| I |
The long, dark slope is topped with mist,
But here the sun is on the grass:
Beneath, the sea-waves break, and twist
Backward like snakes of molten glass.
Across an ancient sand-heaped wall
The foot thro' graves forgotten goes,
And stops where old, old voices call
Thro' generations of repose.
But where a sorrow of to-day
Has set a freshly-fashioned mound,
A bird slides down his airy way
And makes the silence ring with sound. |
| |
| II |
What gloom might now our spirits balk
Fades out before that high reproof;
And thro' the fabric of your talk
Go light and shadow, warp and woof,
With something deeper than the word,—
Some stately certitude of faith
Whose eye at Life had never blurred,
Nor quivered at the eye of Death,
But saw, in that swift, woman's way,
Thro' changings to the changeless Whole,
And Life and Death as waves that sway
Across the ocean of the Soul. |
| |
| III |
Then when the hill was lost in mist,
And in the sea the sky was glassed,
We wandered home in amethyst;
And you upon the morrow passed
On that last journey to the West
Whose end was in the Atlantic wave,
Where, on your youth's triumphant crest,
One stroke, another's life to save,
With glory crowned your life complete,
Proud as the horsed and pluméd seas
That laid your body at my feet—
A wonder past Praxiteles. |
| |
| IV |
Oh! bear her by the weeping crest,
And past the fields of fallen ears,
On her last journey from the West,
This holy Lady Day of tears.
But yet, tho' heads are bared and bowed,
And down the road the keeners keen,
Some spirit-music, deep and proud,
Slips out their thin, shrill cries between
And, like the bird that other day,
That made the silence ring with sound,
It floats along the sun-set way,
A joy above our sorrow's mound. |
| |
| V |
What grief might now our spirits balk
Fades out before that high reproof;
And thro' the hushed and wavering talk
That fills the streets from roof to roof,
A fire from your high altar shines,
And kindles thro' our dusk of strife
A faith whose inner eye divines
That Death is minister to Life,
And all our years a moment's dream
In one great Mind that grasps the whole,
And Life and Death but waves that gleam
Along the ocean of the Soul. |