_I am the Lord._

V

I am the End to which the whole world strives:
Therefore are ye girdled with a wild desire and shod
With sorrow; for among you all no soul
Shall ever cease or sleep or reach its goal
Of union and communion with the Whole,
Or rest content with less than being God.
Still, as unending asymptotes, your lives
In all their myriad wandering ways
Approach Me with the progress of the golden days;
Approach Me; for my love contrives
That ye should have the glory of this
For ever; yea, that life should blend
With life and only vanish away
From day to wider wealthier day,
Like still increasing spheres of light that melt and merge in
wider spheres
Even as the infinite years of the past melt in the infinite
future years.
Each new delight of sense,
Each hope, each love, each fear,
Widens, relumes and recreates each sphere,
From a new ring and nimbus of pre-eminence.
I am the Sphere without circumference:
I only and for ever comprehend
All others that within me meet and blend.
Death is but the blinding kiss
Of two finite infinities;
Two finite infinite orbs
The splendour of the greater of which absorbs
The less, though both like Love have no beginning and no end.

VI

Therefore is Love's own breath
Like Knowledge, a continual death;
And all his laughter and kisses and tears,
And woven wiles of peace and strife,
That ever widen thus your temporal spheres,
Are making of the memory of your former years
A very death in life.

VII

I am that I am;
Ye are evil and good;
With colour and glory and story and song ye are fed as with food:
The cold and the heat,
The bitter and the sweet,
The calm and the tempest fulfil my Word;
Yet will ye complain of my two-edged sword
That has fashioned the finite and mortal and given you the sweetness
of strife,
The blackness and whiteness,
The darkness and brightness,
Which sever your souls from the formless and void and hold you
fast-fettered to life?

VIII

Behold now, is Life not good?
Yea, is it not also much more than the food,
More than the rai