ON the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining — I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future.

A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,
All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same,
All distances of place, however wide,
All distances of time — all inanimate forms,
All Souls — all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes — the fishes, the brutes,
All men and women — me also;
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages;
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe;
All lives and deaths — all of the past, present, future;
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd, and shall forever span them, and compactly hold them, and enclose them.

Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies?

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future,—two eternities!

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.