"If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young,
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells,
O wise man, hear'st thou half it tells?
To the open ear it sings
The early genesis of things;
Of tendency through endless ages
Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old floods' subsiding slime,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm.
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid Nature to a dream."
By Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82).