Obiit MDCCCXXXIII, XXXIX–XLVI

Could we forget the widow’d hour And look on Spirits breathed away, As on a maiden in the day When first she wears her orange-flower!

When crown’d with blessing she doth rise To take her latest leave of home, And hopes and light regrets that come Make April of her tender eyes;

And doubtful joys the father move, And tears are on the mother’s face, As parting with a long embrace She enters other realms of love;

Her office there to rear, to teach, Becoming as is meet and fit A link among the days, to knit The generations each with each;

And, doubtless, unto thee is given A life that bears immortal fruit In such great offices as suit The full-grown energies of heaven.

Ay me, the difference I discern! How often shall her old fireside Be cheer’d with tidings of the bride, How often she herself return,

And tell them all they would have told, And bring her babe, and make her boast, Till even those that miss’d her most, Shall count new things as dear as old:

But thou and I have shaken hands, Till growing winters lay me low; My paths are in the fields I know, And thine in undiscover’d lands.

Thy spirit ere our fatal loss Did 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 bound Thy changes; here upon the ground; No more partaker of thy change.

Deep folly! yet that this could be— That I could wing my will with might To leap the grades of life and light, And flash at once, my friend, to thee:

For though my nature rarely yields To that vague fear implied in death; Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath, The howlings from forgotten fields;

Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor An inner trouble I behold, A spectral doubt which makes me cold, That I shall be thy mate no more,

Tho’ following with an upward mind The wonders that have come to thee, Thro’ all the secular to be, But evermore a life behind.

I vex my heart with fancies dim: He still outstript me in the race; It was but unity of place That 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, train To riper growth the mind and will:

And what delights can equal those That stir the spirit’s inner deeps, When one that loves but knows not, reaps A truth from one that loves and knows?

If Sleep and Death be truly one, And every spirit’s folded bloom Thro’ all its intervital gloom In some long trance should slumber on;

Unconscious of the sliding hour, Bare of the body, might it last, And silent traces of the past Be all the colour of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man; But that still garden of the souls In many a figured leaf enrolls The total world since life began:

And love would last as pure and whole As when he loved me here in Time, And at the spiritual prime Rewaken with the dawning soul.

How fares it with the happy dead? For here the man is more and more; But he forgets the days before God shut the doorways of his head.

The days have vanish’d, tone and tint, And yet perhaps the hoarding sense Gives out at times (he knows not whence) A little flash, a mystic hint;

And in the long harmonious years (If Death so taste Lethean springs) May some dim touch of earthly things Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.

If such a dreamy touch should fall, O turn thee round, resolve the doubt, My guardian angel will speak out In that high place, and tell thee all.

The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is prest Against 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 a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of Death.

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 last In that deep dawn behind the tomb, But clear from marge to marge shall bloom The eternal landscape of the past;

A lifelong tract of time reveal’d; The fruitful hours of still increase; Days order’d in a wealthy peace, And those five years its richest field.

O Love! thy province were not large, A bounded field, nor stretching far, Look also, Love, a brooding star, A rosy warmth from marge to marge.

That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul,

Is faith as vague as all unsweet: Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet:

And we shall sit at endless feast, Enjoying each the other’s good; What vaster dream can hit the mood Of Love on earth? He seeks at least

Upon the last and sharpest height, Before the spirits fade away, Some landing-place, to clasp and say, ‘Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.’