Page:A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields.djvu/71

But a picture like this in my soul gives no birth
To transport or pleasure, for the halo has fled;
Like a wandering spirit I move on the earth,
And the sun of the living warms never the dead.

From hill to far hill, long, long I carry my view,
From the south to the north, from the dawn to the west,
All the points of the vast circle I run through and through,
And say inly, in no place content can I rest.

What care I for palaces, huts, valleys, or woods,
Vain objects of their lustre divested and shorn,
Streams, rocks, green forests, and more adored solitudes;
One being has left me, and ye are all forlorn!

When the march of the day-god commences or ends,
With an eye quite indifferent I follow his range;
What matters to me whether he mounts or descends
In a dark sky or pure, when the days bring no change?

Could I follow the sun's course through all his career,
A blank desert, a void everywhere would I see.
I seek nothing of all he illuminates here;
Visible universe, I ask nothing of thee!

But who knows if beyond the far limits of sight,
Where the True Sun lights up other places and skies,
When my body is dust, and my soul clad in white,
What I dream of so much may not flash to mine eyes!

There shall I drink of the clear fountains I want,
There encounter the sisters long sought, Hope and Love,
Ideal—whose emblems on the earth are but scant,
There, there shall I greet thee, for thy home is above.