Poems by a Painter :: :: University of Virginia Library

Time's unreturning river
Flows moaning down for ever,
Through life and death towards that shadowy sea,
Within whose tideless deeps
The kraken-mystery sleeps:
The trancèd ocean of Eternity!
I hear the fresh wind rippling in the leaves,
The swallows twitter round the barley-sheaves,
The homeward reapers in the setting sun
Sing merrily, their fragrant labour done;
The bee, blue summer's joyous troubadour,
Carols for kisses to each damsel-flower;
Thy sweet voice fills this consecrated bower

With love's own music. But through all, through all,
I hear the time-stream's desolating fall,
The eternal ocean's melancholy roar:
“The past returneth never, never more!”

II.

My youth was spent in folly;
With vestal Melancholy
I walked abroad throughout this beauteous earth
Culling from all things fair
The poison of despair,
To murder in my breast the angel mirth;
Scorning, for cold abstractions of the mind,
The gentle sympathies of human kind;
Gazing on vague Ideals, till the eye
Grew blind to Nature; ever wearily
Seeking afar the beauty round me strewn:
Till, in a world of joy, I stood alone,
In impious isolation. And though now—

Thanks to thy ministry!—my heart can glow
With late-found gladness, ghosts of buried woe
Will rise to scare me, even in hours like this,
And turn to gall the sweetness of thy kiss.