If they can sin or feel life’s wear and fret,
  An men had loved them better, it may be
We had discovered.  But who e’er did yet,
  After the sage saints in their clemency,
Ponder in hope they had a heaven to win,
Or make a prayer with a dove’s name therein.

As grave Augustine pleading in his day,
  ’Have pity, Lord, upon the unfledged bird,
Lest such as pass do trample it in the way,
  Not marking, or not minding; give the word,
O bid an angel in the nest again
To place it, lest the mother’s love be vain.

And let it live, Lord God, till it can fly.’ 
  This man dwelt yearning, fain to guess, to spell
The parable; all work of God Most High
  Took to his man’s heart.  Surely this was well;
To love is more than to be loved, by leave
Of Heaven, to give is more than to receive.

He made it so that said it.  As for us
  Strange is their case toward us, for they give
And we receive.  Made martyrs ever thus
  In deed but not in will, for us they live,
For us they die, we quench their little day,
Remaining blameless, and they pass away.

The world is better served than it is ruled,
  And not alone of them, for ever
Ruleth the man, the woman serveth fooled
  Full oft of love, not knowing his yoke is sore. 
Life’s greatest Son nought from life’s measure swerved,
He was among us ‘as a man that served.’

Have they another life, and was it won
  In the sore travail of another death,
Which loosed the manacles from our race undone
  And plucked the pang from dying?  If this breath
Be not their all, reproach no more debarred,
‘O unkind lords, you made our bondage hard’

May be their plaint when we shall meet again
  And make our peace with them; the sea of life
Find flowing, full, nor ought or lost or vain. 
  Shall the vague hint whereof all thought is rife,
The sweet pathetic guess indeed come true,
And things restored reach that great residue?

Shall we behold fair flights of phantom doves,
  Shall furred creatures couch in moly flowers,
Swan souls the rivers oar with their world-loves,
  In difference welcome as these souls of ours? 
Yet soul of man from soul of man far more
May differ, even as thought did heretofore

That ranged and varied on th’ undying gleam: 
  From a pure breath of God aspiring, high,
Serving and reigning, to the tender dream,
  The winged Psyche and her butterfly—­
From thrones and powers, to—­fresh from death alarms
Child spirits entering in an angel’s arms.

Why must we think, begun in paradise,
  That their long line, cut off with severance fell,
Shall end in nothingness—­the sacrifice
  Of their long service in a passing knell? 
Could man be wholly blest if not to say
’Forgive’—­nor make amends for ever and aye?

Waste, waste on earth, and waste of God afar. 
  Celestial flotsam, blazing spars on high,
Drifts in the meteor month from some wrecked star,
  Strew oft th’ unwrinkled ocean of the sky,
And pass no more accounted of than be
Long dulses limp that stripe a mundane sea.