The great Intelligences fair
That range above our mortal state,
In circle round the blessed gate,
Received and gave him welcome there;
And led him through the blissful climes,
And show’d him in the fountain fresh
All knowledge that the sons of flesh
Shall gather in the cycled times.
But I remain’d, whose hopes were dim,
Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,
To wander on a darken’d earth,
Where all things round me breathed of him.
O friendship, equal-poised control,
O heart, with kindliest motion warm,
O sacred essence, other form,
O solemn ghost! O crowned soul!
Yet none could better know than I,
How much of act at human hands
The sense of human will demands,
By which we dare to live or die.
Whatever way my days decline,
I felt and feel, though left alone,
His being working in mine own,
The footsteps of his life in mine;
A life that all the Muses deck’d
With gifts of grace that might express
All-comprehensive tenderness,
All-subtilising intellect:
And so my passion hath not swerved
To works of weakness, but I find
An image comforting the mind,
And in my grief a strength reserved.
Likewise the imaginative woe,
That loved to handle spiritual strife,
Diffused the shock through all my life,
But in the present broke the blow.
My pulses therefore beat again
For other friends that once I met;
Nor can it suit me to forget
The mighty hopes that make us men.