Mind and Soul
Hark! the awe-whisperd’d prayer, “God spare my mind!”
Dust unto dust, the mortal to the clod;
But the high place, the altar that has shrined
Thine image,—spare, O God!
Thought, the grand link from human life to Thee,
The humble reed that by the Shadowy River
Responds in music to the melody
Of spheres that hymn for ever,—
The order of the mystic world within,
The airy girth of all things near and far;
Sense, though of sorrow,—memory, though of sin,—
Gleams through the dungeon bar,—
Vouchsafe me to the last!—Though none may mark
The solemn pang, nor soothe the parting breath,
Still let me seek for God amid the dark,
And face, unblinded, Death!
Whence is this fine distinction twixt the twain
Rays of the Maker in the lamp of clay
Spirit and Mind?—strike the material brain,
And soul seems hurl’d away.
Touch but a nerve, and Brutus is a slave;
A nerve, and Plato drivels! Was it mind,
Or soul, that taught the wise one in the cave,
The freeman in the wind?
If mind—O Soul! what is thy task on earth?
If soul! O wherefore can a touch destroy,
Or lock in Lethé’s Acherontian dearth,
The Immortal’s grief and joy?
Hark, how a child can babble of the cells
Wherein, beneath the perishable brow,
Fancy invents, and Memory chronicles,
And Reason asks—as now:
Mapp’d are the known dominions of the thought,
But who shall find the palace of the soul?
Along what channels shall the source be sought,
The well-spring of the whole?
Look round, vain questioner,—all space survey,
Where’er thou lookest, lo, how clear is Mind!
The laws that part the darkness from the day,
And the sweet Pleïads bind,
The thought, the will, the art, the elaborate power
Of the Great Cause from whence the All began,
Gaze on the star, or bend above the flower,
Still speak of Mind to man.
But the arch soul of soul—from which the law
Is but the shadow, who on earth can see?
What guess cleaves upward through the deeps of awe,
Unspeakable, to thee?
As in Creation lives the Father Soul,
So lives the soul He breathed amidst the clay;
Round it the thoughts on starry axles roll,
Life flows and ebbs away.
If chaos smote the universe again,
And new Chaldeans shudder’d to explore
Amidst the maddening elements in vain
The harmonious Mind of yore,
Would not God live the same?—the Unseen Spirit,
Whether that life or wills or wrecks Creation?—
So lives, distinct, the god-spark we inherit,
When Mind is desolation.