John Kenyon - Destiny lyrics

'Strange Power! mysterious Destiny! Thou who dost love to sit, alone, With moveless lip, and brooding eye, Close beside the' eternal throne; When from the Godhead's forming hand The globe leapt forth, He gave command That Thou shouldst guard the circling sphere, And guide, and balance, and control The mighty ma**, the breathing soul, And heed the vast machinery roll Through Time's immortal year. 'Or may it be, as some have thought, That from the very birth of Time, While yet this whirling globe was not, Thy primal spirit ruled sublime; That, when the mighty Being came To forge this world's ænigma-frame, He felt thy power no less than We; But learned how Thou the Good and Ill Hadst doomed in endless course to wheel, And curbed e'en his wide-shadowing will Reluctantly to Thee? 'Before or since, effect or cause, Or limiting, or limited, Yet say, oh! whence those dooming laws, Or His or Thine, so dark—so dread. In anger was it, or in mirth, Ye bade Oppression walk the earth, Torturing the race with scourge and chain? Why flaunts yon despot on a throne By treachery reared and blood-bestrown, While Kosciusko's dungeon-groan Ascends to Heaven in vain? 'Hath virtue then no saving force, Hath justice no prevailing might To stay that scythed chariot's course, Dark as eclipse and swift as light? Inwoven in one eternal chain, Evil and good, and bliss and pain, Are all the links alike to Thee? Brute forms that breathe, high souls that feel, Matter inert and human will, Stamped all with one portentous seal To work one blind decree? 'Man sinks in musing wonder lost! Meanwhile his bark, with shattered sail, Fast verging to some unknown coast, Hurries adown the unslackening gale. Amid thy gathering mysteries In vain for glimpse of light he tries To trace his course—to read his doom; He fears the sea, he dreads the shore, And darkness thickening more and more, Till hope, and fear, and suffering o'er, Thou wreck'st him on the tomb.' By one, through many a change of grief Full sorely tried, these words were spoken; But Heaven in pity sent relief To troubled brain and heart half-broken. The self-same star, to Syrian land That led, of old, the Magi-band, Uplit for him that night of pain; And beamed on that despairing sight, With the first flush of morning light, A clasping haven, calmly bright, Beyond Life's stormy main.