A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul. George MacDonald

In the Son of man, folded in love and ruth?

           Fair shore we see, fair ocean; but behind

           Lie infinite reaches bathing many a coast—

           The human thought of the eternal mind,

           Pulsed by a living tide, blown by a living wind.

10

           Thou, healthful Father, art the Ancient of Days,

           And Jesus is the eternal youth of thee.

           Our old age is the scorching of the bush

           By life's indwelling, incorruptible blaze.

           O Life, burn at this feeble shell of me,

           Till I the sore singed garment off shall push,

           Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush.

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           But shall I then rush to thee like a dart?

           Or lie long hours æonian yet betwixt

           This hunger in me, and the Father's heart?—

           It shall be good, how ever, and not ill;

           Of things and thoughts even now thou art my next;

           Sole neighbour, and no space between, thou art—

           And yet art drawing nearer, nearer still.

12

           Therefore, my brothers, therefore, sisters dear,

           However I, troubled or selfish, fail

           In tenderness, or grace, or service clear,

           I every moment draw to you more near;

           God in us from our hearts veil after veil

           Keeps lifting, till we see with his own sight,

           And all together run in unity's delight.

13

           I love thee, Lord, for very greed of love—

           Not of the precious streams that towards me move,

           But of the indwelling, outgoing, fountain store.

           Than mine, oh, many an ignorant heart loves more!

           Therefore the more, with Mary at thy feet,

           I must sit worshipping—that, in my core,

           Thy words may fan to a flame the low primeval heat.

14

           Oh my beloved, gone to heaven from me!

           I would be rich in love to heap you with love;

           I long to love you, sweet ones, perfectly—

           Like God, who sees no spanning vault above,

           No earth below, and feels no circling air—

           Infinitely, no boundary anywhere.

           I am a beast until I love as God doth love.

15

           Ah, say not, 'tis but perfect self I want

           But if it were, that self is fit to live

           Whose perfectness is still itself to scant,

           Which never longs to have, but still to give.

           A self I must have, or not be at all:

           Love, give me a self self-giving—or let me fall

           To endless darkness back, and free me from life's thrall.

16

           "Back," said I! Whither back? How to the dark?

           From no dark came I, but the depths of light;

           From the sun-heart I came, of love a spark:

           What should I do but love with all my might?

           To die of love severe and pure and stark,

           Were scarcely loss; to lord a loveless height—

           That were a living death, damnation's positive night.

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           But love is life. To die of love is then

           The only pass to higher life than this.

           All love is death to loving, living men;

           All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss.

           Our life is the broken current, Lord, of thine,

           Flashing from morn to morn with conscious shine—

           Then first by willing death self-made, then life divine.

18

           I love you, my sweet children, who are gone

           Into another mansion; but I know

           I love you not as I shall love you yet.

           I love you, sweet dead children; there are none

           In the land to which ye vanished to go,

           Whose hearts more truly on your hearts are set—

           Yet should I die of grief to love you only so.

19

           "I am but as a beast before thee, Lord."—

           Great poet-king, I thank thee for the word.—

           Leave not thy son half-made in beastly guise—

           Less than a man, with more than human cries—

           An unshaped thing in which thyself cries out!

           Finish me, Father; now I am but a doubt;

           Oh! make thy moaning thing for joy to leap and shout.

20

           Let my soul talk to thee in ordered words,

           O king of kings, O lord of only lords!—

           When I am thinking thee within my heart,

           From the broken reflex be not far apart.

           The troubled water, dim with upstirred soil,

           Makes not the image which it yet can spoil:—

           Come nearer, Lord, and smooth the wrinkled coil.

21

           O Lord, when I do think of my departed,

           I think of thee who art the death of parting;

           Of him who crying Father breathed his last,

           Then radiant from the sepulchre upstarted.—

           Even then, I think, thy hands and feet kept smarting:

           With us the bitterness of death is past,

           But by the feet he still doth hold us fast.

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           Therefore our hands thy feet do hold as fast.

           We pray not to be spared the sorest pang,

           But only—be thou with us to the last.

           Let not our heart be troubled at