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And tell them all they would have told,
And bring her babe, and make her boast,
Till even those that miss'd her most
Shall count new things as dear as old:

But thou and I have shaken hands, Till growing winters lay me low; My paths are in the fields I know, And thine in undiscover'd lands.

XL.

THY spirit ere our fatal loss

Did ever rise from high to higher; As mounts the heavenward altar-fire, As flies the lighter thro' the gross.

But thou art turn'd to something strange,
And I have lost the links that bound
Thy changes; here upon the ground,
No more partaker of thy change.

Deep folly! yet that this could be,-
That I could wing my will with might
To leap the grades of life and light,
And flash at once, my friend, to thee:

For tho' my nature rarely yields

To that vague fear implied in death; Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath, The howlings from forgotten fields:

Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor An inner trouble I behold,

A spectral doubt which makes me cold, That I shall be, thy mate no more,

Tho' following with an upward mind
The wonders that have come to thee,
Thro' all the secular to-be,
But evermore a life behind.

XLI.

I VEX my heart with fancies dim:
He still outstript me in the race;
It was but unity of place

That made me dream I rank'd with him.

And so may Place retain us still,
And he the much-beloved again,
A lord of large experience, train
To riper growth the mind and will:

And what delights can equal those

That stir the spirit's inner deeps, When one that loves, but knows not, reaps A truth from one that loves and knows?

XLII.

IF Sleep and Death be truly one,
And every spirit's folded bloom
Thro' all its intervital gloom

In some long trance should slumber on ;

Unconscious of the sliding hour, Bare of the body, might it last, And silent traces of the past Be all the color of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man;
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;

And love will last as pure and whole
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Rewaken with the dawning soul.

XLIII.

How fares it with the happy dead?
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.

The days have vanish'd, tone and tint,
And yet perhaps the hoarding sense
Gives out at times (he knows not whence)
A little flash, a mystic hint;

And in the long harmonious years

(If Death so taste Lethean springs) May some dim touch of earthly things Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.

If such a dreamy touch should fall,
O turn thee round, resolve the doubt;
My guardian angel will speak out
In that high place, and tell thee all.
XLIV.

THE baby new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that "this is I:"

But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of "I," and "me,"
And finds "I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch."

So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of Death.

XLV.

WE ranging down this lower track,
The path we came by, thorn and flower,
Is shadow'd by the growing hour,
Lest life should fail in looking back.

So be it: there no shade can last

In that deep dawn behind the tomb,

But clear from marge to marge shall bloom The eternal landscape of the past:

A lifelong tract of time reveal'd;
The fruitful hours of still increase;
Days order'd in a wealthy peace,
And those five years its richest field.

O Love, thy province were not large,
A bounded field, nor stretching far;
Look also, Love, a brooding star,
A rosy warmth from marge to marge.

XLVI.

THAT each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,

Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet:

And we shall sit at endless feast,

Enjoying each the other's good: What vaster dream can hit the mood Of Love on earth? He seeks at least

Upon the last and sharpest height,

Before the spirits fade away, Some landing-place to clasp and say, "Farewell! We lose ourselves in light."

XLVII.

Ir these brief lays of Sorrow born,
Were taken to be such as closed
Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
Then these were such as men might scorn:

Her care is not to part and prove;

She takes, when harsher moods remit, What slender shade of doubt may flit, And makes it vassal unto love:

And hence, indeed, she sports with words,
But better serves a wholesome law,
And holds it sin and shame to draw
The deepest measure from the chords:
Nor dare she trust a larger lay,

But rather loosens from the lip
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.

XLVIII.

FROM art, from nature, from the schools,
Let random influences glance,
Like light in many a shiver'd lance
That breaks about the dappled pools:

The lightest wave of thought shall lisp, The fancy's tenderest eddy wreathe, The slightest air of song shall breathe To make the sullen surface crisp.

