folds? 
  It seemed to keep its sweetness to itself,
  Yet was not the less sweet for that it seem’d. 
  For young Life knows not when young Life was born,
  But takes it all for granted:  neither Love,
  Warm in the heart, his cradle can remember
  Love in the womb, but resteth satisfied,
  Looking on her that brought him to the light: 
  Or as men know not when they fall asleep
  Into delicious dreams, our other life,
  So know I not when I began to love. 
  This is my sum of knowledge—­that my love
  Grew with myself—­and say rather, was my growth,
  My inward sap, the hold I have on earth,
  My outward circling air wherein I breathe,
  Which yet upholds my life, and evermore
  Was to me daily life and daily death: 
  For how should I have lived and not have loved? 
  Can ye take off the sweetness from the flower,
  The colour and the sweetness from the rose,
  And place them by themselves? or set apart
  Their motions and their brightness from the stars,
  And then point out the flower or the star? 
  Or build a wall betwixt my life and love,
  And tell me where I am?  ’Tis even thus: 
  In that I live I love; because I love
  I live:  whate’er is fountain to the one
  Is fountain to the other; and whene’er
  Our God unknits the riddle of the one,
  There is no shade or fold of mystery
  Swathing the other.

                      Many, many years,
  For they seem many and my most of life,
  And well I could have linger’d in that porch,
  So unproportioned to the dwelling place,
  In the maydews of childhood, opposite
  The flush and dawn of youth, we lived together,
  Apart, alone together on those hills. 
  Before he saw my day my father died,
  And he was happy that he saw it not: 
  But I and the first daisy on his grave
  From the same clay came into light at once. 
  As Love and I do number equal years
  So she, my love, is of an age with me. 
  How like each other was the birth of each! 
  The sister of my mother—­she that bore
  Camilla close beneath her beating heart,
  Which to the imprisoned spirit of the child,
  With its true touched pulses in the flow
  And hourly visitation of the blood,
  Sent notes of preparation manifold,
  And mellow’d echoes of the outer world—­
  My mother’s sister, mother of my love,
  Who had a twofold claim upon my heart,
  One twofold mightier than the other was,
  In giving so much beauty to the world,
  And so much wealth as God had charged her with,
  Loathing to put it from herself for ever,
  Crown’d with her highest act the placid face
  And breathless body of her good deeds past. 
  So we were born, so orphan’d.  She was motherless,
  And I without a father.  So from each
  Of those two pillars which from earth uphold
  Our childhood, one had fall’n away,