 | My Sonnets |  |
[By the sweet beauty of yon bending sky,—]
By the sweet beauty of yon bending sky,—By the dark, gorgeous, majesty of night,—
By the unutterable glory bright
In all its thousand starry worlds,—yea, by
The ocean of the gleaming light, on high,
Rolling its billows o'er them, in the sight
Of mortals, burying them down in the white,
Pellucid, depths of its clear waves,—they lie,
Who say the All-good, whose word made man, hath said,
That never-ending toil should be the lot
Of all the generations that the dead
Shall gather to their slumbering hosts. No, not,
For this, lives thought in man. If God meant ne'er
Man should rejoice, why made he earth so fair?
November 20th, 1842.
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