XCI.

If any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain;

Yea, tho' it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind

Of memory murmuring tho past.

Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view

A fact within the coming year;

And tho' the months, revolving near,

Should prove the phantom-warning true, ■J

They might not seem thy prophecies, ! \ But spiritual presentiments,

And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise.

SOU.

I Shall not see thoic. Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land,

Where first he walk'd when claspt in clay t

But he, the Spirit himself, may come

II t

Where all the nerve of sense is numb; Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost .

O, therefore from thy sightless range

With gods in unconjectured bliss,

O, from the distance of the abyss . j

Of tenfold-complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and cuter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame

My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

I

XCIII.

How pure at heart and sound in head,

With what divine affections bold

Should be the man whose thought would hold An hour's communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,

My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast,
Imaginations calm and fair,
The memory like a cloudless air,

The conscience as a sea at rest:

But when the heart is full of din,

And doubt beside the portal waits,
They can but listen at the gates,

And hear the household jar within.

Whence radiate: fieree extremes employ h i

Thy spirits in tho darkening leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief

Thy passion clasps a secret joy:

i

And I—my harp would prelude woe—

I cannot all command tho strings;

The glory of the sum of things Will flash along the chords and go.