Life.
Remember how thy ardor's magic sense
Made poor things rich to thee and small things great;
How hearth and garden, field and bushy fence,
Were thy own eager love incorporate;
And how the solemn, splendid Past
O'er thy early widened earth
Made grandeur, as on sunset cast
Dark elms near take mighty girth.
Hands and feet were tiny still
When we knew the historic thrill,
Breathed deep breath in heroes dead,
Tasted the immortals' bread.
Self.
Seeing what I might have been
Reproved the thing I was,
Smoke on heaven's clearest sheen,
The speck within the rose.
By revered ones' frailties stung
Reverence was with anguish wrung.
Life.
But all thy anguish and thy discontent
Was growth of mine, the elemental strife
Toward feeling manifold with vision blent
To wider thought: I was no vulgar life
That, like the water-mirrored ape.
Not discerns the thing it sees,
Nor knows its own in others' shape,
Railing, scorning, at its ease.
