Classic Poem

I

My dear, dear Friends, my heart yearns forth to you
In very many of its lonely hours;
Not sweetlier comes the balm of evening dew
To all-day-drooping in fierce sunlight flowers,
Than to this weary withered heart of mine
The tender memories, the moonlight dreams
Which make your home an ever-sacred shrine,
And show your features lit with heavenly gleams.
I have with some most noble friends been blest;
I wage no quarrel with my human kin, —
Knowing my misery comes from my own breast,
At war with Fate by chance and God by sin:
But of all living friends you claim in me
The love most sanctified by memory.

II

When too, too conscious of its solitude,
My heart plains weakly as a widowed dove,
The forms of certain women sweet and good,
Whom I have known and loved with reverent love,
Rise up before me; then my heart grows great
With tearful gratitude, and no more pines.
You lovely souls that fitly consecrate
The whiteness of your alabaster shrines!
You tender lives of purest good, that leaven
The monstrous evils of our mortal birth!
There are no female angels up in Heaven,
Because they all are women here on earth:
As once God's sons, God's daughters now come down,
But these to share, not lose, the heavenly crown.

III

Of all these women fair and wise and good,
Of all save only her who died so young,
Thou art in this angelic womanhood,
Whose solemn praises bards have seldom sung,
Supreme to me — most lovely and most pure,
O second Mother of my orphaned youth:
Thou patient heart to suffer and endure,
Thou placid soul to mirror heavenly truth,
Thou gracious presence wheresoe'er you go
To gladden pleasure, or to chasten strife,
Thou gentlest friend to sympathise with woe,
Thou perfect Mother and most perfect Wife,
Whose priceless goodness shed on worthless me
Makes gratitude itself half agony.

IV

A man of genial heart and liberal mind,
A man most rich in that rare common-sense,
Whose common absence in its name we find;
A man of nature scorning all pretence,
And honest to the core, yet void of pride
Whose vice upon that virtue most attends;
A man of joyous humour, unallied
With malice, never making foes but friends;
As such all know you, knowing you at all:
But I, dear Guide and Teacher of my youth,
When deeply shamed yet strengthened I recall
Your goodness, patience, constant loyal truth
In love for one whose life's a long defeat,
Say — Souls like this keep human nature sweet.

V

When I trace back from this my death-in-life,
Through years of sensual sin and nerveless sloth,
And weary thought with Earth and Heaven at strife,
And dull decay preventing natural growth; —
Trace back until that period I attain
When still stirred in me living seeds of good —
Some faith in soul, some active power in brain,
Some love in heart, some hopefulness in mood;
I always reach at last that little room
Wherein we lived a life so sweet and mild,
When he who now lies sleeping in the tomb
Was but an infant, and your only child:
The happy Child! thus saved, still pure in soul,
From our false world of sin and strife and dole.

VI

Indeed you set me in a happy place,
Dear for itself, and dearer much for you,
And dearest still for one life-crowning grace —
Dearest, though infinitely saddest too:
For there my own Good Angel took my hand,
And filled my soul with glory of Her eyes,
And led me through the love-lit Faerie Land
Which joins our common world to Paradise.
How soon, how soon, God called Her from my side,
Back to Her own celestial sphere of day!
And ever since She ceased to be my Guide,
I reel and stumble on Life's solemn way;
Ah, ever since Her eyes withdrew their light,
I wander lost in blackest stormy night.