University of Virginia Library


20

XVIII.
LOVE AND IMMORTALITY

Those magic dreams of boyhood! passing sweet
They were,—the glimpses swift as when we see,
Ourselves fast-moving, field and tower and tree
Torn by us on the wings of motion fleet;
The flashes of a future joy to meet,
A heaven all untrodden yet to be.
But present love transcends foreboded glee
As April suns are pale in August heat,
And youth's romance was but a star beside
The moon of riper passion; so I think
It shall be when we float upon death's tide
To a new shore's, another ocean's, brink;
The draught shall deeper, sweeter, be to drink
Than dimly in the distance we descried.