loving, hopes, Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof, And in his mind for possible proofs gropes, Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff, I daily live, i’th’ fame I dream to see, But by my thought of others’ thought of me. 

 

XVI.

 We never joy enjoy to that full point Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been, Nor have the strength regret to disappoint Recalling not past joy’s thought, but its mien. Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled, It must have been joy ere its joy did pass And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled. Alas! All this is useless, for joy’s in Enjoying, not in thinking of enjoying. Its mere thought-mirroring gainst itself doth sin, By mere reflecting solid life destroying, Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove It must not think, doth further from joy move. 

 

XVII.

 My love, and not I, is the egoist. My love for thee loves itself more than thee; Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist, And makes me live that it may feed on me. In the country of bridges the bridge is More real than the shores it doth unsever; So in our world, all of Relation, this Is true—that truer is Love than either lover. This thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt’s door— If we, seeing substance of this world, are not Mere Intervals, God’s Absence and no more, Hollows in real Consciousness and Thought. And if ’tis possible to Thought to bear this fruit, Why should it not be possible to Truth? 

 

XVIII.

 Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night, In one black mystery two void mysteries blends; The stray stars, whose innumerable light Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends; The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles; The gulf of silence, empty even of nought; Thought’s high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles Because the string’s lost and the plan forgot: When I think on this and that here I stand, The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise, Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand And looking at it with thought-alien eyes, The prayer of my wonder looketh past The universal darkness lone and vast. 

 

XIX.

 Beauty and love let no one separate, Whom exact Nature did to each other fit, Giving to 

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