Informs with terror the sorrow that guards the dead.

No service of bended knee or of humbled head

May soothe or subdue the God who has change to wife:

And life with death is as morning with evening wed.

And yet, if the light and the life in the light that here

Seem soft and splendid and fervid as sleep may seem

Be more than the shine of a smile or the flash of a tear,

Sleep, change, and death are less than a spell-struck dream,

And fear than the fall of a leaf on a starlit stream.

And yet, if the hope that hath said it absorb not fear,

What helps it man that the stars and the waters gleam?

What helps it man, that the noon be indeed intense,

The night be indeed worth worship? Fear and pain

Were lords and masters yet of the secret sense,

Which now dares deem not that light is as darkness, fain

Though dark dreams be to declare it, crying in vain.

[Pg 137]

For whence, thou God of the light and the darkness, whence

Dawns now this vision that bids not the sunbeams wane?

What light, what shadow, diviner than dawn or night,

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