Chapter 1

The Word of the Silence

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,

A world of sight clear and inimitable,

A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,

A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.

Once on its pages Ignorance could write

In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time

And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light,

A food for souls that wander on Nature’s rim.

But now I listen to a greater Word

Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:

The Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard

Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.

All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace

To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.

Chapter 2

Silence is All

1

Silence is all, say the sages.

Silence watches the work of the ages;

In the book of Silence the cosmic Scribe has written his cosmic pages:

Silence is all, say the sages.

2

What then of the word, O speaker?

What then of the thought, O thinker?

Thought is the wine of the soul and the word is the beaker;

Life is the banquet-table as the soul of the sage is the drinker.

3

What of the wine, O mortal?

I am drunk with the wine as I sit at Wisdom’s portal,

Waiting for the Light beyond thought and the Word immortal.

Long I sit in vain at Wisdom’s portal.

4

How shalt thou know the Word when it comes, O seeker?

How shalt thou know the Light when it breaks, O witness?

I shall hear the voice of the God within me and grow wiser and meeker;

I shall be the tree that takes in the light as its food,

I shall drink its nectar of sweetness.

Chapter 3

In the Silence of the Midnight

In the silence of the midnight, in the light of dawn or noontide

I have heard the flutings of the Infinite, I have seen the sun-wings of the seraphs.

On the boundless solitude of the mountains, on the shoreless roll of ocean,

Something is felt of God’s vastness, fleeting touches of the Absolute

Momentary and immeasurable smite the sense nature free from its limits, –

A brief glimpse, a hint, it passes, but the soul grows deeper, wider:

God has set his mark upon the creature.

In the flash or flutter of flight of bird and insect, in the passion of wing and cry on treetops,

In the golden feathers of the eagle, in the maned and tawny glory of the lion,

In the voiceless hierophants of Nature with their hieratic script of colour,

Orchid, tulip and narcissus, rose and nenuphar and lotus,

Something of eternal beauty seizes on the soul and nerves and heartstrings.

Chapter 4

To the Hill-tops of Silence

To the hill-tops of silence from over the infinite sea,

Golden he came,

Armed with the flame,

Looked on the world that his greatness and passion must free.