Will its subtle essence, passing through death's portal,
Put on nobler presence in a life immortal?
Or is man but matter, that a touch ungentle,
Back again may shatter to forms elemental?
Can mere atoms question how they feel sensation?
Or dust make suggestion of its own creation?
Yet if man were better than his base conditions,
Could things baser fetter his sublime ambitions?
What unknown conjunction of the pure etherial,
With the form and function of the gross material,
Gives the product mortal? whose immortal yearning
Brings him to the portal of celestial learning:
To the portal gleaming, where the waiting sphinxes,
Humoring his dreaming, give him what he thinks is
Key to the arcana—plausible equation
Of the problems many in his incarnation.
Pitiful delusion!—in no nomenclature—
Maugre its profusion—O ambiguous nature!
Can man find expression of his own relation
To the great procession of facts in creation?
Fruitless speculating! none may lift the curtain
From the antedating ages and uncertain
When what is, was not, and tides of pristine being
Beat on shores forgot, and all, as now, unseeing
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