Читать книгу Last Verses - Coolidge Susan - Страница 7

JACOB BOEHME, Sage and Mystic, wert thou right or wert thou wrong,

In believing and upholding that all human souls belong

To some elemental structure, be they weak or be they strong?

That each separate spirit made is of one element, and shows,

By its power or by its weakness, its unrest or its repose,

Whether earth, air, fire, or water is the Source from which it flows?

’Tis a difficult conclusion; but, as in the jewel’s blue,

Red and rose and green and amber flash and leap and sparkle through,

Through your speculative fancy seems to scintillate the true.

For the variance of the creature whom we call our fellow-man,

Framed alike in needs and passions, on the self-same human plan,

Grows more wide, more past believing, as we study it and scan.

Ah, the temperaments, the fateful, how they front us and surprise,

Looking with bewildering distance out of wistful, alien eyes,

Never drawing any nearer, or to hate or sympathize.

Eager, dominant, all unresting are the spirits born of Fire,

Burning with a fitful fever, ever reaching high and higher,

Shrivelling weaker wills before them in the heat of their desire.

Cool, elusive, fluctuating, hard to fix and strangely fair

Are the difficult, grievous, grieving souls which born of Water are —

Ours to-day, not ours to-morrow; never ours to hold and wear.

Vainly love and passion battle ’gainst their unresisting chill,

Like the oar-stroke in the water which the drops make haste to fill,

The impression melts and wavers, the cool surface fronts us still.

But the souls of Air! ah, sweetest, rarest of the human kind,

They the poets are, the singers, making music for the mind,

Lifting up the weight of living like a fresh and rushing wind.

And the souls of Earth, dear, steadfast, firm of root and sure of stay,

Not disdaining commonplaces, not afraid of every day,

Taking from the air and water and the sunshine what they may.

Theirs the dower of happy giving, theirs the heritage of Fate

Which, when faith has grown to fulness, and the little is made great,

Brings to love its true rewarding, harvested or soon or late.

Jacob Boehme, by-gone mystic, gifted with a strange insight,

As I read your yellowed pages, which in former times were white,

And review my men and women, half I deem that you were right.