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When darkness deepens strangling the earth's breast And man's corporeal mind is the only lamp, As a thief's in the night shall be the covert tread Of one who steps unseen into his house.

Along a path of aeons serpentine In the coiled blackness of her nescient course The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.

In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure, Our very being seems to us questionable, Our life a vague experiment, the soul A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,

Only sometimes a holier influence comes, A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives And a diviner Presence moves the soul;

And sometimes, when our sight is turned within, Earth's ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes; There is a short miraculous escape.

ON A height he stood that looked towards greater heights. Our early approaches to the Infinite Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun.

A glory and a rapture and a charm, The All-Blissful sat unknown within the heart; Earth's pains were the ransom of its prisoned delight.

There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul A deathless body and a divine name.

In a brief moment caught, a little space, All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts Lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths A crystal of the ultimate Absolute,