I have long enough been working down in my cellar, <br />Working spade and pick, boring-chisel and drill; <br />I long for wider spaces, airy, clear-dark, and stellar: <br />Successless labour never the love of it did fill. <br /> <br />More profit surely lies in a holy, pure quiescence, <br />In a setting forth of cups to catch the heavenly rain, <br />In a yielding of the being to the ever waiting presence, <br />In a lifting of the eyes upward, homeward again! <br /> <br />Up to my garret, its storm-windows and skylights! <br />There I'll lay me on the floor, and patient let the sun, <br />The moon and the stars, the blueness and the twilights <br />Do what their pleasure is, and wait till they have done. <br /> <br />But, lo, I hear a waving on the roof of great pinions! <br />'Tis the labour of a windmill, broad-spreading to the wind! <br />Lo, down there goes a. shaft through all the house-dominions! <br />I trace it to a cellar, whose door I cannot find. <br /> <br />But there I hear ever a keen diamond-drill in motion, <br />Now fast and now slow as the wind sits in the sails, <br />Drilling and boring to the far eternal ocean, <br />The living well of all wells whose water never fails. <br /> <br />So now I go no more to the cellar to my labour, <br />But up to my garret where those arms are ever going; <br />There the sky is ever o'er me, and the wind my blessed neighbour, <br />And the prayer-handle ready turns the sails to its blowing. <br /> <br />Blow, blow, my blessed wind; oh, keep ever blowing! <br />Keep the great windmill going full and free; <br />So shall the diamond-drill down below keep going <br />Till in burst the waters of God's eternal sea.<br /><br />George MacDonald<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-the-fashion-of-an-old-emblem/
