A GREAT GULF.
If any tender sire
Who sits girt round by loving faces
And happy childhood's thousand graces,
Through sudden crash or fire
Should 'scape from this poor life to some mysterious air,
And, dwelling solitary there,
Should feel his unfilled yearning father's heart
Pierced through by some intolerable smart;
And, sickening for the dear lost lives again,
Should through his overmastering pain
Break through the awful bounds the Eternal sets between
That which lives Here, and There, the Seen and the Unseen;
And having gained once more
The confines of the Earth, the scarce-left place
Which greets him with unchanged familiar face—
The well-remembered door,
The rose he watered blooming yet,
Nought to remember or forget,
No change in all the world except in him,
Nor there save in some sense, already dim
Before the unchanged past, so that he seem
A mortal spirit still, and what was since, a dream;
And in the well-known room
Should find the blithe remembered faces
Grown sad and blurred by recent traces
Of a new sorrow and gloom,
And when his soul to comfort them is fain
Finds his voice mute, his form unknown, unseen,
And thinks with irrepressible pain
Of all the happy days which late have been,
And feels his new life's inmost chambers stirred
If only of his own, he might be seen or heard;
Then if, at length,
The father's yearning and overburdened soul
Burst into shape and voice which scorn control
Of its despairing strength,—
Ah Heaven! ah pity for the present dread
Which strikes the old affection, dull and dead!
Ah, better were it far than this thing to remain,
Voiceless, unseen, unloved, for ever and in pain!
So when a finer mind,
Knowing its old self swept by some weird change
And the old thought deceased, or else grown strange,
Turns to those left behind,
With passionate stress and mighty yearning stirred,—
It strives to stand revealed in shape and word
In vain; or by strong travail visible grown,
Finds but a world estranged, and lives and dies alone!