II
Along the city-ways
Already day’s vehement tumult had begun:
Through street and justled alley, court and square,
The tireless and eternal Heart poured forth
Its myriad human faces, grave or glad,
On the old course of toil (a choral hymn
From the lips of Life) each face a testimony
Of some prefiguring love. O the delight,
The incredible bounty and sustaining will
Of passionate longing, peopling all the earth—
And the joy of man and woman! The laughing boys!
The milkman clanking along in his cart, and there
Two bonneted old women, and there a thief,
Perhaps, with a night’s booty sneaking home!
Yet solemn all and sacred, with new eyes
I saw them then, and in each face I seemed
With a new soul to read the soul beneath;
Through love and pain and sorrow having passed
Into the breast of all humanity—
Through love and sorrow. Yes, and for your sake,
Being human, all things human touched to love
This heart of mine, made holy; and the thought
Of the million other hearts beyond the dawn—
The gladness, and the sadness, and the pain—
Came back upon me like a lifting music,
Beautiful, and most sorrowful, and divine.
Till a vast compassion
Up through the springs of all my being welled
Intolerably! Ah, even as to myself,
Unfaithful, the exuberant Bounty stooped
With arms of pity; so I longed to do—
To lose myself at last in the Great Self
That beams upon the just and the unjust,
Carelessly shedding radiant light around:
Compassing finite hate with infinite love,
With beauty, ugliness, and death with life!
So through that street of pouring souls I passed,
Torn between grief and ecstasy. But none
Guessed the immortal secret that I bore
Close at the fluttering heart—the fear—the joy—
The very beat and memory in my blood,
The exquisite sense and lingering pain of you.