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?

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.

6

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 destroyed,

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 shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold! we know not any thing;

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.

LIV.

THE wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,—

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear ;

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope through darkness up to God;

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.