But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet. 
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart. 
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said: 
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood,
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’

XI.  TIRED MEMORY.

The stony rock of death’s insensibility
Well’d yet awhile with honey of thy love
And then was dry;
Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove,
Nor all thy kind, long letters, nor the band
Which really spann’d
Thy body chaste and warm,
Thenceforward move
Upon the stony rock their wearied charm. 
At last, then, thou wast dead. 
Yet would I not despair,
But wrought my daily task, and daily said
Many and many a fond, unfeeling prayer,
To keep my vows of faith to thee from harm. 
In vain. 
’For ‘tis,’ I said, ’all one,
The wilful faith, which has no joy or pain,
As if ‘twere none.’ 
Then look’d I miserably round
If aught of duteous love were left undone,
And nothing found. 
But, kneeling in a Church, one Easter-Day,
It came to me to say: 
’Though there is no intelligible rest,
In Earth or Heaven,
For me, but on her breast,
I yield her up, again to have her given,
Or not, as, Lord, Thou wilt, and that for aye.’ 
And the same night, in slumber lying,
I, who had dream’d of thee as sad and sick and dying,
And only so, nightly for all one year,
Did thee, my own most Dear,
Possess,
In gay, celestial beauty nothing coy,
And felt thy soft caress
With heretofore unknown reality of joy. 
But, in our mortal air,
None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,
And fresh despair
Bade me seek round afresh for some extreme
Of unconceiv’d, interior sacrifice
Whereof the smoke might rise
To God, and ’mind him that one pray’d below. 
And so,
In agony, I cried: 
’My Lord, if thy strange will be this,
That I should crucify my heart,
Because my love has also been my pride,
I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss
Wherein She has no part.’ 
And I was heard,
And taken at my own remorseless word. 
O, my most Dear,
Was’t treason, as I fear? 
’Twere that, and worse, to plead thy veiled mind,
Kissing thy babes, and murmuring in mine ear,