CXIV.

Is it, then, regret for buried time
That keenlier in sweet April wakes,

And meets the year, and gives and takes The colors of the crescent prime ?

Not all the songs, the stirring air,

:

The life re-orient out of dust,

Cry through the sense to hearten trust In that which made the world so fair.

Not all regret the face will shine
Upon me, while I muse alone;

The dear, dear voice that I have known

Will speak to me of me and mine:

Yet less of sorrow lives in me

For days of happy commune dead ; Less yearning for the friendship fled, Than some strong bond which is to be.

CXV.

O DAYS and hours, your work is this,
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace,
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue

Desire of nearness doubly sweet;

And unto meeting, when we meet, Delight a hundredfold accrue,

For every grain of sand that runs,
And every span of shade that steals,

And every kiss of toothed wheels, And all the courses of the suns.

CXVI.

CONTEMPLATE all this work of time,
The giant laboring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime e;

But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

Till at the last arose the man ;

Who throve and branched from clime to clime,

The herald of a higher race,

And of himself in higher place,

If so he type this work of time

Within himself, from more to more ;

And, crowned with attributes of woe

Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not as idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears;

And dipped in baths of hissing tears,

And battered with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,

And let the ape and tiger die.

CXVII.

DOORS, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, not as one that weeps
I come once more; the city sleeps;
I smell the meadow in the street;

I hear a chirp of birds; I see

Betwixt the black fronts long withdrawn A light-blue lane of early dawn, And think of early days and thee,

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,

And bright the friendship of thine eye; And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh I take the pressure of thine hand.