Songs of the Spirit

Where we were happy all the summer through, And merry when the autumn tinged with brown The glades, and in the winter thought we knew Behind the cloudy weather some far sky was blue. That crown I hope for shall be garlanded Of deathless flowers of equal bloom. And thou, O thou true lover, thou belovéd head And marble pallor of a prince’s brow, At the cliff’s edge we stand together now ; The parting of our ways has come at last, Mine is the bitterest journey, as I trow, A man may take, so solitary, so vast, It binds the future now, and stultifies the past. Only the hope that God may reunite Our ways diverging, and make one again The deathless love that burns a beacon bright On the black deeps, the irremeable main, That men must launch on, the exalted plain Of Life. We sever, and our tears are few, Knowing perchance beyond the moment’s pain 52