'O Love! no habitant of earth thou art-- An unseen seraph, we believe in thee; A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart, But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see The naked eye, thy form, as it should be; The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven Even with its own desiring phantasy, And to a thought such shape and image given, As haunts the unquenched soul--parched--wearied--wrung and riven.
'Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, And fevers into false creation:--where, Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone. Can Nature show so fair? Where are the charms and virtues which we dare Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, The unreached Paradise of our despair, Which o'er informs the pencil and the pen, And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?
'Who loves, raves--'tis youth's frenzy--but the cure Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds Which robed our idols, and we see too sure Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds The fatal spell, and still it draws us on, Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds; The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun, Seems ever near the prize--wealthiest when most undone.
'We wither from our youth, we gasp away-- Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst, Though to the last, in verge of our decay Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first-- But all too late, so are we doubly cursed. Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same, Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst-- For all are meteors with a different name, And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
'Few--none--find what they love or could have loved, Though accident, blind contact, and the strong Necessity of loving, have removed Antipathies--but to recur, ere long, Envenomed with irrevocable wrong; And circumstance, that unspiritual god And miscreator, makes and helps along Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod, Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod.
'Our life is a false nature--'tis not in The harmony of things,--this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless Upas, this all blasting tree. Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew-- Disease--death--bondage--all the woes we see-- And worse--the woes we see not--which throb through The immedicable soul, with heartaches ever new.'