And strangely on the silence broke

The silent-speaking words, and strange Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigor, bold to dwell

On doubts that drive the coward back, And keen through wordy snares to track Suggestion to her inmost cell.

So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last

His living soul was flashed on mine,

And mine in his was wound, and whirled
About empyreal heights of thought,

And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,

Eonian music measuring out

The steps of Time-the shocks of Chance,The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancelled, stricken through with doubt.

Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or even for intellect to reach
Through memory that which I became :

Till now the doubtful dusk revealed

The knolls once more where, couched at ease,
The white kine glimmered, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field:

And sucked from out the distant gloom,
A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,

And fluctuate all the still perfume,

And gathering freshlier overhead,

Rocked the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung

The lilies to and fro, and said

“The dawn, the dawn,” and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixed their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.

YOU

XCV.

say, but with no touch of scorn, Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes Are tender over drowning flies, You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.

I know not: one indeed I knew

In many a subtile question versed,
Who touched a jarring lyre at first,

But ever strove to make it true:

Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

He fought his doubts and gathered strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own;

And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,

And dwells not in the light alone,

But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinai's peaks of old,

While Israel made their gods of gold,
Although the trumpet blew so loud.

XCVI.

My love has talked with rocks and trees,
He finds on misty mountain-ground
His own vast shadow glory-crowned,
He sees himself in all he sees.

Two partners of a married life,—

I looked on these and thought of thee
In vastness and in mystery,

And of my spirit as of a wife.

These two, they dwelt with eye on eye, Their hearts of old have beat in tune, Their meetings made December June,

Their every parting was to die.

Their love has never passed away;
The days she never can forget
Are earnest that he loves her yet,
Whate'er the faithless people say.

Her life is lone, he sits apart,

He loves her yet, she will not weep,
Though, rapt in matters dark and deep,

He seems to slight her simple heart.

He thrids the labyrinth of the mind,
He reads the secret of the star,

He seems so near and yet so far,
He looks so cold: she thinks him kind.

She keeps the gift of years before,
A withered violet is her bliss;

She knows not what his greatness is;
For that, for all, she loves him more.

For him she plays, to him she sings

Of early faith and plighted vows; She knows but matters of the house, And he, he knows a thousand things.

Her faith is fixed and cannot move,

She darkly feels him great and wise, She dwells on him with faithful eyes, "I cannot understand: I love."

XCVII.

You leave us; you will see the Rhine,
And those fair hills I sailed below,
When I was there with him; and go
By summer belts of wheat and vine

To where he breathed his latest breath,
That City. All her splendor seems
No livelier than the wisp that gleams

On Lethe in the eyes of Death.

Let her great Danube rolling fair
Enwind her isles, unmarked of me:
I have not seen, I will not see
Vienna: rather dream that there,

A treble darkness, Evil haunts

The birth, the bridal; friend from friend Is oftener parted, fathers bend Above more graves, a thousand wants

Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey

By each cold hearth, and sadness flings Her shadow on the blaze of kings; And yet myself have heard him say,

That not in any mother town

With statelier progress to and fro The double tides of chariots flow By park and suburb under brown

Of lustier leaves; nor more content,
He told me, lives in any crowd,

When all is gay with lamps, and loud
With sport and song, in booth and tent,

Imperial halls, or open plain;

And wheels the circled dance, and breaks

The rocket molten into flakes

Of crimson or in emerald rain.

XCVIII.

RISEST thou thus, dim dawn, again,
So loud with voices of the birds,
So thick with lowings of the herds,
Day, when I lost the flower of men ;

Who tremblest through thy darkling red

On yon swollen brook that bubbles fast By meadows breathing of the past, And woodlands holy to the dead;

Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves

A song that slights the coming care,
And Autumn laying here and there

A fiery finger on the leaves;

Who wakenest with thy balmy breath
To myriads on the genial earth,
Memories of bridal, or of birth,
And unto myriads more, of death.

O, wheresoever those may be,

Betwixt the slumber of the poles, To-day they count as kindred souls; They know me not, but mourn with me.