There is no certainty, “my bosom’s guest,”
  No proving for the things whereof ye wot;
For, like the dead to sight unmanifest,
      They are, and they are not.

But surely as they are, for God is truth,
  And as they are not, for we saw them die,
So surely from the heaven drops light for youth,
      If youth will walk thereby.

And can I see this light?  It may be so;
  “But see it thus and thus,” my fathers said. 
The living do not rule this world; ah no! 
      It is the dead, the dead.

Shall I be slave to every noble soul,
  Study the dead, and to their spirits bend;
Or learn to read my own heart’s folded scroll,
      And make self-rule my end?

Thought from without—­O shall I take on trust,
  And life from others modelled steal or win;
Or shall I heave to light, and clear of rust
      My true life from within?

O, let me be myself!  But where, O where,
  Under this heap of precedent, this mound
Of customs, modes, and maxims, cumbrance rare,
      Shall the Myself be found?

O thou Myself, thy fathers thee debarred
  None of their wisdom, but their folly came
Therewith; they smoothed thy path, but made it hard
      For thee to quit the same.

With glosses they obscured God’s natural truth,
  And with tradition tarnished His revealed;
With vain protections they endangered youth,
      With layings bare they sealed.

What aileth thee, myself?  Alas! thy hands
  Are tied with old opinions—­heir and son,
Thou hast inherited thy father’s lands
      And all his debts thereon.

O that some power would give me Adam’s eyes! 
  O for the straight simplicity of Eve! 
For I see nought, or grow, poor fool, too wise
      With seeing to believe.

Exemplars may be heaped until they hide
  The rules that they were made to render plain;
Love may be watched, her nature to decide,
      Until love’s self doth wane.

Ah me! and when forgotten and foregone
  We leave the learning of departed days,
And cease the generations past to con,
      Their wisdom and their ways,—­

When fain to learn we lean into the dark,
  And grope to feel the floor of the abyss,
Or find the secret boundary lines which mark
      Where soul and matter kiss—­

Fair world! these puzzled souls of ours grow weak
  With beating their bruised wings against the rim
That bounds their utmost flying, when they seek
      The distant and the dim.

We pant, we strain like birds against their wires;
  Are sick to reach the vast and the beyond;—­
And what avails, if still to our desires
      Those far-off gulfs respond?

Contentment comes not therefore; still there lies
  An outer distance when the first is hailed,
And still forever yawns before our eyes
      An utmost—­that is veiled.