IF I could coldly sum the love That we each other bear, My heart would to itself disprove The truth of what was there; -- Its willing utterance should express Nothing but joy and thankfulness. Yet Friendship is so blurred a name, A good so ill-discerned, That if the nature of the flame That in our bosoms burned Were treasured in becoming rhymes, It might have worth in after-times. The Lover is a God, -- the ground He treads on is not ours; His soul by other laws is bound, Sustained by other powers; We, children of a lowlier lot, Listen and understand him not. Liver of a diviner life, He turns a vacant gaze Towards the theatre of strife, Where we consume our days; His own and that one other heart Form for himself a world apart: A sphere, whose sympathies are wings, On which he rests sublime, Above the shifts of casual things, Above the flow of time; How should he feel, how can he know The sense of what goes on below? Reprove him not, -- no selfish aim Here leads to selfish ends; You might as well the infant blame That smiles to grieving friends: Could all thus love, and love endure, Our world would want no other cure. But few are the elect, for whom This fruit is on the stem, -- And for that few an early tomb Is open, -- not for them, But for their love; for they live on, Sorrow and shame! when Love is gone: They who have dwelt at Heaven's own gate, And felt the light within, Come down to our poor mortal state, Indifference, care, and sin; And their dimmed spirits hardly bear A trace to tell what once they were. Fever and Health their thirst may slake At one and the same stream; The dreamer knows not till he wake The falsehood of his dream: How, @3while@1 I love thee, can I prove The surer nature of our love? It is, that while our choicest hours Are closed from vulgar ken, We daily use our active powers, -- Are men to brother men, -- It is, that, with our hands in one, We do the work that should be done. Our hands in one, we will not shrink From life's severest due, -- Our hands in one, we will not blink The terrible and true; What each would feel a heavy blow Falls on us both as autumn snow. The simple unpresumptuous sway, By which our hearts are ruled, Contains no seed of self-decay; Too temperate to be cooled, Our Passion fears no blast of ill, No winter, till the one last chill. And even then no frantic grief Shall shake the mourner's mind, -- He will reject no small relief Kind Heaven may leave behind, Nor set at nought his bliss enjoyed, When now by human fate alloyed. |