"In Youth I have known one"

       Table of Contents

      How often we forget all time, when lone

       Admiring Nature's universal throne;

       Her woods—her wilds—her mountains—the intense

       Reply of Hers to Our intelligence!

       I

      In youth I have known one with whom the Earth

       In secret communing held—as he with it,

       In daylight, and in beauty, from his birth:

       Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit

       From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth

       A passionate light such for his spirit was fit—

       And yet that spirit knew—not in the hour

       Of its own fervor—what had o'er it power.

       II

      Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought

       To a ferver by the moonbeam that hangs o'er,

       But I will half believe that wild light fraught

       With more of sovereignty than ancient lore

       Hath ever told—or is it of a thought

       The unembodied essence, and no more

       That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass

       As dew of the night-time, o'er the summer grass?

       III

      Doth o'er us pass, when, as th' expanding eye

       To the loved object—so the tear to the lid

       Will start, which lately slept in apathy?

       And yet it need not be—(that object) hid

       From us in life—but common—which doth lie

       Each hour before us—but then only bid

       With a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken

       T' awake us—'Tis a symbol and a token—

       IV

      Of what in other worlds shall be—and given

       In beauty by our God, to those alone

       Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven

       Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone,

       That high tone of the spirit which hath striven

       Though not with Faith—with godliness—whose throne

       With desperate energy 't hath beaten down;

       Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.