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Home  »  An American Anthology, 1787–1900  »  91 From “An Evening Revery”

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By William CullenBryant

91 From “An Evening Revery”

O THOU great Movement of the Universe,

Or Change, or Flight of Time—for ye are one!

That bearest, silently, this visible scene

Into night’s shadow and the streaming rays

Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me?

I feel the mighty current sweep me on,

Yet know not whither. Man foretells afar

The courses of the stars; the very hour

He knows when they shall darken or grow bright;

Yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death

Come unforewarned. Who next, of those I love,

Shall pass from life, or, sadder yet, shall fall

From virtue? Strife with foes, or bitterer strife

With friends, or shame and general scorn of men—

Which who can bear?—or the fierce rack of pain—

Lie they within my path? Or shall the years

Push me, with soft and inoffensive pace,

Into the stilly twilight of my age?

Or do the portals of another life

Even now, while I am glorying in my strength,

Impend around me? Oh, beyond that bourne,

In the vast cycle of being which begins

At that dread threshold, with what fairer forms

Shall the great law of change and progress clothe

Its working? Gently—so have good men taught—

Gently, and without grief, the old shall glide

Into the new; the eternal flow of things,

Like a bright river of the fields of heaven,

Shall journey onward in perpetual peace.