"A year ago, and under yonder sun
Earth had no Heaven to hold our hearts in one!
For me there was no love, afar or nigh:
And, O, if love were thus in time begun,
Love, even our love, in time must surely die."
Then memory murmured, "No";
And he remembered, a million years ago,
He saw the sea-waves wistfully westward wend;
And heard her voice whispering in their flow
And calling through the silent sunset-glow.
Love that hath no beginning hath no end.
"Love dies to live!" How wild, how deep the joy
That knows no death can e'er destroy
What cannot bear destruction! By these eyes
I know that, ere the fashioning of the skies,
Or ever the sun and moon and stars were made
I loved you. Sweet, I am no more afraid.
"Love lives to die!"
Under the deep eternal sky
Her wild sweet voice caught up that deep refrain:
There, in that silent City by the Sea,
Listening the wild-wave music of Infinity,
There, in that old grey City of mortal pain,
Their voices mingled in mystic unison
With that immortal harmony
Which holds the warring worlds in one.
Their Voice, one Voice, yet manifold,
Possessed the seas, the fields, the sky,
With utterance of the dream that cannot die;
Possessed the West's wild rose and dappled gold,
And that old secret of the setting sun
Which, to the glory of Eternity,
Time, tolling like a distant bell,
Evermore faints to tell,
And, ever telling, never yet has told.
One, and yet manifold
Arose their Voice, oh strangely one again
With murmurs of the immeasurable main;
As, far beyond earth's cloudy bars,
Their Soul surpassed the sunset and the stars,
And all the heights and depths of temporal pain,
Till seas of seraph music round them rolled.
And in that mystic plane
They felt their mortal years
Break away as a dream of pain
Breaks in a stream of tears.
Love, of whom life had birth,
See now, is death not sweet?
Love, is this heaven or earth?
Both are beneath thy feet.
Nay, both within thy heart!
O Love, the glory nears;
The Gates of Pearl are flung apart,
The Rose of Heaven appears.
Across the deeps of change,
Like pangs of visible song,
What angel-spirits, remote and strange,
Thrill through the starry throng?
And oh, what wind that blows
Over the mystic Tree,
What whisper of the sacred Rose,
What murmur of the sapphire Sea, What dreams that faint and fail
From harps of burning gold,
But tell in heaven the sweet old tale
An earthly sunset told?
Hark! like a holy bell
Over that spirit Sea,
Time, in the world it loves so well,
Tolls for Eternity.