Fade lesser dreams, that, built of tenderness, Young trust and tinted hopes, have led me long. These jagged ways ye whiled will pain me less Than hath your falsity. Your spirit song Sent magic wafted up and down along The waves of wind to me. Your world was real. There was no ruder world that I could feel. I lived in dreams and thought you all I would, Nor knew what dread, bare truth is doomed to rise, When love and hope and all but one far Good, Like sunset lands feel the cold night of lies.
Go, sweetest visions, die amid my tears, For hence, nor cheered, nor blinded, must I seek That larger dream that cannot fade; though years Of leaden days and leagues of by-path bleak Must intervene, with austere sadness gray, Fade dimmer! lest in agony I turn, And heartsick seek ye, though the Fates shriek "Nay!" And the wroth heavens with judgment lightnings burn.
Go useless lesser dreams. And where they were, Rise, grave aërial Good! Thy texture's true. There is no good can die. "No ill," says Time, "can bear, However beautiful, my long, long earnest view."
Soul, thou hast lived before. Thy wing Hath swept the ancient folds of light Which once wrapt stilly everything, Before the advent of a Night.
O thou art blind and thou art dead Unto the knowledge that was thine. A longing and a dreamy dread Alone oft shadow the divine.
Full loud calls past eternity, But Lethe's murmur stills its roar, The one vague truth that reaches thee Is this--that thou hast lived before.
Home often comes some voice of eld Confused and low--a broken surge By fate and distance half withheld-- Rich in linked sadness like a dirge.
The muffled, great bell Silence clangs His solemn call, and thou, O soul! Dost stir in sense's torpid fangs, Like the blind magnet, toward a pole.
The deep, vast, swelling organ-sound; The cadence of an evening flute, Bring oft those ancient joys around To linger till the notes are mute.
And when thy hushéd breathing fills The shrine of quiet reverence, Then, too, a freeing angel stills The clanking of the chains of sense.
But nearest to that former life Another power calleth thee, Away from care, away from strife, Toward what thou wast--infinity.
And in thee, soul, the deepest chord Thrills to a strain rung from above; That strain is bound within a word, A sole, sweet word, and it is--Love.