I seem to meet their least desire,

To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.

I see their unborn faces shine

Beside the never-lighted fire.

I see myself an honored guest,
Thy partner in the flowery walk
Of letters, genial table-talk,

Or deep dispute, and graceful jest:

While now thy prosperous labor fills

The lips of men with honest praise,

And sun by sun the happy days Descend below the golden hills

With promise of a morn as fair;

And all the train of bounteous hours
Conduct, by paths of growing powers,

To reverence and the silver hair;

Till slowly worn her earthly robe,

Her lavish mission richly wrought,
Leaving great legacies of thought,

Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;

What time mine own might also flee,

As linked with thine in love and fate,

And, hovering o'er the dolorous strait To the other shore, involved in thee,

Arrive at last the blessed goal,

And he that died in Holy Land
Would reach us out the shining hand;

And take us as a single soul.

What reed was that on which I leant?
Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake
The old bitterness again, and break
The low beginnings of content?

LXXXIII.

THIS truth came borne with bier and pall,
I felt it, when I sorrowed most,

'Tis better to have loved and lost,

Than never to have loved at all.

O true in word, and tried in deed,
Demanding, so to bring relief

To this which is our common grief,

What kind of life is that I lead ;

And whether trust in things above

Be dimmed of sorrow, or sustained,

And whether love for him have drained

My capabilities of love;

Your words have virtue such as draws

A faithful answer from the breast,

Through light reproaches, half expressed, And loyal unto kindly laws.

My blood an even tenor kept,

Till on mine ear this message falls,

That in Vienna's fatal walls

God's finger touched him, and he slept.

The great Intelligences fair

That range above our mortal state, In circle round the blessed gate, Received and gave him welcome there;

And led him through the blissful climes,
And showed him in the fountain fresh
All knowledge that the sons of flesh
Shall gather in the cycled times.

But I remained, whose hopes were dim,

Whose life, whose thoughts, were little worth,

To wander on a darkened earth,

Where all things round me breathed of him.

O friendship, equal-poised control,

O heart, with kindliest motion warm,

O sacred essence, other form,

O solemn ghost! O crowned soul !

Yet none could better know than I,
How much of act at human hands

The sense of human will demands,
By which we dare to live or die.

Whatever way my days decline,

I felt and feel, though left alone, His being working in mine own, The footsteps of his life in mine;

A life that all the Muses decked

With gifts of grace that might express
All-comprehensive tenderness,

All-subtilizing intellect:

And so my passion hath not swerved
To works of weakness, but I find
An image comforting the mind,
And in my grief a strength reserved.

Likewise the imaginative woe,

That loved to handle spiritual strife,
Diffused the shock through all my life,

But in the present broke the blow.