LOVE.

Love comes divinely, gladdening mortal life,

As sunrise dawns upon the gaze of one

Bewildered in some outland waste, and lost:

Who, lonely faint and shuddering, through the night

Heard savage creatures nigh; and far-off moan

Of tempests on the wind.

Auroral joy

Flushes the brow of childhood, warms his cheek

To rosier redness at the name of Love;

And earlier thoughts awake in darkness strive;

As unfledged nestlings move their sightless heads

At sound, toward a fair world to them unknown.

Young Hope scales azure mountain heights to gaze,

In Love's first golden and delicious dream.

He sees the earth a maze of tempting paths,

For blissful sauntering mid the crowded flowers

And music of the rills. No ambushed wrongs,

Or thwarting storms there baffle and surprise;

But lingering, man treads long an odorous way;

And at the close, with Love clasped hand in hand,

Sets in proud glory: thence to rise anon

With Love beyond the stars and rest in heaven.

Man, nerved by Love, can steadily endure

Clash of opposing interests; perplexed web

Of crosses that distracting clog advance:

In thickest storm of contest waxes stronger

At momentary thought of home, of her,

His gracious wife, and bright-faced joys.

To him

The wrinkled patriarch, who sits and suns

His shrunken form beneath the boughs he climbed

A lissom boy, whence comes that brooding smile,

Whose secret lifts his cheeks, and overflows

His sight with tender dew? What through his frame

Melts languor sweeter than approaching sleep

To one made weary by a hard day's toil?

It is the memory of primal love,

Whose visionary splendour steeped his life

In hues of heaven; and which grown open day,

Revealing perilous falls, his steps confined

Within the pathways to the noblest end.

Now following this dimmed glory, tired, his soul

Haunts ever the mysterious gates of Death;

And waits in patient reverence till his doom

Unfolding them fulfils immortal Love.

As from some height, on a wild day of cloud,

A wanderer, chilled and worn, perchance beholds

Move toward him through the landscape soaked in gloom

A golden beam of light; creating lakes,

And verdant pasture, farms, and villages;

And touching spires atop to flickering flame;

Disclosing herds of sober feeding kine;

And brightening on its way the woods to song;

As he, that wanderer, brightens when the shaft

Suddenly falls on him. A moment warmed,

He scarcely feels its loveliness before

The light departing leaves his saddened soul

More cold than ere it came.

Thus love once shone

And blessed my life: so vanished into gloom.