Can I look on your sweet faces,
And your proud heads backward thrown,
From this dusk of leaf-strewn places
With the dumb woods and the night alone?
Yet, indeed, this flux of guesses,—
Mad delight, and frozen calms,—
Mirth to-day, and vine-bound tresses,
And to-morrow—folded palms;
Is this all? this balanced measure?
Could life run no happier way?
Joyous at the height of pleasure,
Passive at the nadir of dismay?
But, indeed, this proud possession,
This far-reaching, magic chain,
Linking in a mad succession
Fits of joy and fits of pain,—
Have you seen it at the closing?
Have you tracked its clouded ways?
Can your eyes, while fools are dozing,
Drop, with mine, adown life's latter days?
When a dreary light is wading
Through this waste of sunless greens,
When the flashing lights are fading
On the peerless cheek of queens,
When the mean shall no more sorrow,
And the proudest no more smile;
While the dawning of the morrow
Widens slowly westward all that while?
Then, when change itself is over,
When the slow tide sets one way,
Shall you find the radiant lover,
Even by moments, of to-day?
