of hearing or sight,
And the shrine stands fast and is changed not, whose likeness was
changed as a cloud in the night.

All the storms of time, and wrath of many winds, may carve no
trace
On the viewless altar, though the veil bear many a name and face:
Many a live God's likeness woven, many a scripture dark with awe,
Bids the veil seem verier iron than the word of life's own law.
Till the might of change hath rent it with a rushing wind in
twain,
Stone or steel it seems, whereon the wrath of chance is wreaked
in vain:
Stone or steel, and all behind it or beyond its lifted sign
Cloud and vapour, no subsistence of a change-unstricken shrine.
God by god flits past in thunder, till his glories turn to
shades:
God to god bears wondering witness how his gospel flames and
fades.
More was each of these, while yet they were, than man their
servant seemed:
Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he
dreamed.

Yet haply or surely, if vision were surer than theirs who rejoiced
that they saw,
Man might not but see, through the darkness of godhead, the light
that is surety and law.
On the stone that the close-drawn cloud which veils it awhile makes
cloudlike stands
The word of the truth everlasting, unspoken of tongues and
unwritten of hands.
By the sunbeams and storms of the centuries engraven, and approved
of the soul as it reads,
It endures as a token dividing the light from the darkness of
dreams and of deeds.
The faces of gods on the face of it carven, or gleaming behind and
above,
Star-glorified Uranus, thunderous Jehovah, for terror or worship or
love,
Change, wither, and brighten as flowers that the wind of eternity
sheds upon time,
All radiant and transient and awful and mortal, and leave it
unmarred and sublime.
As the tides that return and recede are the fears and the hopes of
the centuries that roll,
Requenched and rekindled: but strong as the sun is the sense of it
shrined in the soul.

II

In the days when time was not, in the time when days were none,
Ere sorrow had life to lot, ere earth gave thank