Destiny
The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
—Edward Fitzgerald.
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled
The heavens, God thought on me His child:
Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circumstances every one
To the minutest.
—Robert Browning.
Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river tides!
Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble’s edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling towards the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.
So from the heights of will
Life’s parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends—
From the same cradle’s side,
From the same mother’s knee—
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Alternate Reading: Joshua 1: 5-9.