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

To make allowance for us all.

than ours,

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 gathered 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 doctrine give

That had the wild oat not been sown,

The soil, left barren, had not grown The grain by which a man may live?

Oh, 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.

OH 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 shrivel'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.