Love--yet it cannot set thee free To sweep again those folds of light, It torches but a part to thee And dim, though fair. The rest is night.
As the fine structure of a man Fits into life's great world, foremade, So too it shadoweth the plan Of ages hidden in the shade.
And thou hast lived before; hast known The depth of every mystery, Has dwelt in Nature, hid, alone And winged the blue ætherial sea;
Hast looked upon the ends of space; Hast visited each rolling star,-- Before Time measured forth his pace, Scythe-armed, on a terrestrial war.
Time, with his constant touch, has half erased The memory, but he cannot dim the fame Of one who best of all has paraphrased The tale of waters with a tale of flame, Yet left us but his accents and his name.
Upon that life, the sun of history Shines not, but Legend, like a moon in mist, Sheds over it a weird uncertainty, In which all figures wave and actions twist, So that a man may read them as he list.
We know not if he trod some Theban street, And sought compassion on his aged woe, We know not if on Chian sand his feet Left footprints once; but only this we know, How the high ways of fame those footprints show.
Along the border of the restless sea, The lonely thinker must have loved to roam, We feel his soul wrapt in its majesty, And he can speak in words that drip with foam, As though himself a deep, and depths his home.
Hark! under all and through and over all, Runs on the cadence of the changeful sea; Now pleasantly the graceful surges fall, And now they mutter in an angry key Ever, throughout their changes, grand and free.
How sternly sang he of Achilles' might, How sweetly of the sweet Andromache, How low his lyre when Ajax prays for light; (Well might he bend that lyre in sympathy For also great, and also blind was he.)
We almost see the nod of sternbrowed Jove, And feel Olympus shake; we almost hear The melodies that Greek youths interwove In pæan to Apollo, and the clear, Full voice of Nestor, sounding far and near.
A dignity of sadness filled his heart, That sadness, born of immortality, Which they alone who live in art Feel in its sweetness and its mystery, Half-filled already with infinity.
Yea, Zeus was wise when he decreed him blind, And wiser still when he decreed him poor; For insight grew as outer sight declined, And want overrode the ills it could not cure, Else rhapsody had lacked its lay most pure.