And touch the draperies of imagined shapes
That hold the souls we love—that have gone forth
Into the land of shadows, but still live
In memory, O, most dear! Beguile our lives
With dim, half-fashioned phantoms of dead hours,
Lest the long way grow hateful; give us faith
Unreasoned, vague, unsubstanced, but still faith;
For faith is hope, and hope alone is life.
"EVEN WHEN JOY IS NEAR"
Even when joy is near
These ghosts of banished thoughts do haunt the mind:
The awful void of space wherein our earth,
An atom in the unending whirl of stars,
Circles, all helpless, to a nameless doom;
The swift, indifferent marshaling of fate
Whereby the world moves on, rewarding vice
And punishing angelic innocence
As 't were the crime of crimes; the brute, dull, slow
Persistence in the stifled mind of man
Of forces that drive all his being back
Into the slime; the silent cruelty
Of nature, that doth crush the unseen soul
Hidden within its sensitive shell of flesh;
The anguish and the sorrow of all time,—
These are forever with me,—but grow dim
When I remember my sweet mother's face.
Somewhere, at heart of all, the right must reign
If in the garden of the infinite
Such loveliness be brought to perfect bloom.
