But something ’mid the pauses of the dark Doth teach me that I am not all alone, For I have dreamed in my dread, maddest hour, An awful shadow, blacker than my black, Went ever with me. Hearken to me now: I never felt a hand or saw a face, I never knew a comfort more than sleep, The winters they are only barren snows, And age is hard, and death waits at the last.
But I have felt in some dim, shapeless way, As memories long remembered after youth, That back of all there is some mighty will, Beyond the little dreams that we are here, Beyond the misery of our days and years, Beyond the outmost system’s outmost rim, Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim, A wondrous mercy that is working still.
THE DREAMERS.
They lingered on the middle heights, Betwixt the brown earth and the heaven; They whispered, “We are not the night’s, But pallid children of the even.”
They muttered, “We are not the day’s, For the old struggle and endeavor, The rugged and unquiet ways, Are dead and driven past for ever.”
They dreamed upon the cricket’s tune, The winds that stirred the withered grasses: But never saw the blood-red moon, That lit the spectre mountain-passes.
They sat and marked the brooklet steal In smoke-mist o’er its silvered surges: But marked not, with its peal on peal, The storm that swept the granite gorges.
They dreamed the shimmer and the shade, And sought in pools for haunted faces: Nor heard again the cannonade, In dreams from earth’s old battle-places.