Unworthy thou! if faith should sink and falter;
Blind hand and blinder eye
Bind the blind hope upon thy doubt’s old altar
And stab it till it die.
Thou canst not say thy toil and tears have never
Communed with lovely sleep!
Had night before thine eyeballs—night forever
To lead thee to the deep!
Ay! wouldst thou have thy self-love for a burden,
A fardel bound with tears,
To sweat beneath and gain at last, for guerdon,
From hands of wasted years?
To find thy stars are glow-worms, feebler, thinner
Than glimmers of the moon:
Dead stars, and all the darkness of the inner
Self’s deader plenilune.
To see at last,—beneath Death’s sterner learning,
—Through sockets sealed with frost,
The awful sunsets of Doom’s heavens burning
God’s baffling pentecost.
WITH THE TIDE
Once when the morning flashed athwart the breakers,
And on the foaming sand,
In exultation, by the ocean’s acres,
Love took command.
And so we sailed, æolian music melting
Around our silken sails;
The bubbled foam our prow of sandal pelting
With rainbow gales.
We watched the beach, with prickly cactus hateful,
And gnarled palmetto, pass
Beyond our vision; coasts where Life walked fateful
With Time’s slow glass.
Though hateful now, who could forget the beauty
Of dim and fragile shells,
That strewed the shores of Patience and of Duty
Like asphodels?