AND yet—and yet—in these our ghostly lives, | |
| Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake, | |
| How if our waking life, like that of sleep, | |
| Be all a dream in that eternal life | |
| To which we wake not till we sleep in death? | 5 |
| How if, I say, the senses we now trust | |
| For date of sensible comparison,— | |
| Ay, ev’n the Reason’s self that dates with them, | |
| Should be in essence of intensity | |
| Hereafter so transcended, and awoke | 10 |
| To a perceptive subtlety so keen | |
| As to confess themselves befooled before, | |
| In all that now they will avouch for most? | |
| One man—like this—but only so much longer | |
| As life is longer than a summer’s day, | 15 |
| Believed himself a king upon his throne, | |
| And played at hazard with his fellows’ lives, | |
| Who cheaply dreamed away their lives to him. | |
| The sailor dreamed of tossing on the flood: | |
| The soldier, of his laurels grown in blood: | 20 |
| The lover, of the beauty that he knew | |
| Must yet dissolve to dusty residue: | |
| The merchant and the miser of his bags | |
| Of fingered gold; the beggar of his rags: | |
| And all this stage of earth on which we seem | 25 |
| Such busy actors, and the parts we played | |
| Substantial as the shadow of a shade, | |
| And Dreaming but a dream within a dream! | |
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