XCV.
O ye, who furnish’d with hearts form’d of fire,
Can clasp no longer love within your arms;
Who, lost in a poor world of brick and mire,
Can find no breast to give the love which charms;
Who live to dream, what waking quite confounds;
Who, forced on self, loathe your own lives the while;
Who cannot hear your names, ’mid many sounds,
Or teach one heart to feel, one face to smile;
Mechanical action, which use steers, not thought,
And lifeless purpose, robb’d of seeming gains,
This is your lot: with how much rapture fraught,
Too well, I know, were Nature’s slightest strains;
With what sweet voice Nature can soothe such woe,
And smile away such tears with evening’s glow.
XCVI.
Where solitude makes music unto silence,
By forests arching over deep slow streams;
Or, where huge rocks guard oceans, giving high sense
Of gods in-dwelling through immortal dreams;
There stands a shadow, beckoning to the insight,
Of a world, far vaster, fuller, more intense,
It sweeps away the cobwebs of our dim sight;
The pigmy world dwindles near shapes immense:
’Tis then, that voice, passion, shape, action, thought,
Lose all the colours caught from phantom life;
And all is given, that even presumption sought;
And there is peace, without the bubble strife:
’Tis but a moment we may blissful be;
Soon grate the irons that mind us we’re not free.
XCVII.
Who that has felt such joy would dare intrude
His heart’s best love into such quiet scene?
Who would not rather stifle thought’s sick brood,
And gag the monitor of existence lean?
For this is the well-spring, whence love must draw
The food to stuff those shapes, on which it doats;
And henceforth, kindlier, pity Nature’s flaw,
Dazzling with lustre all her gloom of motes:
’Tis here the bosom of Existence heaves;
Man feels its swell, which lifts him to more bliss;
He feels the heaven of its warm breath, which leaves
The rapture of young Love’s ideal kiss:
And he is calm, in depth of sweet repose,
In Nature lives, to Nature’s bosom grows.