| |
| SHE is not yet, but he whose ear | |
| Thrills to that finer atmosphere | |
| Where footfalls of appointed things, | |
| Reverberant of days to be, | |
| Are heard in forecast echoings, | 5 |
| Like wave-beats from a viewless sea— | |
| Hears in the voiceful tremors of the sky | |
| Auroral heralds whispering “She is nigh.” | |
| |
| She is not yet; but he whose sight | |
| Foreknows the advent of the light, | 10 |
| Whose soul to morning radiance turns | |
| Ere night her curtain hath withdrawn, | |
| And in its quivering folds discerns | |
| The mute monitions of the dawn, | |
| With urgent sense strained onward to descry | 15 |
| Her distant tokens, starts to find her nigh. | |
| |
| Not yet her day. How long “not yet?” | |
| There comes the flush of violet! | |
| And heavenward faces, all aflame | |
| With sanguine imminence of morn, | 20 |
| Wait but the sun-kiss to proclaim | |
| The Day of the Dominion born. | |
| Prelusive baptism!—ere the natal hour | |
| Named with the name and prophecy of power. | |
| |
| Already here to hearts intense | 25 |
| A spirit force, transcending sense, | |
| In heights unscaled, in deeps unstirred, | |
| Beneath the calm, above the storm, | |
| She waits the incorporating word | |
| To bid her tremble into form: | 30 |
| Already, like divining-rods, men’s souls | |
| Bend down to where the unseen river rolls; | |
| |
| For even as, from sight concealed, | |
| By never flush of dawn revealed, | |
| Nor e’er illumed by golden noon, | 35 |
| Nor sunset-streaked with crimson bar, | |
| Nor silver-spanned by wake of moon, | |
| Nor visited of any star, | |
| Beneath these lands a river waits to bless | |
| (So men divine) our utmost wilderness,— | 40 |
| |
| Rolls dark, but yet shall know our skies, | |
| Soon as the wisdom of the wise | |
| Conspires with nature to disclose | |
| The blessing prisoned and unseen, | |
| Till round our lessening wastes there glows | 45 |
| A perfect zone of broadening green,— | |
| Till all our land Australia Felix called, | |
| Become one Continent-Isle of Emerald;— | |
| |
| So flows beneath our good and ill | |
| A viewless stream of common will, | 50 |
| A gathering force, a present might, | |
| That from its silent depths of gloom | |
| At Wisdom’s voice shall leap to light, | |
| And hide our barren fields in bloom, | |
| Till, all our sundering lines with love o’er-grown, | 55 |
| Our bounds shall be the girdling seas alone. | |
| |