And look thy look, and go thy way,

But blame not thou the winds that make
The seeming-wanton ripple break,
The tender-pencil'd shadow play.

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears,
Ay me! the sorrow deepens down,
Whose muffled motions blindly drown
The bases of my life in tears.

XLIX.

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust: And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife, And on the low dark verge of life The twilight of eternal day..

L.

Do we indeed desire the dead

Should still be near us at our side? Is there no baseness we would hide? No inner vileness that we dread?

Shall he for whose applause I strove,
I had such reverence for his blame,
See with clear eye some hidden shame,
And I be lessen'd in his love?

I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.

Be near us when we climb or fall:
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.

LI.

I CANNOT love thee as I ought,

For love reflects the thing beloved: My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought. "Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song," The Spirit of true love replied; "Thou canst not move me from thy side, Nor human frailty do me wrong.

"What keeps a spirit wholly true

To that ideal which he bears?
What record? not the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue:

"So fret not, like an idle girl,

That life is dash'd with flecks of sin. Abide: thy wealth is gather'd in, When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl."

LII.

How many a father have I seen,
A sober man among his boys,
Whose youth was full of foolish noise,
Who wears his manhood hale and green:

And dare we to this fancy give,

That had the wild-oat not been sown, The soil, left barren, scarce had grown The grain by which a man may live?

O, if we held the doctrine sound
For life outliving heats of youth,
Yet who would preach it as a truth
To those that eddy round and round?

Hold thou the good: define it well:
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

LIII.

O YET We trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
Behold we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last-far off-at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

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Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,

And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star;

Who makes by force his merit known,
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mould a mighty state's decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;

And moving up from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope
The pillar of a people's hope,
The centre of a world's desire;

Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,
When all his active powers are still,
A distant dearness in the hill,
A secret sweetness in the stream,
The limit of his narrower fate,

While yet beside its vocal springs
He play'd at counsellors and kings,
With one that was his earliest mate;

Who ploughs with pain his native lea
And reaps the labor of his hands,
Or in the furrow musing stands:
"Does my old friend remember me?"

LXIV.

SWEET Soul, do with me as thou wilt;
I lull a fancy trouble-tost
With "Love's too precious to be lost,
A little grain shall not be spilt."

And in that solace can I sing,

Till out of painful phases wrought There flutters up a happy thought, Self-balanced on a lightsome wing:

And thine effect so lives in me, A part of mine may live in thee, And move thee on to noble ends.

LXV.

You thought my heart too far diseased;
You wonder when my fancies play
To find me gay among the gay,
Like one with any trifle pleased.

The shade by which my life was crost,
Which makes a desert in the mind,
Has made me kindly with my kind,
And like to him whose sight is lost;

Whose feet are guided thro' the land,

Whose jest among his friends is free, Who takes the children on his knee, And winds their curls about his hand :

He plays with threads, he beats his chair
For pastime, dreaming of the sky;
His inner day can never die,

His night of loss is always there."

LXVI.

WHEN on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest,
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls :

Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.

The mystic glory swims away:

From off my bed the moonlight dies; And, closing eaves of wearied eyes,

I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:

And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church, like a ghost,
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

LXVII.

WHEN in the down I sink my head,

Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath; Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death, Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

I walk as ere I walk'd forlorn,

When all our path was fresh with dew, And all the bugle breezes blew Reveillée to the breaking morn.

But what is this? I turn about,

I find a trouble in thine eye,
Which makes me sad, I know not why,
Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:

But ere the lark hath left the lea
I wake, and I discern the truth;
It is the trouble of my youth
That foolish sleep transfers to thee.

LXVIII.

I DREAM'D there would be Spring no more,
That Nature's ancient power was lost:
The streets were black with smoke and frost,
They chatter'd trifles at the door :

I wander'd from the noisy town,

I found a wood with thorny boughs: I took the thorns to bind my brows, I wore them like a civic crown:

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