| |
| .. PEACE, 1 peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep— | |
| He hath awakened from the dream of life— | |
| ’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep | |
| With phantoms an unprofitable strife, | |
| And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife | 5 |
| Invulnerable nothings.—We decay | |
| Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief | |
| Convulse us and consume us day by day, | |
| And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. | |
| |
| He has outsoared the shadow of our night; | 10 |
| Envy and calumny and hate and pain, | |
| And that unrest which men miscall delight, | |
| Can touch him not and torture not again; | |
| From the contagion of the world’s slow stain | |
| He is secure, and now can never mourn | 15 |
| A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain; | |
| Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn, | |
| With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn … | |
| |
| He is made one with Nature: there is heard | |
| His voice in all her music, from the moan | 20 |
| Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird; | |
| He is a presence to be felt and known | |
| In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, | |
| Spreading itself where’er that Power may move | |
| Which has withdrawn his being to its own; | 25 |
| Which wields the world with never-wearied love, | |
| Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. | |
| |
| He is a portion of the loveliness | |
| Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear | |
| His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress | 30 |
| Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there | |
| All new successions to the forms they wear; | |
| Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight | |
| To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; | |
| And bursting in its beauty and its might | 35 |
| From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light. | |
| |
| The splendours of the firmament of time | |
| May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; | |
| Like stars to their appointed height they climb, | |
| And death is a low mist which cannot blot | 40 |
| The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought | |
| Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, | |
| And love and life contend in it, for what | |
| Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there | |
| And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air … | 45 |
| |
| The One remains, the many change and pass; | |
| Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; | |
| Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, | |
| Stains the white radiance of Eternity, | |
| Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die, | 50 |
| If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! | |
| Follow where all is fled!—… | |
