The Equinox (Volume I, Number VII)

LONG ODDS How many million galaxies there are Who knows ? and each has countless stars in it, And each rolls through eternities afar Beneath the threshold of the Infinite. How is it that with all that space to roam I should have found this mote that spins and leaps In what unutterable sunlight, foam Of what unfathomable starry deeps Who knows ? And how this thousand million souls And halfa thousand million souls of earth That swarm, all bound for unimagined goals, All pioneers of death enrolled at birth, How were they swept away before my sight, That I might stand upon the single prick Of infinite space and time as infinite, Who knows? Yet here I stand, climacteric, Having found you. Was it by fall of chance? Then what a stake against What odds I have won | Was it determined in God’s ordinance? Then wondrous love and pity for His son ! Or was it part of an eternal law? Then how ineffably beneficent! Each thought excites an ecstasy of awe, A rapture tending the mind's firmament. 61