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1818-1848
OFTEN rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:
To-day I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
Ill walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguishd faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.
Ill walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
STILL let my tyrants know, I am not doomd to wear
Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.
He comes with Western winds, with evenings wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears:
When, if my spirits sky was full of flashes warm,
I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.
But first, a hush of peacea soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breastunutterd harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost freeits home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
O dreadful is the checkintense the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throbthe brain to think again
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.
And, if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!
Yea, as my swift days near their goal,
Tis all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.
NO coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere!
I see Heavens glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Lifethat in me has rest,
As Iundying Lifehave power in Thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move mens hearts: unutterably vain:
Worthless as witherd weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine Infinity;
So surely anchord on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
ThouThou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
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