THE SUN

Now autumn, and that sadness as of love

Heroic in immortal solitude;

Those veins of flaming passion through the wood;

But in the blue and infinite above

A shining circle like the light of truth,

Self-poising; deathless his desire sublime,

Whose motion is the measurement of time,

Whose step is morning, and his smile is youth.

No passion burns upon the livid earth

Whose stain can tint that circle, or whose cry

Can rout the tranquilly receiving sky.

All passion, all its crimson stream, from birth

To murder, bloom and pestilential blight,

All flows beneath the sanction of his light.