Glimpses Poem by Lucy Larcom

LIFE comes to us only by glimpses;
We see it not yet as a whole,
For the vapor, the cloud, and the shadow
That over it surging roll;
For the dimness of mortal vision;
That mingles the false with the true:
Yet its innermost, fathomless meaning
Is never quite hidden from view.
The hills lift aloft the glad secret;
It is breathed by the whispering leaves;
The rivers repeat it in music;
The sea with its harmony heaves;
The secret of that living gospel
Which freshened the veins of the earth,
When Love, named in heaven the Redeemer,
Was revealed in a human birth.
Life shows us its grandeur by glimpses;
For what is this wondrous To-Day
But a rift in the mist-muffled vastness
Of surrounding eternity?
One law for this hour and far futures;
One light on the distant and near;
The bliss of the boundless hereafter
Pulses into the brief moments here.
The secret of life, — it is giving;
To minister and to serve;
Love's law binds the man to the angel,
And ruin befalls, if we swerve.
There are breadths of celestial horizons
Overhanging the commonest way;
The clod and the star share the glory,
And to breathe is an ecstasy.
Life dawns on us, wakes us, by glimpses;
In heaven there is opened a door! —
That flash lit up vistas eternal;
The dead are the living once more!
To illumine the scroll of creation,
One swift, sudden vision sufficed:
Every riddle of life worth the reading
Has found its interpreter — Christ!