God said, 'I take my stand behind
Men, Nature, and the shaping mind.
And cry, 'The open secret lies
To him who reads with proper eyes.''
Then thought came boldly forth, and lent
Its strength to conquer what was meant.
The Hebrew with his passionate heart
Came on, and solved it part by part.
The high Greek saw, but turn'd aside,
With beauty walking by his side.
At last came One, upon whose head
The light of God Himself was shed.
He read the secret, and divine
Forever after grew each line.
Then sullen cycles follow'd Him,
In which His reading would not dim.
The ages sped, but still took heed
To wait, and mould a band at need.
Whose worded cunning might lay bare
The omnific secret everywhere.
Stern Dante saw it, though his face,
Was darken'd by the nether place.
Next Shakespeare, who, before his kind,
Stept with it forming in his mind.
Then Milton, blind and old in years,
Stood nearer to it than his peers.
Later a Goethe wander'd by,
To see it only with his eye.
At last the nineteenth century came,
With railway track and furnace flame,
At which, as at a mighty need,
Men's thoughts flew into headlong speed.
Then one rose up, whose northern ire,
Smote shams, like sudden bursts of fire.
A roughly-block'd Apollo, strong
To pierce the coiling Python, Wrong.
Last, Science, waking from her sleep,
Sent forth her thought to sound the deep,
But, like the dove sent from the ark,
It came back, having found no mark.
Then she stood up and proudly said,
'The open secret is not read.'
O foolish one! Wrap weeds of shame
Around that keen device you claim.
'Behold!' cries God, 'I stand and teach,
The open secret is for each.
I slip my own wide soul behind
Men, nature, and the shaping mind,
And he who can unite these three,
Until they lose themselves in me,
The same hath in him, night and day,
The open secret I display.'