Writers Unbound

The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, in tidal wave,
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space
Electric star and pencil plays.
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void,
Supplemental asteroid,
Or compensatory spark,
Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man’s the elm, and Wealth the vine;
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,
None from its stock that vine can reave.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
There’s no god dare wrong a worm.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts;
Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

…. Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted,
we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,—
to gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the
needs of the character. The ingenuity of man has been dedicated
to the solution of one problem,—how to detach the sensual sweet,
the sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet,
the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut
clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get
a one end, without an other end.The soul says, Eat; the body
would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one
flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul
says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the
body would have the power over things to its own ends.