“There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’.”
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“They watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.”
LII.
He complains of his own inability to love Hallam as he ought, that is, worthily; because, if he did so, he would be equal to his friend,
“For love reflects the thing beloved;”
whereas his words are words only, the “froth of thought.”
The Spirit of love reproves this self-accusation:
“Thou canst not move me from thy side,
Nor human frailty do me wrong.”
There is no ideal of excellence, which we may conceive, that will ensure our attaining to it:
“not the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue”—
not the life of Christ, in the clear atmosphere of Palestine, keeps any spirit “wholly true” to that pattern of perfection.