Select Poetry.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 16, Issue 823, 19 September 1870, Page 3

Select Poetry.

"LIGHT, MORE LIGHT!" What is the name for the Future to give To this age with its restless moving P Its changing efforts better to live, Its multiplied searching and proving : Every form of the teeming life In the heart of the earth found lying, Ever is weighed with emulous strife, And an endless praying and crying, " Light, more light 1" Mocking at distance, under the deep, Our secrets cherished are bounding, Spite of the waves with their howling sweep, Our whispers electric are sounding; Even the mysteries Neptune thought Sacred and free he was saving, Down in his darken'd caves we've sought And still with the yearning and craving, "Light, more light!" We take the hidden in humble life, That life with its ebbing and flowing, Bares its breast to the pruner's knife, And watch ev'ry act in its growing. Never a tale must Nature keep /," Back from our ceaseless enquiring, II - E'en when our charms are Cradled in sleep : •. We seek them with earnest aspiring—- " Light, more light!" - With dry old fossils we modify creeds; — «;. Is it all progress, our changing ? Will knowledge e'er have all that it needs, And limits be placed to our ranging P With a reverent union of thought, Will one form e'er govern our praying P Only one God—one way—to be sought, Was the dying want that went saying "Light, more light!" Say, wheu the death film covers the eye, Its view of the outer world clouding, Are there not moments e'er the last sigh, When the mystery's reft of its shrouding P All we have gathered seeming but sand And nothingness out of our poring— Then we lift the tremulons hand, And the last faint cry of imploring, ...:\. "Light, more light!"