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knowledge from its sleepy lair.

      For knowledge comes not to us as a guest

      Called into our chamber from the outer world;

      A friend and inmate of our secret self,

      It hid behind our minds and fell asleep

      And slowly wakes beneath the blows of life;

      The mighty daemon lies unshaped within,

      To evoke, to give it form is Nature’s task.

      All was a chaos of the true and false,

      Mind sought amid deep mists of Nescience;

      It looked within itself but saw not God.

      A material interim diplomacy

      Denied the Truth that transient truths might live

      And hid the Deity in creed and guess

      That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.

      This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind

      Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night

      In her first tamperings with Inconscience:

      Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;

      Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;

      Only a slow advance the earth can bear.

      Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth’s

      Compelled to handle makeshift instruments

      Invented by the life-force and the flesh.

      Earth all perceives through doubtful images,

      All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,

      Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.

      Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook

      She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,

      Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,

      Expelling Nature’s mystic unity

      Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;

      She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.

      In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,

      That greater Power with her half-risen sun

      Wrought within limits but possessed her field;

      She knew by a privilege of thinking force

      And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.

      In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit

      The Archangel’s gaze who knows inspired his acts

      And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.

      In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,

      But moves in boundaries of subtle power

      Across which mind can step towards the sun.

      A candidate for a higher suzerainty,

      A passage she cut through from Night to Light,

      And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.

      A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.

      First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,

      A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,

      A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds

      For ever stooped to hammer fact and form.

      Absorbed and cabined in external sight,

      It takes its stand on Nature’s solid base.

      A technician admirable, a thinker crude,

      A riveter of Life to habit’s grooves,

      Obedient to gross Matter’s tyranny,

      A prisoner of the moulds in which it works,

      It binds itself by what itself creates.

      A slave of a fixed mass of absolute rules,

      It sees as Law the habits of the world,

      It sees as Truth the habits of the mind.

      In its realm of concrete images and events

      Turning in a worn circle of ideas

      And ever repeating old familiar acts,

      It lives content with the common and the known.

      It loves the old ground that was its dwelling-place:

      Abhorring change as an audacious sin,

      Distrustful of each new discovery

      Only it advances step by careful step

      And fears as if a deadly abyss the unknown.

      A prudent treasurer of its ignorance,

      It shrinks from adventure, blinks at glorious hope,

      Preferring a safe foothold upon things

      To the dangerous joy of wideness and of height.

      The world’s slow impressions on its labouring mind,

      Tardy imprints almost indelible,

      Increase their value by their poverty;

      The old sure memories are its capital stock:

      Only what sense can grasp seems absolute:

      External fact it figures as sole truth,

      Wisdom identifies with the earthward look,

      And things long known and actions always done

      Are to its clinging hold a balustrade

      Of safety on the perilous stair of Time.

      Heaven’s trust to it are the established ancient ways,

      Immutable laws man has no right to change,

      A sacred legacy from the great dead past

      Or the one road that God has made for life,

      A firm shape of Nature never to be changed,

      Part of the huge routine of the universe.

      A smile from the Preserver of the Worlds

      Sent down of old this guardian Mind to earth

      That all might stand in their fixed changeless type

      And from their secular posture never move.

      One sees it circling faithful to its task,

      Tireless in an assigned tradition’s round;

      In decayed and crumbling offices of Time

      It keeps close guard in front of custom’s wall,

      Or in an ancient Night’s dim environs

      It dozes on a little courtyard’s stones

      And barks at every unfamiliar light

      As at a foe who would break up its home,

      A watch-dog of the spirit’s sense-railed house

      Against intruders from the Invisible,

      Nourished on scraps of life and Matter’s bones

      In its kennel of objective certitude.

      And yet behind it stands a cosmic might:

      A measured Greatness keeps its vaster plan,

      A fathomless sameness rhythms the tread of life;

      The stars’ changeless orbits furrow inert Space,

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