a moment flushed with quicker pace,
As though his being faintly felt the flood
Of dawning wisdom in the distant race.

For who shall say when first the brain of beast
To harbor human attributes began ?
Or when rude dreams, to lower sense released,
Forefelt the advent of approaching man ?

Perchance the soul that trembles in the seed
Has faint foreshadowings of leaf and flower;
Within its secret heart, perhaps, is freed
Some feeble prescience of the forest s power.

There is a spirit in all things that live,
Which hints of patient change from kind to kind ;
And yet no words its mystic sense may give,
Strange as a dream of radiance to the blind.

And as, in time unspeakably remote,
Vague frenzies, in inferior brains set free,
Presaged a power no language could denote,
So dreams the mortal of the god to be.