But I there learned that he had written
the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a
dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming likely to
come to naught.
"I have lived to prove it true," he said,--"that which I but vaguely
divined when I wrote the lines. Our lives are all so fearfully
and wonderfully shot through with the very warp and woof of the
universe, past, present, and to come! No doubt at all that our
own--that which our souls crave and need--does gravitate toward us,
or we toward it. 'Waiting' has been successful," he added, "not
on account of its poetic merit, but for some other merit or quality.
It puts in simple and happy form some common religious aspirations,
without using the religious jargon. People write me from all
parts of the country that they treasure it in their hearts; that
it steadies their hand at the helm; that it is full of consolation
for them. It is because it is poetry allied with religion that
it has this effect; poetry alone would not do this; neither would
a prose expression of the same religious aspirations do it, for
we often outgrow the religious views and feelings of the past.
The religious thrill, the sense of the Infinite, the awe and
majesty of the universe, are no doubt permanent in the race, but
the expression of these feelings in creeds and forms addressed to
the understanding, or exposed to the analysis of the understanding,
is as transient and flitting as the leaves of the trees.
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