(For Faith is ours by gift, but Hope by right),
  And walks among us whispering as of yore: 
’Glory and grace are thrown thee with the light;
  Search, if not yet thou touch the mystic shore;
Immanent beauty and good are nigh at hand,
For infants laugh and snowdrops bloom in the land.

Thou shalt have more anon.’  What more? in sooth,
  The mother of to-morrow is to-day,
And brings forth after her kind.  There is no ruth
On the heart’s sigh, that ‘more’ is hidden away,
And man’s to-morrow yet shall pine and yearn;
He shall surmise, and he shall not discern,

But list the lark, and want the rapturous cries
  And passioning of morning stars that sing
Together; mark the meadow-orchis rise
  And think it freckled after an angel’s wing;
Absent desire his land, and feel this, one
With the great drawing of the central sun.

But not to all such dower, for there be eyes
  Are colour-blind, and souls are spirit-blind. 
Those never saw the blush in sunset skies,
Nor the others caught a sense not made of words
  As if were spirits about, that sailed the wind
And sank and settled on the boughs like birds.

Yet such for aye divided from us are
  As other galaxies that seem no more
Than a little golden millet-seed afar. 
  Divided; swarming down some flat lee shore,
Then risen, while all the air that takes no word
Tingles, and trembles as with cries not heard.

For they can come no nearer.  There is found
  No meeting point.  We have pierced the lodging-place
Of stars that cluster’d with their peers lie bound,
  Embedded thick, sunk in the seas of space,
Fortunate orbs that know not night, for all
Are suns;—­but we have never heard that call,

Nor learned it in our world, our citadel
  With outworks of a Power about it traced;
Nor why we needs must sin who would do well,
  Nor why the want of love, nor why its waste,
Nor how by dying of One should all be sped,
Nor where, O Lord, thou hast laid up our dead.

But Hope is ours by right, and Faith by gift. 
  Though Time be as a moon upon the wane,
Who walk with Faith far up the azure lift
  Oft hear her talk of lights to wax again. 
‘If man be lost,’ she cries, ’in this vast sea
Of being,—­lost—­he would be lost with Thee

Who for his sake once, as he hears, lost all. 
  For Thou wilt find him at the end of the days: 
Then shall the flocking souls that thicker fall
  Than snowflakes on the everlasting ways
Be counted, gathered, claimed.—­Will it be long? 
Earth has begun already her swan-song.

Who, even that might, would dwell for ever pent
  In this fair frame that doth the spirit inhearse,
Nor at the last grow weary and content,
  Die, and break forth into the universe,
And yet man would not all things—­all—­were new.’ 
Then saith the other, that one robed in blue: