Years fly; beneath the yew-tree shade Thy father's holy dust is laid; The brook glides on, the jasmine blows; But where art thou, the wandering wife,
And what the bliss, and what the woes, Glass'd in the mirror-sleep of life? For whether life may laugh or weep, Death the true waking — life the sleep.
None know! afar, unheard, unseen — The present heeds not what has been; This herded world together press'd, Can miss no straggler from the rest —
Not so! Nay, all one heart may find, Where Memory lives, a saint enshrined — Some altar-hearth, in which our shade The Household-god of Thought is made,
And each slight relic hoarded yet With faith more solemn than regret. Who tenants thy forsaken cot — Who tends thy childhood's favourite flowers —
Who wakes, from every haunted spot, The Ghosts of buried Hours? ‘ Tis He whose sense was doom'd to borrow From thee the Vision and the Sorrow —
To whom the Reason's golden ray, In storms that rent the heart was given; The peal that burst the clouds away Left clear the face of heaven!
And wealth was his, and gentle birth, A form in fair proportions cast; But lonely still he walk'd the earth — The Hermit of the Past.
It was not love — that dream was o'er! No stormy grief, no wild emotion; For oft, what once was love of yore, The memory soothes into devotion!
He bought the cot:— The garden flowers — The haunts his Eva's steps had trod, Books — thought — beguiled the lonely hours, That flow'd in peaceful waves to God.
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