Father! I dare at length. 
My childhood, thy gift, all my claim in speaking; Sinful, yet hoping, I to Thee come, seeking
  Thy tenderness, my strength.

THE LOST SOUL.

Brothers, look there!

What! see ye nothing yet? 
Knit your eyebrows close, and stare;
Send your souls forth in the gaze,
As my finger-point is set,
Through the thick of the foggy air. 
Beyond the air, you see the dark;
(For the darkness hedges still our ways;)
And beyond the dark, oh, lives away! 
Dim and far down, surely you mark
A huge world-heap of withered years
Dropt from the boughs of eternity? 
See ye not something lying there,
Shapeless as a dumb despair,
Yet a something that spirits can recognise
With the vision dwelling in their eyes? 
It hath the form of a man! 
As a huge moss-rock in a valley green,
When the light to freeze began,
Thickening with crystals of dark between,
Might look like a sleeping man. 
What think ye it, brothers?  I know it well. 
I know by your eyes ye see it—­tell.

’Tis a poor lost soul, alack! 
It was alive some ages back;
One that had wings and might have had eyes
I think I have heard that he wrote a book;
But he gathered his life up into a nook,
And perished amid his own mysteries,
Which choked him, because he had not faith,
But was proud in the midst of sayings dark
Which God had charactered on his walls;
And the light which burned up at intervals,
To be spent in reading what God saith,
He lazily trimmed it to a spark,
And then it went out, and his soul was dark.

    Is there aught between thee and me,
    Soul, that art lying there? 
    Is any life yet left in thee,
    So that thou couldst but spare
    A word to reveal the mystery
    Of the banished from light and air?

    Alas, O soul! thou wert once
    As the soul that cries to thee! 
    Thou hadst thy place in the mystic dance
    From the doors of the far eternity,
    Issuing still with feet that glance
    To the music of the free!

    Alas!  O soul, to think
    That thou wert made like me! 
    With a heart for love, and a thirst to drink
    From the wells that feed the sea! 
    And with hands of truth to have been a link
    ’Twixt mine and the parent knee;
    And with eyes to pierce to the further brink
    Of things I cannot see!

    Alas, alas, my brother! 
    To thee my heart is drawn: 
    My soul had been such another,
    In the dark amidst the dawn! 
    As a child in the eyes of its mother
    Dead on the flowery lawn!

    I mourn for thee, poor friend! 
    A spring from a cliff did drop: 
    To drink by the wayside God would bend,
    And He found thee a broken cup! 
    He threw thee aside, His way to wend
    Further and higher up.