Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Hermes Trismegistus lyrics

Still through Egypt's desert places   Flows the lordly Nile, From its banks the great stone faces   Gaze with patient smile. Still the pyramids imperious   Pierce the cloudless skies, And the Sphinx stares with mysterious,   Solemn, stony eyes. But where are the old Egyptian   Demi-gods and kings? Nothing left but an inscription   Graven on stones and rings. Where are Helios and Hephaestus,   Gods of eldest eld? Where is Hermes Trismegistus,   Who their secrets held? Where are now the many hundred   Thousand books he wrote? By the Thaumaturgists plundered,   Lost in lands remote; In oblivion sunk forever,   As when o'er the land Blows a storm-wind, in the river   Sinks the scattered sand. Something unsubstantial, ghostly,   Seems this Theurgist, In deep meditation mostly   Wrapped, as in a mist. Vague, phantasmal, and unreal   To our thought he seems, Walking in a world ideal,   In a land of dreams. Was he one, or many, merging   Name and fame in one, Like a stream, to which, converging   Many streamlets run? Till, with gathered power proceeding,   Ampler sweep it takes, Downward the sweet waters leading   From unnumbered lakes. By the Nile I see him wandering,   Pausing now and then, On the mystic union pondering   Between gods and men; Half believing, wholly feeling,   With supreme delight, How the gods, themselves concealing,   Lift men to their height. Or in Thebes, the hundred-gated,   In the thoroughfare Breathing, as if consecrated,   A diviner air; And amid discordant noises,   In the jostling throng, Hearing far, celestial voices   Of Olympian song. Who shall call his dreams fallacious?   Who has searched or sought All the unexplored and spacious   Universe of thought? Who, in his own sk** confiding,   Shall with rule and line Mark the border-land dividing   Human and divine? Trismegistus! three times greatest!   How thy name sublime Has descended to this latest   Progeny of time! Happy they whose written pages   Perish with their lives, If amid the crumbling ages   Still their name survives! Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately   Found I in the vast, Weed-encumbered sombre, stately,   Grave-yard of the Past; And a presence moved before me   On that gloomy shore, As a waft of wind, that o'er me   Breathed, and was no more.