From art, from nature, from the schools,Let random influences glance,Like light in many a shiver’d lanceThat breaks about the dappled pools: The lightest wave of thought shall lisp,The fancy’s tenderest eddy wreathe,The slightest air of song shall breatheTo make the sullen surface crisp. And look thy look, and go thy way,But blame not thou the […]

If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,Were taken to be such as closedGrave 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 […]

That each, who seems a separate whole,Should move his rounds, and fusing allThe skirts of self again, should fallRemerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet:Eternal form shall still divideThe eternal soul from all beside;And I shall know him when we meet: And we shall sit at endless feast,Enjoying each the […]

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 lastIn that deep dawn behind the tomb,But clear from marge to marge shall bloomThe eternal landscape of the past; A lifelong tract of time […]

The baby new to earth and sky,What time his tender palm is prestAgainst 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 […]

How fares it with the happy dead?For here the man is more and more;But he forgets the days beforeGod shut the doorways of his head. The days have vanish’d, tone and tint,And yet perhaps the hoarding senseGives out at times (he knows not whence)A little flash, a mystic hint; And in the long harmonious years(If […]

If Sleep and Death be truly one,And every spirit’s folded bloomThro’ all its intervital gloomIn some long trance should slumber on; Unconscious of the sliding hour,Bare of the body, might it last,And silent traces of the pastBe all the colour of the flower: So then were nothing lost to man;So that still garden of the […]

I vex my heart with fancies dim:He still outstript me in the race;It was but unity of placeThat 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, trainTo riper growth the mind and will: And what delights can equal thoseThat stir the […]

  Thy spirit ere our fatal lossDid 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 boundThy changes; here upon the ground,No more partaker of thy change. Deep folly! yet that this could be—That I […]

Could we forget the widow’d hourAnd look on Spirits breathed away,As on a maiden in the dayWhen first she wears her orange-flower! When crown’d with blessing she doth riseTo take her latest leave of home,And hopes and light regrets that comeMake April of her tender eyes; And doubtful joys the father move,And tears are on […]