How far are ye from the innocent, from those
  Whose hearts are as a little lane serene,
Smooth-heaped from wall to wall with unbroke snows,
  Or in the summer blithe with lamb-cropped green,
  Save the one track, where naught more rude is seen
    Than the plump wain at even
Bringing home four months’ sunshine bound in sheaves! 
How far are ye from those! yet who believes
    That ye can shut out heaven? 
  Your souls partake its influence, not in vain
  Nor all unconscious, as that silent lane
Its drift of noiseless apple-blooms receives.

Looking within myself, I note how thin
  A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;
  In my own heart I find the worst man’s mate,
  And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate
    That opes to those abysses
Where ye grope darkly,—­ye who never knew
On your young hearts love’s consecrating dew,
    Or felt a mother’s kisses,
  Or home’s restraining tendrils round you curled;
  Ah, side by side with heart’s-ease in this world
The fatal nightshade grows and bitter rue!

One band ye cannot break,—­the force that clips
  And grasps your circles to the central light;
Yours is the prodigal comet’s long ellipse,
  Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night;
  Yet strives with you no less that inward might
    No sin hath e’er imbruted;
The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes;
The Law brooks not to have its solitudes
    By bigot feet polluted;
  Yet they who watch your God-compelled return
  May see your happy perihelion burn
Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods.

TO THE PAST

Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls,
    O kingdom of the past! 
There lie the bygone ages in their palls,
    Guarded by shadows vast;
  There all is hushed and breathless,
Save when some image of old error falls
  Earth worshipped once as deathless.

There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands,
    Half woman and half beast,
The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands 10
    That once lit all the East;
  A dotard bleared and hoary,
There Asser crouches o’er the blackened brands
  Of Asia’s long-quenched glory.

Still as a city buried ’neath the sea
    Thy courts and temples stand;
Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry
    Of saints and heroes grand,
  Thy phantasms grope and shiver,
Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently 20
  Into Time’s gnawing river.

Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun,
    Of their old godhead lorn,
Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,
    Which they misdeem for morn;
  And yet the eternal sorrow
In their unmonarched eyes says day is done
  Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse,
    The shapes that haunt thy gloom 30
Make signs to us and move their withered lips
    Across the gulf of doom;
  Yet all their sound and motion
Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships
  On the mirage’s ocean.