n nobler presence in a life immortal?
Or is man but matter, that a touch ungentle,
Back again may shatter to forms elemental?

Can mere atoms question how they feel sensation?
Or dust make suggestion of its own creation?
Yet if man were better than his base conditions,
Could things baser fetter his sublime ambitions?

What unknown conjunction of the pure etherial,
With the form and function of the gross material,
Gives the product mortal? whose immortal yearning
Brings him to the portal of celestial learning.

To the portal gleaming, where the waiting sphinxes,
Humoring his dreaming, give him what he thinks is
Key to the arcana--plausible equation
Of the problems many in his incarnation.

Pitiful delusion!--in no nomenclature--
Maugre its profusion--O ambiguous nature!
Can man find expression of his own relation
To the great procession of facts in creation?

Fruitless speculating! none may lift the curtain
From the antedating ages and uncertain
When what is was not, and tides of pristine being
Beat on shores forgot, and all, as now, unseeing.

Whence impelled or whither, or by what volition;
Borne now here, now thither, in blind inanition.
Out of this abysmal, nebulous dim distance,
Haunted by a dismal, phantomic existence,

Issued man?--a creature without inspiration,
Gross of form and feature, dull of inclination?
Or was his primordial self a something higher?
Fresh from test and ordeal of elemental fire.

Were these ages golden while the world was younger,
When the giants olden knew not toil nor hunger?
When no pain nor malice marred joy's full completeness,
And life's honeyed chalice rapt the soul with sweetness?

When the restless river of time loved to linger;
Ere flesh felt the quiver of death's dissolving finger;
When man's intuition led without deflection,
To a sure fruition, and a full perfection.

Individual man is ever new created:
What his being's plan is, loosely predicated
On the circumstances of his sole condition,
Colored by the fancies borrowed from tradition.

His creation gives him clue to nothing older:
Naked, life receives him--wondering beholder
Of the world about him--and ere aught is certain,
Time and mystery flout him; and death drops the curtain.

Man, the dreamer, groping after what he