Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Mystic.

The Mystic

  Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones:

  Ye knew him not: he was not one of ye,

  Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn:

  Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,

  The still serene abstraction; he hath felt

  The vanities of after and before;

  Albeit, his spirit and his secret heart

  The stern experiences of converse lives,

  The linkèd woes of many a fiery change

  Had purified, and chastened, and made free.

  Always there stood before him, night and day,

  Of wayward vary coloured circumstance,

  The imperishable presences serene,

  Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,

  Dim shadows but unwaning presences

  Fourfacèd to four corners of the sky;

  And yet again, three shadows, fronting one,

  One forward, one respectant, three but one;

  And yet again, again and evermore,

  For the two first were not, but only seemed

  One shadow in the midst of a great light,

  One reflex from eternity on time,

  One mighty countenance of perfect calm,

  Awful with most invariable eyes.

  For him the silent congregated hours,

  Daughters of time, divinely tall, beneath

  Severe and youthful brows, with shining eyes

  Smiling a godlike smile (the innocent light

  Of earliest youth pierced through and through with all

  Keen knowledges of low-embowèd eld)

  Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud

  Which droops low hung on either gate of life,

  Both birth and death; he in the centre fixed,

  Saw far on each side through the grated gates

  Most pale and clear and lovely distances.

  He often lying broad awake, and yet

  Remaining from the body, and apart

  In intellect and power and will, hath heard

  Time flowing in the middle of the night,

  And all things creeping to a day of doom.

  How could ye know him? Ye were yet within

  The narrower circle; he had well nigh reached

  The last, with which a region of white flame,

  Pure without heat, into a larger air

  Upburning, and an ether of black hue,

  Investeth and ingirds all other lives.

Alfred Lord Tennyson