In lengthened silence of a living love,
Our faithful thinking travels strangely far;
We feel sometimes that it has reached the place:
Is longing lost, then, where the angels are?

Two that for many a year had closely lived,
By Circumstance were forced and kept apart;
From youth to age no word between them passed,
While all the way each had this thought at heart:

" Oh that for only once it were allowed
To tell the one that used to live so near
That, through long silence, often Thought goes out
Seeking to break her secrets in his ear!

" Just a few words would last me for a life —
The few such words as I might hear and speak,
But Lot and Place are tyrannous as Death,
And this one favor all in vain I seek. "

As tyrannous, ah, yes! they truly are,
But, unlike Death's, uncertain is their reign;
Some miracle may, in the dead of dark,
Undo the prison door for heart and brain.

Then each to each shall revelations make
Of the long past that flowed so still between;
In what one says of all the time ago,
As in a glass, the other's heart be seen.

If thus on earth, what must it be up There,
When we have passed within the jewelled Gate?
What of the longing that invades our hearts?
What of the souls whom Death doth isolate?